I got started when I joined Lemmy actually! I talked to people like @dessalines@lemmy.ml and @nutomic@lemmy.ml, and that was the first time I seriously had my liberal/socdem views challenged. I spent some time on communist communities on Reddit and Lemmy, read all kinds of resources that other communists posted. Particularly DebateCommunism and Sino on Reddit and Communism101 on both Reddit and Lemmy, as well as Dessalines’ excellent lists of links. I definitely resisted at first, and looking back now, I realized that I was just repeating Western propaganda that I had been taught, you can probably even see it if you go far back in my Lemmy.ml account.
Lemmy truly is a radicalizing tool, to be honest, if you equip it into the right hands. Even though I wasn’t a liberal when I got here it also helped me to move away from Western ideals.
That is our aims, ultimately. At least on Lemmygrad.
The internet desperately needs a far-left sphere that isn’t western nonsense or dominated by sponsors, where we can have honest (and fully open, uncensored) discussions on all of the topics that need to be talked about, without the overbearing weight of liberal invaders on those discussion topics.
Lemmygrad is hosted exterior to the United States, and can be somewhat effortlessly moved around should the need arise. So we’re free to post things that sites like Reddit, Twitter, or Facebook would ban a user for. Which, in all honesty, is part of what’s required to have the discussions the left needs. You won’t get a good amount of the discourse Lemmygrad has (and has had) on those sites, simply because we can actually call out western propaganda without vanishing from the discussion space.
With the recent events, and western media’s response to it, there’s a chance Lemmygrad will be one of the last decent places left to challenge anti-Russian propaganda. And we have the added advantage of being a pointedly Marxist-Leninist space, that will actively fight against liberal bullshitery.
I was a nazi, then a social democrat, then an anarchist, then a mixture of both anarchist and communist ideas (I still like some ideas from anarchism but they lack a lot of other stuff, so eh), then now a full fledged communist tankyist who wants to have a romantic dinner with Stalin.
Honestly at the beginning I wasn’t a true nazi but I was just your average person who is super racist and shit, and I also was going to school with a dude who has a super rightist and WWI/WWII fan who made be that way. Then I started reading books so I read The Communist Manifesto but just because it’s an important book, it changed my mind a bit but not much, then I joined a FB group where people discussed politics and there where a lot of communists there so that started bringing me to that side, then I started to read about China and how it’s not what the West tells you and here I am.
Edit: I was like 12-14 when I was a nazi, it was a long time ago.
I think many people can relate to my own experience, as it’s probably quite common. I was a socialist for longer than I was truly aware of what socialism was. Like when you describe the values and ideas within socialism to someone but you never use the scary words, they’ll probably think that they’re great ideas. I think I was basically that person, though not necessarily with the allergic reaction to the words that some people have.
I can’t pinpoint an exact moment when I “made the switch” though. I started consuming more and more socialist information from reading articles, videos, conversations on reddit, etc.
I can definitely say it was a terrible idea lol. I might even more depressed now than I was before. It’s like putting on the special glasses in They Live and being unable to unsee the terrible reality.
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I was a member of what was basically a right-of-center liberal party here in Argentina. This remained the case for all my teens and early twenties - being largely asocial in a high income area allowed me to be blind to the horrors of capitalism. Slowly, largely thanks to university (I’m a history major), moving to a bigger city and dating a guy who is part of the local Communist party I began to be very intersted in studying marxism (which at this point I saw as a relic being taught at universities) and historical socialist societies, particularly the PRC, and I gained a better understanding of these societies which made me divorce from all the propaganda sorrounding them. I think I became a “proper” communist when I sat down and actually studied historical materialism - it was a mind opening experience if I ever had one. I felt like I could finally understand reality without all the shitty overgrowth of ideology that had plagued my mind for all these years.
When I realized that Democrats aren’t doing much good for the majority either, and Obama was a huge war criminal.
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