There's this red sails article that pops up every once in a while. Don't get me wrong it's a fine article, but there's a bit that goes "something something don't think people are brainwashed and just need to be exposed to uncomfortable truths."
And like, I get it. But...that's exactly what happened to me. I mean, I'm not going to say it was exactly one thing that caused it. However, genuinely when i learned about the Iraq War in detail*, that was basically what flipped the switch in my head. Obviously I wasn't as theoretically developed as I am today, but thats what made me genuinely want to read Marx, Lenin, Mao, etc. It was exactly that process of being exposed to information like that that made me want to be a communist, and want to fight for it.
This isn't some debunking thing. I think what I'm trying to explain is that my story seems to be very different from other people's, and applying my own experiences might not really work if it's not how things commonly work.
And, as much as it is important, I do want something more in depth than just "organize and educate." Don't get me wrong, that's good advice. What I'm trying to ask moreso is, what is the actually psychology going on behind these decisions here? Obviously there's no cookie cutter/one size fits all strategy here, but some direction would be helpful in actually attempting to convince people.
*To elaborate, I always heard of Iraq as just "the war." Kinda like how Vietnam was. But no one ever explained to me what it was and school didn't really neither. So when I learned it was basically the US invading Iraq almost explicitly for oil and no one got punished for it and basically everyone got rich off of it besides normal people while hundreds of thousands Iraqis died, it really shook me.
Because people don’t work like that trust me Ive tried and I give up the only their minds change is if it’s splattered on the floor
Woa man, 1st this is WHOLELY out of line, especially with the admin reminder of Rule 3. We cannot forget that people do have a capacity to learn, need I remind you the former Chinese Emperor got elected to the Chinese National Congress.
People need to want to change. If they wanna stay where they are intellectually, you are right. They change when they are dead. But the point is, how do we get them to want to change?
Except people keep asking “how do I get my racist as fuck uncle to be a super based communist” or “how do I get my Neo Nazi brother whose got racist steam names to consider my view” and I have to keep reminding them that if they don’t want to change theres nothing you can do about it cut your losses you can give these people the most logical argument in the world worthy of a Nobel prize but if they don’t want to listen you're wasting your energy
So what comes to mind here is, changes are often not dramatic and take time to formulate, but this doesn't mean they don't occur.
Consider it this way: If a single conversation could change a devout liberal into a budding communist, couldn't a single conversation also change them back from a budding communist into a devout liberal again?
Our belief systems need a kind of process to them in order for us to have some kind of stability to how we perceive the world and how we act in it. So when someone has a belief challenged and when they are open enough to be considering that challenge, they are not just considering the challenge itself; they are also considering what the challenge implies about other beliefs they have, what the newly formed synthesis would imply about them as a person and how they act in the world, what it would imply about other people around them, what feelings it evokes in them, and so on. This is not to say everybody is doing this all consciously for every single challenge to a belief they encounter. But that they are likely going through some form of this process when evaluating information and beliefs and are probably doing it in more conscious detail, the more significant a challenge it is to their existing framework of belief.
So with this in mind and from the standpoint of what we can do as individuals in the world, we shouldn't expect dramatic, instantaneous change, but instead try to form relationships (where reasonable, I am not asking people to befriend nazis) and be firm on what we believe and why where disagreements come up. Sometimes the first step may simply be the other person accepting that we have dramatically different beliefs and are also not a scary creature from under the bed (notice how some imperialist propaganda specifically tries to get people to consider any and all anti-imperialist dialogue as belonging to a scary faction, such as when people are called "Russian trolls/agents"). Once they've accepted we're not a scary creature from under the bed, then they may be able to start considering what we're saying. I won't pretend this is a system-level solution, but when we're talking about dealing with it in a disorganized manner where we don't have party power.
These people are delusional lmao, if they can’t accept reality then theres really nothing you can do to convince them otherwise it’s better mental wise to cut your losses
Really depends on the situation. I'm not going to insist to someone that they associate with a person who is a drain on them, sans context. But speaking generally, in the imperial core, we often don't have the luxury to be especially selective on who we associate with, if we want to make any headway on things. Most are not exactly ML and those of us who made our way to that did it because there were people who were willing to associate with us in spite of our ignorance and get through to us over time.
What you're saying sounds a lot like encouraging barbarism in the imperial core, in the hope it will somehow make it collapse faster. Which is accelerationism and is not how revolution is built. Worsening contradictions don't automatically translate to socialist revolution, in the imperial core or anywhere. It still has to be built and people in the imperial core can still try to build and prepare locally, while trying to have solidarity internationally as well. It is counter to having an internationalist view to throw local under the bus simply because it isn't as revolutionary as you'd like. It is counter to having empathy in general as well.
Furthermore, the western empire is not a controlled house of cards confined within a sterilized chamber. If it collapses violently, and there is nothing significant to counter that locally, it's still an empire with far-reaching tendrils that has nukes and other kinds of militarized violence. Don't confuse a controlled implosion with a violent explosion, in other words. Even from this point of view of people who live in the imperial core that seems to saying "their lives matter less than those in the 'third world'", their downfall is not confined to only them. And if imperialism can get dismantled to the point that that's no longer the case, the (already flimsy) argument for valuing "third world" lives more also goes out the window, since the "first world" is no longer able to exploit those people in the same way at that point anyway.
Except I don’t want a revolution in the imperial core I want their hegemony to collapse I don’t care if it’s violent I want to live in a multipolar world order since it’s magnitudes better than the current one also yes in the grand scheme their lives are lesser to me I don’t care about them
So you don't care if indigenous people in the region that gets called the US suffer? You don't care if children in the imperial core more broadly, suffer? You don't care if the collapse of the empire harms people outside it in the process? You're going to turn around and say that people who have not done harm are deserving of harm by association, is that it? What kind of sick shit are you peddling to sit here and tell me that some lives are lesser?
Why would I care about a people whose class interests do not align with mine especially when they’re the same people that don’t consider indigenous or black people to be citizens of their empire, “what if the people outside the empire (aka the occupied Koreans, Japanese and the rest of the imperialist lapdogs) suffer” I don’t give a shit read top comment, I don’t give a fuck if they haven’t harmed me specifically but the fact that they support imperialist actions in the south tells me exactly where their sympathies lie so get the fuck off your moralist high horse and consider the material reality that we live in
I'm sorry, what? You don't care if peoples who are occupied by the empire suffer? Because the governance does imperialist bidding?
South Koreans and Japanese are not occupied they willingly serve their imperial masters they're the same as the capos, with indigenous and black people as I said before they’re not considered citizens my animosity does not extend to them
Unfortunately it's not quite that simple. People can be both victim and accomplice at the same time.
Yes, they are. There's a reason people here tend to say Occupied Korea rather than South Korea. You need to learn about Korea's history evidently. They faced enormous violence and repression, first under colonial Japan and then under US occupation, and the US occupation continues to this day. The whole designation of North and South Korea was literally drawn up by the US military.
Japan's situation is a bit more complicated because of their part in colonialism and imperialism prior to and during WWII. But it would still be racist and reductionist to imply that Japanese people are a monolithic entity deserving of suffering because of their governance.
Black people absolutely can be citizens of the US. They still face systemic racism on top of that. The Civil Rights Act was more of a diffusion of revolutionary energy than it was a solution to problems of racism, but it did further the rights of black people in the US and normalize them more so into the US culture as other regular people. If you're thinking of what's going on right now with ICE and all, that's more of a broader violence of white supremacy and the institution of whiteness, and it's not as simple as "everyone is going along with it" or something.
With indigenous people, it's complicated by the fact that they wouldn't necessarily want to be a citizen of the US. There are still indigenous nations who want their sovereignty respected. I can't speak to the exact details of it, but I feel confident in saying that they are not generally interested in assimilation into the US project that genocided their ancestors and continues to treat them as less than.
That said, I'm not entirely sure what this has to do with excusing a lack of empathy. Regional barbarism, as I said before, is not a controlled implosion. And as we can see with what's going on in the US right now, the mask off stuff with ICE is primarily hurting historically marginalized groups, not those who people would tend to be most disgusted with and have a harder time feeling any empathy for. I don't think the liberal mask is really "better", but I also don't think accelerationism tends to hurt the people you think it will. The contradictions are what they are and we have to deal with them as they are, not turn up our noses because we don't personally love everyone around us. You don't have to be burbling with love to do a good strategic analysis, but if you aren't motivated by compassion, it leaves one to wonder what you are motivated by. If there is one thing I take away from successful AES projects, it's that they tend to have a great love for the people and a great interest in serving their needs. This desire alone does not make them successful, but it sure is a helpful motivator.