this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2026
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We shouldn't concede defeats to the anti-communist witch hunters in any field, especially language. To do otherwise would be implicitly accepting their worldview as the correct one. Instead we should dismantle the weak supports for their anti-communism / anti-marxism in the first place, which isn't difficult for any person whose attention can be drawn to the mass suffering capitalism causes.
It takes a bit more effort to engage with people using language that will be more likely to reach them but if you want to get someone to understand, and are capable of it, speaking to them in their native tongue is more effective. When talking to someone who has never been given a basic understanding of communism, or who has been given an intentionally misleading false understanding, while you have, you can say things that do not translate because you are effectively speaking a different dialect of English from them. When you say 'I'm a Stalinist-Marxist Communist,' that translates as 'I am a genocider-terrorist mother-fucker.' They are less likely to understand you than a person from Kazakhstan because at least the Kazakh hasn't been trained to hate you. Learning to say things in the local tongue is the only way to bypass the filter long enough to get them to learn the better definitions of all those words.