It's worse. That the whole "communism = evil dictators" wasn't only wrong, it was projection.
Imagine thinking your whole life dictatorships are bad, then finding out that your team was the one doing them then blaming their rivals. It creates a TON of cognitive dissonance. It usually resolves in one of two ways: Thinking "Dictatorships are good, actually" which is where your Nazbols come from, then you have those who just give up on leftism and go back to being liberals because they can't resolve the contradiction. Very few come out thinking "Democracy is good, I thought I was fighting for it, but I was fighting against it. I was wrong but I'm going to change that." because you know, toxic masculinity and not being able to admit you're wrong.
One of the best things we can do to promote leftist principles is explain that dictatorships do not always take the form of one single person exercising total rule over a country.
It also helps to point out that this idea is complete ahistorical nonsense in of itself. You can't have a society where one person has unilateral control over everything and everyone else goes along with it or dies, because that person still needs someone to actually pull the trigger at the end of the day, and someone to supply the trigger-puller with guns/ammo/transportation, and the supply chains for all of that, and so on. Pointing out that Stalin could not singlehandedly hold the entire Soviet Union in the grips of terror without the majority of society backing him up quickly makes a lot of anticom propaganda fall apart, because it gives agency to the people in those societies and makes it clear that the majority of them were happy with their regimes.
Correct. It's not some nefarious scheme, it's libs wanting to be left but still believing all the propaganda because not doing so makes them feel like they sound crazy. Because Liberal politics is about affirming that you're a good person.
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It's worse. That the whole "communism = evil dictators" wasn't only wrong, it was projection.
Imagine thinking your whole life dictatorships are bad, then finding out that your team was the one doing them then blaming their rivals. It creates a TON of cognitive dissonance. It usually resolves in one of two ways: Thinking "Dictatorships are good, actually" which is where your Nazbols come from, then you have those who just give up on leftism and go back to being liberals because they can't resolve the contradiction. Very few come out thinking "Democracy is good, I thought I was fighting for it, but I was fighting against it. I was wrong but I'm going to change that." because you know, toxic masculinity and not being able to admit you're wrong.
You can probably guess which camp I fall into.
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I still get the occasional :brainworms: moment. Deprograming by yourself is tough.
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It also helps to point out that this idea is complete ahistorical nonsense in of itself. You can't have a society where one person has unilateral control over everything and everyone else goes along with it or dies, because that person still needs someone to actually pull the trigger at the end of the day, and someone to supply the trigger-puller with guns/ammo/transportation, and the supply chains for all of that, and so on. Pointing out that Stalin could not singlehandedly hold the entire Soviet Union in the grips of terror without the majority of society backing him up quickly makes a lot of anticom propaganda fall apart, because it gives agency to the people in those societies and makes it clear that the majority of them were happy with their regimes.
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Correct. It's not some nefarious scheme, it's libs wanting to be left but still believing all the propaganda because not doing so makes them feel like they sound crazy. Because Liberal politics is about affirming that you're a good person.