Oh no, that's cool. I'm completely full of myself, so allow this rambling story.
I grew up as a white upper-middle class cisboy in an extremely wealthy suburb of Atlanta, GA. Parents were mild Republicans, voted Dole in 96, and Gore in 2000. Dad would listen to Rush Limbaugh some days, and Neal Boortz every day. Mom was lapsed Catholic but apolitical. We weren't any more racist than the guy next door, and took the Seinfeld stance on homosexuality. Nothing but your average all-American family here.
And then 9/11 happened.
I was in fifth grade, saw the Towers fall on the TV, and like everyone else in the Greatest Nation Evertm I went batshit insane with nationalistic fervor. From then on, we were glued to the Fox Box. They were the most bombastic, showed the most explosions, gave the best miltech wank, and really played bigtime into the WAR hype. From there I got more into right-wing radio, listening to it on the bus to and from school. I perceived myself as some sort of rebel against the Evil Libruls who controlled our schools and gave me detention. Pure persecution. Literally 1984.
This near-constant bombardment with Republican talking points worked it's magic on my little head full of mush, and by my teen years I had become the most devout young dittohead in the land. I had also become That Guy who nobody wanted to be with. To be fair, a touch of the sperg played a role, but in retrospect I understand why nobody wanted to be friends with the boy who *literally threw Hitler salutes to the flag during the Pledge and claimed it was the "Bellamy Salute." It wasn't the social awkwardness of mild autism, I was a toxic preteen edgelord and loved it. Perhaps the timing was the only thing that saved me from turning into an Andrew Tate stan because I totally would have been.
Thankfully, the guidance of a handful of well-meaning adults, the stinging comedy of Stewart and Colbert, and a downright debaucherous addiction to World of Warcraft conspired to distract me out of the political arena. It was 2008, and the world hadn't ended when Obama was elected, so the air was out of the sails for a bit.
Found Reddit in 2011 at behest of my then-boycrush, who I knew through Warcraft. By that time, serious cracks had formed in my political identity. For the past several years I was still in the closet and hating it. Like a good conservative, I despised homosexuals. They were evil demons who recruited children, couldn't breed, worshipped the Devil, did all this bad stuff and blah blah blah, and...well...yeah I was that stereotype of the secretly-gay homophobic Republican. Accepting my sexuality was the first break in the dam.
I discovered atheism on this website, visited some lefty forums for the first time, and in college I got a true taste of the world and my first real understandings of history. Read the Communist Manifesto and...it felt weird. As a disciple of the Maha Rushie, I grew up thinking that Marx was Satan Incarnate and the Manifesto was the Literal Necronomicon. To think Marx was merely milquetoast was apostasy! But, between Romney's "47 percent" gaffe, the obvious injustice of Occupy Wall Street, and the clear absurdity of the Log Cabin Republicans, it was clear I was no right-winger any longer.
The next few years were spent adrift, roleplaying as an internet spaceship admiral in Eve Online. That game is weird, in that it simulates real-world economics and politics better than any other video game ever made. I was in Goonswarm, the most powerful player group, playing a leadership and admin role. Our organization was nothing short of a state. While other groups were structured like your typical MMO guild, we had an entire bureaucracy and state apparatus, and one of our most popular programs was "Space Communism"; a spaceship-replacement program which enabled our faction to field far larger fleets than any others. Since any and all losses were reimbursed, our players were heavily incentivized to fight more aggressively.
In reality, our scheme was not communism. It was a rebate program, but it worked incredibly well. My experience gave me respect for well-run autocracy, and indeed, our virtual state was nearly identically structured to Stalin's Russia. Put a pin in that.
By now it's 2013. Warthunder and World of Tanks are big and I and all my space-friends are playing them. I don't blame a Russian and a Belarusian company for glorifying their own military history, but from the jump, both these games have been accused of "Russian Bias." You play their tanks and planes if you wanted to win easily, and many a night was spent storming the Reichstag and raising the Red Banner of Victory. Communism was a joke, but it was our joke.
Enter the LateStageCapitalism subreddit. This space, around 2015, was precious. I have only vague memories of those days, and perhaps these are red-colored glasses, but I recall a vibrant leftist community replete with biting criticisms of capitalism and humorous and relevant memes. I had rediscovered politics, and at the perfect time. The next year I volunteered for Bernie's campaign, wasted hours making shit up on CapitalismVSocialism, and returning to college.
And then Trump happened.
To say that this man was a catastrophe would be an understatement. He fucked me, personally, and like he's done so many other Americans, he has no clue that he did. His candidacy re-awakened the dormant fanaticism that had simmered in my family since bin Laden won the War on Terror by starting it. My mom had just died, I had moved back in, and my father, who had long been your typical "Obummer" Republican, donned the Red Hat and threw a wrench in my college remix. I had labored under the impression that childhood promises of unconditional support weren't just platitudes, but so much for that. This is America. Bootstraps, buttercup!
The next few years were unnecessarily stressful, as the combination of mild autism and major depression converged, and I saw my hopes and dreams of at least a low-to-middle-class-life melt away. The Trump years saw headline after headline of bad news, with an ever-more fatalistic view of my life complimenting an ever-more nihilistic view of the world. I began losing friendships over politics. People I had known for years began to turn on me, though granted some of them were literal Nazis so I get why my decade-long heel-turn might have irked them.
You can probably see where this is going.
Cults have a habit of catching you when you're at your lowest; and during these dark days, I took solace in a lovely little corner of the internet which practiced a radical sort of leftist rite, the meme-space of FULLCOMMUNISM. The home of the Tankies.
The denizens of this region are best described as terminally-online Soviet larpers devoted to the fictional, idyllic, propaganda-fantasy version of communism that everyone in the Union wishes they had. They praise Lenin at every opportunity, regularly hornypost about Young Stalin, and break into singing the State Anthem as easily as normal Americans break into chants of "USA". Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism is the dream, Sovietwave is the theme music. Seize the means and ready the guillotines; the rich are on the menu tonight, bois!
Please ignore the fact that it sweeps the rug over all the bad things that happened, and by that I mean, What war crimes? The Black Book of Communism is bullshit, Fox News lies, the CIA lies, and the American government also lies, so clearly everything else is also just a fabrication of the Evil Fasctist-Capitalist-Imperialist-West too. Sure, Stalin was a bad dude, but he did what he had to do ! Nothing wrong with that! And the Gulags? Kulaks deserved it. (yikes!)
It felt like some of us were self-aware, and kinda went along because, is joke, comrade! It's a meme space. We're all fellow leftists here. Anti-communism racked up a bodycount as bad as communism itself did; Pinochet gave us free helicopter rides, after all, so the dark humor was reciprocal. Nobody here was really a Stalinist anyway...right?
I mean...I had long since discovered Wikipedia's giant list of conspiracy theories, and had lurked on AskHistorians since it's inception. The Death of Stalin remains one of my favorite movies, and I knew the inside baseball on Soviet history since before Game of Thrones ripped it off. But, knowledge is a double-edged sword, and I was cursed with the recognition that some of these memes weren't so innocent. Interwoven between lampoons of PragerU and caricatures of Ben Shapiro's Vuvuzela were some serious acts of historical revisionism, which, given my childhood experience with Lost Cause narratives, didn't really sit well.
I don't put too much stock into Horseshoe Theory, but I get where it comes from. By now I had done a full swing, and pendulum would inevitably fall back. But I had other stuff going on in life which took precedent, and I once again let politics simmer on the back-burner, plenty content with being some kind of "soft" commie and relishing in my re-claimed self-perceived secret "rebel" status. It was cool to hate Trump anyway, and America with it. 2019 was 2007 all over again, and hope had returned.
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