Recently I have been thinking over why I find this sort of liberal anti-communism so pathetic, and I think its because there is something particularly aggravating about being scolded by a person whose level of ideological development so closely resembles a past version of myself.

If you are an atheist, you have probably encountered the specific form of anti-atheist propaganda wherein which a religious person will say something like "I used to be an atheist, I was so mad at god every day and hated him, but then I found blah blah". These anecdotes usually make me want to laugh; its obvious they were never former atheists, and are simply (and sloppily) trying to create a strawman atheist to convince you of how bad it is. The point im trying to make is that there probably aren't a lot of serious atheists who go on to convert to religion; its a cognitive step that, once made, is hard to take back.

The argument I am trying to make is that being a communist is the same thing. If I asked you to show me a committed, well read marxist-leninist who decided to become a liberal, I imagine you would be hard pressed to find one. I specify "committed" and "well read" because I'm sure some lemmitor would counter-argue "But I loved to play the soviet anthem out loud on the school bus when i was in middle school, and now I love Joe Biden!". However, if I asked you to show me a committed liberal who became a communist, many of you would raise your hands, as would I!

And this is sort of the crux of the point im trying to make. Its really frustrating seeing the smugness of these individuals with regards to their hate for tankies, because I see myself in them. I know that they are literally just who I was in high school; before I had read any communist works, before I had tried to study history, etc. When I see a particularly arrogant comment from one of them, I cant help but imagine my 16 year old self saying it instead, and I just want to explain to him that he is literally just a version of me that knows less about the world, and that therefore his smugness is unwarranted.

I would like to find a way to explain this to a liberal that isnt too condescending, because I imagine it could be a powerful source of doubt for their neoliberal beliefs. Something along the lines of "I reached your level of political development many years ago, and surpassed it. You, on the other hand, were never a communist, let alone did you "surpass it"", except thats incredibly smug redditor speak and I think it would aggravate someone too much for them to process it. I used religion as the blueprint because thats where I have obviously seen this dynamic play out the most; if any of you are formerly religious and were convinced to stop being religious by a person who once belonged to your religion, maybe you have a useful anecdote for how they were able to arouse doubt in your beliefs without insulting your intelligence.

[–] ShimmeringKoi@hexbear.net 6 points 1 day ago

This hits on something I feel very keenly, and have boiled down to "I've been where you are, you've never been where I am."

[–] FunkyStuff@hexbear.net 22 points 1 day ago

if any of you are formerly religious and were convinced to stop being religious by a person who once belonged to your religion, maybe you have a useful anecdote for how they were able to arouse doubt in your beliefs without insulting your intelligence.

I'm Catholic, was before my radicalization and still am, but obviously had a lot of homophobia and transphobia to unlearn. More relevant to this question though, the way I thought about Marxists before I radicalized had to change, and while I still don't use the label Marxist I'd say I use Marxist thought to analyze basically all social phenomena. I think the critical thing for me was understanding that the conflict between Communist states in history (and to some extent, the French Revolution) and religion didn't stem out of the left's hatred of religion, but out of the Church's resistance to social change. I had to understand that the Church was kind of a load-bearing structural member of the social order and legitimized all the oppressive institutions, so naturally the radicals who aimed to abolish said social order needed to take measures against religious institutions. If I could talk to myself before I was politically conscious, I'd tell him that he should consider that the way things were arranged in the Russian Empire, Feudal China, France, etc. the only possible way to get the masses to throw off their shackles was to attack corrupt religious institutions that were literally conspiring and collaborating with the secular states to keep peasants down. That the violent measures that I was taught about were used as a last resort, and were only a reflection of the violence that the overthrown institutions had used liberally for centuries.

As to how this pertains to anti-authoritarian leftists, I think you could modify this argument a little bit, and apply it to whatever they think authoritarianism is. "Tankies" don't want to use authoritarian tactics because they hate freedom, or because they want to restrict individuality. They want to use those tactics to achieve the same political goals as all leftists: to abolish capitalism.

[–] 389aaa@hexbear.net 4 points 1 day ago

The point im trying to make is that there probably aren't a lot of serious atheists who go on to convert to religion; its a cognitive step that, once made, is hard to take back.

As a former serious Atheist who could currently be described as religious, I can confirm that this is true - I do not think I have ever met anyone else who went from Atheist to Theist. In my case, it required - as you said regarding the Liberal to Communist transition - further information about the world that I lacked when I was an Atheist. Granted, I am somewhat unusual in this respect, as I was raised as an Atheist unlike most in America but - even still, it required what I perceived as hard evidence that there was more than just the material. Of course, this perceived hard evidence came in the form of personal experiences that I cannot transmit to others, as typically seems to be the case with this stuff, for better or worse.

This often also seems to be the case for the Liberal to Communist transition - I'm not sure I've ever seen someone actually be successfully convinced through rhetoric alone - it always requires some kind of personal experience that provides a bedrock of hard evidence that their current beliefs are inadequate for understanding and navigating the world in which they exist. After that bedrock exists - then rhetoric and reading and all that can have a meaningful effect.