I’ll start first: at the height of reddit going absolutely mad and frothing at the mouth I heard r/genzedong mentioned a lot as this evil evil tankie place, so I checked it out. Was a bit overly china fanboy-ish for my taste back then but alright overall and leagues more civil than people on other subs. So I started lurking over there to preserve my sanity until it basically became my most frequently viewed sub. I’ve kinda warmed up to the whole idea of socialism during my stay. And then it got quarantined. I’ve heard of lemmygrad even before the quarantine, so I switched to this place instead. As of this moment, lemmygrad remains my primary source of news and entertainment where I dont have to risk running into some flavour of wehraboo.
There are a lot of reasons why I turned left, but as of now I want to highlight just one part.
The multiracial makeup of my home country where not a single ethnic group holds a majority, meant that my politics had to be international to properly address the material conditions of my home country. When 30% of your population consists of Indians and Chinese (as of currently), you are practically forced to learn from the experiences and cultures of the countries they were originally from, consciously or not.
I have also lived in multiple countries throughout my life. This pushed me to adopt much more internationalist perspectives than perhaps someone who was accustomed to only living in one country. Even when I used to have more centrist or right-wing views, it never really stuck. I was implictly inspired by Pan-African and Pan-Arab movements, and even Islam’s call for one united ummah or community.
When your cultures and families are seperated by colonial borders, you develop an internationalist vision because of necessity. What truly seperates Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, East Timor, and arguably Papua New Guinea, the Phillipines and even mainland Southeast Asia from eachother?
A simplistic overview of British or Japanese history makes it seem like that the sea acts as a barrier and allowed you to be isolated from the world but that was never the case in Southeast Asia. The Malay word for homeland, tanah air, literally means land water, showcasing how the sea acted as a bridge in connecting islands that would span across the entirety of Europe if it were transposed1. Even the Indonesian language is based from a Johor-Riau Malay dialect found in the straits of Malacca, rather than the more spoken Javanese.
It is specifically Marxism that has always been the principled anti-racist and internationalist force within my country (and region), reconciling the contradictions and rejecting the colonial borders and labels that has defined us for too long. Right-wing ideas in it’s social-liberal or neocolonial forms could never hold up to this.
As of r/GenZedong, the only thing I can remember is that I used to lurk a lot on the Chapo subreddit which eventually lead me to the sub and the rest, as they say, is history.
1 The picture for reference.
Didn’t these countries develop language and culture independent from each other? Or are their languages similar?
I wrote a very long response but I’ll keep it short.
To answer your 2nd question: yes and no. Maritime Southeast Asia (SEA), consisting of East Timor, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei and the Phillipines all speak an Austronesian language. Mainland SEA, consisting of Viet Nam, Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia have their own language families.
This is not including “non-indigenous” languages brought by immigrants over the centuries.
Prior to Islam’s introduction in SEA, maritime SEA culture actually was quite similar to that of the mainland. Hinduism, Buddhism and other local traditional faiths were practiced in the archipelago. Furthermore, when Islam did get brought over by Indian and Arab traders, it reached the Phillipines and as far as Western Papua.
The archipelago was also a regional hub for trade, with continent wide trade routes that would bring goods from very disparate places, similar to that of Africa prior to colonization. So our cultures were intimately connected and only grew seperate due to colonization starting in the 16th century.