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.
I discovered in old notebooks of mine some drawings of a hammer and sickle. I was 18-20 years old at the time, but I couldn’t remember my association with communism then. Though at an early age I used to draw swastikas since I was frequently exposed to it because of my father’s obsession with the Second World War, so drawing these symbols didn’t mean I knew their true meaning.
I think I began leaning left based on my personal and abusive relationship with my father, which leaned towards right-wing fanaticism, so I was inclined to anything against what that asshole believed. After the 2013 protests in Brazil, I saw firsthand how a corporate-sponsored movement called Movimento Brasil Livre (MBL) began influencing people using sensational clickbait articles basically creating a moral panic against leftists, “corruption”, and the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), the social-liberal party which governed the country for years. Since then I became a general “leftist”, usually influenced by some exponents of the liberal left in Brazil.
I began grounding myself politically in 2018, with the elections that led to the victory of Jair Bolsonaro, who was openly anti-communist. I used the same reasoning I had used with my father, I would probably look into anything that was against this jackass. So when I saw his Minister of Education removing university directors in a fight against “cultural Marxism,” I was drawn upon looking into Marxism.
Hence I began studying Marxism mid-2019 and since then it was a straight path towards exactly where I am right now lol
My father was also abusive. It’s never easy. Downright very difficult.