So, in my circles of friends, I am the most terminally online person. I remember being a soc-demmy kinda person (who called themselves socialist) when I joined r/cth when it hit 69,420 members.
Now here I am with opinions like “Stalin and the USSR weren’t so bad” and “The tanks rolling into Hungary in 1956 were correct, actually”. I feel like the community here on hexbear has kinda shifted in the same way. That said, we’ve steered clear of the patsoc menace, who aesthetically venerate AES while following the most regressive social/nationalist opinions of what they think of as the working class.
This has somewhat put me at odds with a lot of my RL friends, who are anarchists or trots of varying degrees. I’m generally not down with getting into spats with said RL friends, so I keep a lot of my opinions to myself. This is especially onerous with opinions about the Ukraine war.
How did I end up here? How did we…? I remember back on r/cth the line “This is enough to turn me into a tankie”, or some such thing, as though being a tankie was just socialism + willingness to use violence to achieve it.
I can remember online anarchists posting fairly high profile Ls that I think split actual anarchists and left-liberals who just liked to call themselves anarchists (and now online anarchists who really like NATO? idk). But those events had a lot of people shy away from the anarchist label and kinda mull about their own beliefs. The main ones off the top of my head were CHAZ, Vaush audience watchers, and the anti-work breakdown. Certainly, I remember r/cth being a lot more awash with anarchist rhetoric and population (claimed or otherwise) than hexbear currently is.
I don’t want this to be a sectarian rant session, but more a reflection of political journeys from r/cth’s medicare for all socdem position to the current vibes of hexbear, both personal and pontifications of why this shift occurred.
This isn’t the be-all and end-all of my thoughts of my own political evolution. I’ll comment some more as I think of them (in between cleaning for rent inspection)
Our position hasn’t shifted that much from the pod’s position.
The pod has a semi-ironic veneration of China, per the Wolf Warrior episode. It hates the entire US establishment. It wants Iran to get a nuke. Much of its stance is based on opposing what the most awful people in Amerikkka support.
That’s not to say we follow the pod’s marching orders. Rather, we get to the same place for much the same reasons.
The Ukrainian issue is probably the best example of this. No one here’s super pro Putin or his brand of Russian nationalism. When the war started, we were deep into ‘lol there’s not gonna be a war’. We had to eat humble pie, hard.
You know what changed?
Ukrainian flag emojis.
The worst people in the world, with the absolute worst takes, went hard on the Ukraine side.
Was the war a bad idea? Quite possibly. It’ll likely settle into a frozen conflict again, much like it was before, with similar territory, at the cost of a lot of lives.
But seeing people go around, pretending there wasn’t Ukrainian shelling of the Donbas? Pretending Putin hadn’t been pushing for Minsk II to be implemented as agreed? Saying that Putin wants to wage a genocide against Ukraine? Seeing everyone bend over backwards to apologise for literal neo-Nazis?
Fuck that.
Ayatollah Khameini: “WMDs are against Islam and Iran will never get a nuke”
A bunch of terminally online anti-imperialist freaks: “GET A NUKE! GET A NUKE!”