For real, western nations really need to get a grip and realize that no one is scared of them anymore. Russia has shown the world that you can fight back against NATO and win. Yet countries like France still seem to think that they can terrorize modern independent nations like they terrorized african tribal communities.

redditors when they have to realize that the mighty ubermensch superior german engineering tanks get blown up by an atgm like literally every other tank

redditors be like "this is out of context" as if there is a context where not condemning nazis is fine

they have a point, remember how they destroyed the People's Republic of China by copypasting Winnie the Pooh memes?

that movie made me feel like a proud irish man and i am a swiss millenial

Starship troopers is my guilty pleasure movie, i just love it so much. Pure fun

i'm a big fan of Ken Loach, sometimes not overtly leftist but always working class-oriented. Plus the guy was super nice when we got the chance to meet him so i like him on a personal level.

in years of having to disguise myself as a "moderate" to do IRL politics, i have learned some thinngs.

The most important is to pick your battles. Is it worth it to get on someone's bad side just to defend Stalin? Who cares. Convincing that single person won't make a difference. It's tough, but you just have to suck up your pride and ignore the ignorance many people have on these subjects. You also have to understand that people who have been indoctrinated since birth are not... easy to convert. If you have been told all of your life that water boils at 100 degrees no matter what, you would just think i was crazy if i told you that the temperature at which it boils on top of mount everest is different. No matter how right i was. You can present sources and do all the theoretical work you want, the truth is that with the majority of people it will just not work. Save your energy for something more productive.

Besides, if you engage one, two, three, ten times... then you do become the caricature of the annoying leftist that has to always be "akchually" and that pulls out so many unknown facts that people think it's just made up jargon.

But if you don't and manage to keep the "functional and moderate member of society" facade up, during important moments you will be able to go ham because people have come to know you as a reasonable person.

When the question of Russia came up in my party (which is the youth wing of the main succdem party) i and a few closet-communist pals were the ones controlling the narrative because we could just talk basic geopolitics and people would believe us since we never came off as "extremist" by praising stalin in public (don't get me wrong we hella praise stalin in private). Yes it was annoying having to listen to people talk about how evil red fash the USSR was or how china bad, but now we got all of those people to understand that NATO is at fault for all of this solely because we managed to never lose any credibility by avoiding pointless discussions.

btw, by "losing credibility" i mean "opposing the mainstream narrative and be labeled as a conspiracy theorist".

It is a bit harder when it comes to people you really do care about. For me it was a mix if things. for example i try to get close to likeminded people, so i never come out as a ML but i do drop some hints about being leftist to "test" people i meet and see if they get it. This alone allows you to at least avoid MOST big issues. Another thing, as said above, is just your ability to swallow your pride. We still gotta live normal lives, there is no point in ruining relationships of friendships over politics. It can be taxing long term, but let me be real: the path we have chosen to follow is not easy, it has never been for anyone. Politics is a very important field of life, but the truth is that it is only one field.

Keep up the fight, but remember that no one expects you to be fighting 24/24. Politics are very important to me and i am sure for you too to a degree, but to most people it's just not like that. In my opinion you should just try to asess how much they actually give a shit about hitler or stalin. because chances are that they don't care nearly enough to have THAT jeopardize the relationship.

i was at an internship working for the local government and i took a picture of a confidential document detailing horrid conditions in some refugee centers + some degree of evidence that the local police apparatus was geared towards intimidating minorities in order to discourage them from applying for naturalization or work permits and whatnot. Direct links to a prominent politician. The news broke out (partially because of me, sent the stuff to my father's newspaper anonymously) and there was a bit of an actual ruckus because of it. People were calling for that politician to get impeached.

Nothing happened in the end, but at least people talked about it

imma be real. It's almost a good thing the subreddit is over. Sure a lot of material has been lost, but now we have a safer platform and a community dedicated enough to show up in another website. This is something we can build upon, while on reddit it always was a matter of "how big can we get until we inevitably get banned".

Now we have a solid core of comrades and history has definitely started moving forward.

imma make use of my freedom of speech, don't mind me just venting and saying whatever would get me banned on reddit:

• God, Syria and Assad!
• Death to america
• Mao was right about landlords
• world would be a better place if Stalin gulag'd more people
• allowing germany to exist as a nation after ww2 was a mistake
• I don't like Putin but i'd rather have him than NATO
• Ukraine is not winning and Zelensky is just playing soldier for the cameras well away from the front
• repression of reactionary forces is cool and good
• China is more democratic than any western country and Xi is the real leader of the free world
• i have leaked insider information from the swiss government and i don't regret it one bit