i go out of my way to experience different cultures and it seems like the immigrant communities in the united states originating from communist countries tend to be some of the chuddiest people imaginable. chinese, russian, cuban, vietnamese. literally every person who i ever talked to that has lived in a communist country and then moved to the united states, or is like second or third generation from that, tends to be incredibly reactionary and anti communist. i feel like i am a more well versed communist when talking to people that lived in a communist country.
its like that everyone that comes to the united states from a communist country forgets the values of marxism, socialism, and communism. i have been too polite to ask what really made these people move to this fucking shithole and if i had to guess they have something severely wrong with them and they want to participate in some small business tyrany and become capitalists. like all these assholes be chasing the dollar and they bring great shame on their own nationality even being here.
i have had much better discussions with people from countries that are still being exploited by capitalists since they already have an understanding of what colonialism and capitalism even is and they arent here to try to become small business owners or worse. people from puerto rico dont got the brain worms that cuban expats do for example.
and i should mention, they all state, they love their country but they blame everything bad with their country on communists. It infuriates me hearing these people, who were born in a nation with socialized healthcare, state controlled industry, basic welfare for citizens, just trash talk the system that make them so successful in the first place and gave them the resources they probably didn’t deserve to open up a shitty restaurant selling borscht. they would know exactly why these social programs cant meet demand if they just took the blindfold off and realized that america, the great fucking satan, is the reason why the global economy is so unequal ITS ALL BECAUSE OF FUCKING AMERICA NOT COMMUNISM YOU STUPID FUCK!
ive been told not to view myself as more communist than others, but i fucking am around these parts with expats who are not communist whatsoever, that makes me more communist than them. if i was to draw a hundred mile radius around myself odds are there probably wouldnt be someone more communist than me. nobody in my life reads theory, every fucking time i tried reaching out with dsa or the bernie shit i have only met shitlibs, i have found no comrades in bipoc communities, the lgbt, religion, or labor. just having someone say to me face to face they are a communist would help me anchor my belief system to something real and not entirely made up and on the internet.
idk, communism is basically what i use to fill my god hole and its fucking hard to find communists irl and its real shitty that people from communist countries arent oftentimes communists. i just want some validation in my belief in communism by someone who is fucking real.
America caters to everything chuds love and attracts them here.
Think about the flip side, if you lived in a communist country, would you want to leave it to come live in this reactionary hellhole?
if you lived in a communist country, would you want to leave it to come live in this reactionary hellhole
When a lot of immigrants from Cuba, Vietnam, and China came over, the US was around 30-40% of the WORLD’s GDP. These three countries’ lifespans were literally a full decade lower than America’s. The infrastructure and technology was easily many many decades behind
Not to mention a normal job in the US at the time could afford you a house and lifestyle that even the wealthiest of those countries would dream of
I mean yea there’s a fuck load of South Vietnam immigrants but this argument is missing a lot of historical analysis
When a lot of immigrants from Cuba, Vietnam, and China came over, the US was around 30-40% of the WORLD’s GDP. These three countries’ lifespans were literally a full decade lower than America’s. The infrastructure and technology was easily many many decades behind
White supremacist’s version of Mecca. The US is the only country on earth to carry out such a nearly complete and total genocide on an entire continent. The undisputed champions of fascism as we know it now.
The European colonial project that built the US killed literally hundreds of millions of people in the US alone, and that was before it was even the US.
And of those who survived, only ~8% are fluent in ANY of their native languages.
The entire population of North and South America at the start of that project did not exceed a hundred million, and the vast majority of it was in central and southern America. There were not hundreds of millions of people in the US to kill.
Very possibly, every native American living within the modern borders of the US from 1400 to today might have totalled a hundred million, but the colonial project didn’t kill literally every one of them.
Well it depends, doesn’t it? If I were just an average person from a very poor country and a revolution just happened, and the government was having a hard time getting basic services set up, and suddenly we’re under sanction from the whole world, I’m not sure how I’d feel.
That describes people I know who came to the US from Vietnam. They grew up poor, a massive war happened, then the new socialist government had problems maintaining itself for a while.
Modern Vietnam is absolutely a success story though. It paid off in the end, but it took them a while. They’re building rail transport through the country finally, they’ve got a robust healthcare system, and their education seems top notch. But if I were someone poor coming out of a warzone in 1976 with no idea what 2023 Vietnam would look like, I could see wanting to leave.
My Chinese parents immigrated not to US but to Canada
My mom’s family got their entire business (bunch of merchant shops on the street of a rural town) and large property taken away from the communists
She’s pretty anti-China and a little bigoted but hilariously enough, she’s also anti-Canada/US and anti- lol
My dad just sold t-shirts on a wagon on the streets and moved to Canada because he blew his entire life savings in his 20s travelling the entire world and wanted to live in a foreign country
He’s pretty pro-China *now* because of the progress and less bigoted than my mom, but also less bigoted towards white people lol
One thing you have to remember though is that Cuba and Vietnam + China in the past were incredibly poor. Like genuinely some of the poorest and worst places you can live in on this planet. Most people are not politically literate and so of course will judge their home country based on what they’ve seen and experienced compared to the West rather than apply historical materialism to their opinions
Yeah, as ever I recommend non-third-world people read Fanshen, about the fraught process of revolution in a town in China where the (long fled) Lord of the Manor owned a staggering 23 acres (for comparison, you probably can’t support a family very well on less than three.), and the divide of rich and poor was if you could sometimes eat wheat and not millet.
you probably must feel that weird feeling all those german kids felt when they asked their parents and grandparents what they did in the war. like both of us shouldnt have the right to exist for the sins of our parents but here we are, so basically we got to self obliterate ourselves in penance and use what privilege and wealth we have to fight for communism.
its definitely a special kind of person who has the means to move across the world, like there’s economic necessity to move to a country that we consider like ultimately evil (or in canada case, a country trying to imitate its evil neighbor) but the economy good and you can send money back. but it has a cost on your metaphorical soul being here on your own volition. but like being second gen sort of takes that burden off you since you didnt choose to be here.
as for the white person thing, personally i kind of consider how far one is from being black to how close one is to being a direct beneficiary of colonialism. it would be wrong to rank it but pacific asian people tend to side with white people on all the wrong issues since they are so close to “whiteness”. like in the united states at least (and by proxy canada) theres like a caste system and i feel like theres culpability for everyone except the direct bottom, who frankly are innocent in all the sins of this nation.
you probably must feel that weird feeling all those german kids felt when they asked their parents and grandparents what they did in the war
I don’t think being a small business owner is comparable to being a literal Nazi
like both of us shouldnt have the right to exist for the sins of our parents but here we are
People aren’t born inheriting the sins of their parents
to side with white people on all the wrong issues since they are so close to “whiteness”.
This is a bad take and misunderstands the whiteness concept.
The best estimates of the total death toll in India under British rule is somewhere around 60 million people but some of those famines occurred after the end of the British East India Company. A good estimate for those deaths under the Company rule is about 40 million.
All that profiting!
Whiteness is more than the colour of the skin and that play largely a role in power systems and passing.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asien-Pazifik#/media/Datei:Asia-Pacific_map1.png
Is not:
One factor is that people who have the means to move to a different country have some amount of privilege (specifically money or connections) relative to the average person in their home country, even if it’s not necessarily oligarch levels of wealth
That is to say the people who are like “I came here with nothing but $10 in my pocket and created a life for myself with hard work and immigrant grindset!” might be telling the truth about arriving with such meager wealth, but are conveniently leaving out that they somehow were able to afford the thousands of dollars it costs to complete the immigration process (over a years worth of full time work in some countries), and likely have a sponsor in their destination country they could rely on for food and shelter while starting out
not all people who move to the us are privileged though. its just that people that move from communist countries tend to be. like mexican people specifically are sort of an underclass that are exploited for cheap labor. you can find leftist sentiment in immigrants, just not immigrants from places that have actually achieved socialism.
I’ve seen anticommunist sentiment from immigrants from global south countries that have never been ruled by any sort of communists, such as India, The Philippines, and even Mexico. I think there does tend to be more leftist sentiment among immigrants in the US from Mexico since compared to many other countries, the physical proximity allows for more undocumented immigration, which for better or worse is more accessible to the working class (people who don’t have the privilege I was talking about), but which also has a dynamic that keeps them in an underclass in the US.
There’s the matter of them having enough means to make it to the US, and in addition to that, they’re the ones who picked the US out of anywhere in the world as where they wanted to go. It’d be like a westerner going to live in a communist country, they would not be a typical westerner.
what i do know is people that left countries during/after a revolution, for example cubans moving to florida, is because many of them were wealthy and fled to preserve their fortune/lives in some cases. as to why they do it now, i’m not too sure but i suspect a lot of it has to do with the idolization that some people in socialist countries tend to have with capitalist ones - michael parenti’s blackshirts and reds has a good write-up about the latter in chapter 7. that, and the ones who have the means to leave are also probably wealthy and want to gain more wealth
