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’ve always considered myself left but my education started when an old friend whose parents were communist invited me to a student union. I had read about materialism online previously, and started to analyse what I learned in highschool history class through that lens. I remember talking to that friend and saying something like “it’s normal that the the USSR was undemocratic, they just went out from feudalism” and my friend casually said “actually it was democratic, even under Stalin yknow”.
So I just noded because I found this interesting, but that was the start of the deconstruction of cold war myths.
Later I subbed to genzedong just because I saw people hating on it lol
the good old “redditors collectively hate that sub and thus i got into it” pipeline that led most of us to Genzedong
When I learned about the atrocities that were committed by the British Empire, especially in India (I’m of Indian descent so that was of particular interest to me). I needed an outlet for my hatred of Anglos and I somehow discovered Genzedong. The memes were hilarious and simultaneously enlightening. One thing lead to another and I found myself supporting AES and eventually reading theory.
I was previously on the path to anarchism so I’m really glad I found GZD before I became a baby-brained idealist.
The rest is history.
