Look, I'm coming around. I have been provided with so much reading material in this thread that my head is spinning and I'm starting to feel sick for being such an arsehole given the quality of some of the responses I've received. I work 60+ hours a week and I really should not have been so quick to respond to a lot of this stuff without proper time to read and digest, but I was already being called out for being a coward and not replying. I got mad as fuck at the trolling, which I guess is half the point of the hexbear method but it's no excuse to be a goon. In truth I hardened my position in the opposite direction due to some of the low-effort baiting in here, but the quality responses win out.

I still don't believe for one second that the people running China are on the whole "good" people, if such a thing even exists anymore. I visited the country in 2017 as part of a small delegate of primary producers. Covertly State-owned industry made up two of my largest customers at the time. We don't deal with them anymore because our previous Prime Minister was a careless dickhead who liked to run his mouth in the media...a bit like me I guess.

Our experience in China was curated about as intensely as any visit to Pyongyang is. Even after the activities for the day, we were followed and watched extremely closely. I don't like the place, it gave me the heebie jeebies worse than anywhere I've ever been. People seemed to be terrified to leave the acceptable script and I left feeling like I had just been exposed to an entire country full of dedicated cult members and paid actors. I still believe what I was seeing was pure fear in their eyes. Just sheer terror to say the wrong thing, or give away something that they weren't supposed to. This was not a case of a language or cultural barriers, and given their position of power over us during negotiations I do not buy into any idea of deference to colonial powers or any of that tripe. They took us to the cleaners. They held ALL the cards and they knew it. The people I dealt with also had better English language skills than I do so it really just felt like hitting a wall where humanity was not allowed to be expressed out of fear of consequences. OF COURSE there are cultural differences as well, but again - none of you were there and as much as you might pretend to understand my biases and prior programming, you really don't know shit on that front.

I AM doing my best to take on the points about my own programming however. There's certainly got to be an element of truth there - we are all products of our environment and the anti-China sentiment in Australia has always been as strong as hell and seems to be getting worse, but it's all just political posturing. Our federal government will publicly bad-mouth the Chinese whilst gladly taking millions in international tuition fees and Chinese migration. It's just posturing. It really means nothing, but the narrative remains. Whilst I'd love to think I'm above assimilating this type of trash, Australia has been my primary country of residence for over three decades now. I'm mostly a product of their primary, secondary and tertiary education systems. They have had plenty of opportunity to infect me with bad ideas, even as cynical and critical as I have always been, and with an ever growing disdain for the capitalist and democratic status quo since literally childhood.

I do wish people on hexbear would not be so judgemental. You don't know me at all: where I've been, what I've done and oddly enough for a guy who just spent two days arguing with communists, what I have done for the Labor movement here. Having said that, you can only judge me on what I give you, and I gave you a bunch of aggressive trolling so I absolutely received better than what I deserve in return.

Having said that, even as I make my way through all of the articles and material I have been sent, it is going to be a very very hard sell to convince me that the PRC and Russia are the good guys. It might be a bloody good time to try and give it a thorough evaluation though given the current state of geopolitics and Australia's tenuous position in the region.

We have a huge Chinese population in my country: permanent residents like myself, student visas, working visas. A total of 5% of our population are first generation Chinese migrants, and this is nothing new. The Chinese have been here since prior to federation during the gold rushes.

I went through school with Chinese. I worked extremely closely with a lot of Chinese-born migrants at university, I've worked with Chinese people in a professional capacity both based here and based in China (mostly Han, obviously) and I've gotten drunk and red faced with enough of them to know that there are lines they will not cross, no matter how far removed they are from the reach of the CCP...the fear is still there. I can't express how much that bothers me, and this is my biggest driver for looking at the wholeheartedly pro-CCP posts here with the fattest dose of skepticism I can muster. If theirs is the best system, and something that we should strive towards...I just don't see it. I can go anywhere I like in the world and talk shit about the government of Australia or the country of my birth as much as I like without consequence, and I do. I'm not even a citizen. Until such time as Chinese people feel free to do the same then I am going to struggle to accept that any move in that direction is a move towards progress. This is why I lean towards anarchism, because I value freedom above most things. It's why I live in the middle of nowhere where I am truly left alone. I receive few government services here: no water, no sewage, no garbage collection. I have to travel 2 hours for healthcare but...I am free to do as I please and say as I please. You can read this both as a staunch indictment of Australia's version of democracy that I have had to take these steps to achieve a limited freedom within its bounds AND why I come across as libertarian with some of my beliefs. I am almost completely self-reliant in this world and exist in stark defiance of the government structures that strive to pull me back into the fold, but not ignorant of the privilege I was born into that has allowed me to be so.

Again, I will qualify this. I am not even half way through the material that /u/robinn2@hexbear.net , /u/Mardoniush@hexbear.net, and /u/Tastysnack@hexbear.net have sent. Even /u/Egon@hexbear.net has given me plenty to think on, and they really only turned against me when I hardened my position against you all. In my defense, I did start out this discussion in good faith. You really do have a lot of members who are antagonistic fuckwits but after 27 years on the internet I should know far better than to feed the trolls.

Reading my drunken string of replies this morning I will admit I was pretty horrified. I got defensive and just took up a position against communism in general, which is pretty unproductive and not really inline with my day to day thought. I walk around every day with a knife on my belt that has this symbol on it: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f6/Emblema_NKVD.svg/1200px-Emblema_NKVD.svg.png

I can't pretend to understand fully what it means. As a matter of fact I feel I'm pretty staunchly against the tactics employed by the NKVD but I wear the knife anyway. It was a gift from a group of friends that know me better than most. Obviously it was a joke and a jab in some fashion, but they know the content of my heart maybe better than I do, so I will do my best to grapple with what I have been sent here. I remain extremely dubious, but I am dubious of everything...especially capitalism and perverse profit incentives.

I am grateful for the time that people have invested here, even in the face of my arrogance and opposition. I'm also aware that I'm out of my depth here. /u/robinn2@hexbear.net is obviously a scholar of communism, and I am obviously not. I have read far more theory than any of you have given me credit for, but I didn't give you any reason to give me any credit either. I'm just grateful for a space (lemmy, not hexbear) where such discussions can take place without all comments being deleted and half of us banned.

It really does seem like things are falling apart at present. I will be out here in rural Australia, armed to the teeth and ready for what comes but still not sure if we will end up friend or Phở in the long run.