#everyone who wants to stan communism should read about cambodia

[hussyknee]

A self proclaimed anarchist who completely misunderstands communism? On MY tumblr? It's more likely than you think. Communism isn't fascism and it certainly isn't authoritarianism. Get off my lawn.

I have generational poverty trauma from the food insecurity my parents suffered under our socialist government in the '60s and '70s. Their nationalist policies, and those of their capitalist counterparts, sparked three separate ethnic cleansings of Tamils. They burned thousands of people alive on the streets. That led to a 26 year war between Sinhalese state forces and Tamil Marxist separatists - Asia's longest civil war.

The corruption of both capitalist and socialist governments sparked two other, unrelated, Sinhalese (majority) nationalist Marxist insurrections. One of those groups threatened to kill my father, causing my mother to lose her baby from stress. Mum and I were sent to go live with my grandmother in the village for safety and leave my father behind because he couldn't leave his post. My earliest memories are of being scared at night that men would come and kidnap or kill my parents, like I heard on the news. The government in turn deployed death squads that kidnapped, tortured and murdered suspected insurrectionists. When my aunts were pregnant with my cousins, they were told not to look up on their way to work so they wouldn't see the corpses strung up on electricity poles.

The war began four years before I was born and kept on until I was 22. My friends and I didn't know a world where we could step outside of our houses without accepting the possibility that we might not make it home. We couldn't even imagine it. People were regularly caught in suicide bombs and bus bombs. My first year in primary, my classmates Mum died when they attacked the Central Bank three blocks away from our school. And we were the lucky ones living in the capital city, which only got bombed at random. The North and East of my country was razed to the ground, hundreds of thousands disappeared, killed and displaced.

All of this? Happened under both socialist and capitalist governments, when allegiances were switching between Communist China, the USSR, and the US and its allies. A communist/socialist government will always be nationalist, because that's the base rationale for state control over all industries and isolationist market policies. Nationalist always means the ethnic supremacy of the majority. Our socialist government right now is quite literally Aryan supremacist.The capitalist government has also persecuted minorities and robbed and tortured and killed just as much, because capitalists are in bed with neoliberal colonizers and they need a scapegoat for the starving poor.

This is not based solely off the trauma of my own country. I'm a scholar of decolonization and political science, following leading academics from the Global South who have a huge body of research on post-colonial geo-political and ethnic conflicts and their dynamics. This is the consensus of decolonization scholars especially from South and Southeast Asia with whom I work.

So when I tell you that communism is a genocidal dictatorship just as much as Nazism, just as bad as capitalism, maybe I know what I'm talking about.

But obviously, you'd know that if you looked up literally ANY Asian or Eastern bloc country that used to be communist. You just don't actually give a single shit. You think that communism only failed for the rest of us because we're poor, brown, non-Western, "unfortunate" and incompetent. You think only you can instate a "proper" communist government because you're white or Western or American, and therefore cleverer and stronger and richer.

In a word - you're a white supremacist, imperialist piece of shit. Y'know. Like Nazis.