maysaloon

Sorry for posting this here, I don't know a better place. I feel very sick watching the events in my country unveil. Sectarian tensions have been bad for a while, but in a matter of one week, so many of my people have decided that the druze minority is their enemy, and that "liberating" their towns (from their own people!) is their righteous conquest.

I am very saddened about where things have gone. Things just keep getting worse and I see no way out. A small protest in damascus against the violence was attacked by mobs, without any government protection or presence whatsoever (the protest was next to the "parliament" building!). We are living in fascism, where speaking out against sectarian violence is punishable my mob beatings.

I apologize for the rant. I understand probably none of you here is syrian or even middle eastern, so please feel free to ask questions and I will happily answer. At this point this is my only outlet.

I know this question will sound silly to some, but suppose a group of people in a low key third world country decide to make their own commune. They work together to build up farming and industry purely based on their own need, and slowly expand to accomodate their needs.

I understand Communes are viewed as ineffective, but a commune like this would be meant to grow, not just remain isolated. It would inspire communes in other areas, and it would aim to expand.

I see a couple of issues with this:

• not all countries can do this. For example, Palestinians living in Palestine will suffer trying to do this. But most countries can, right?
• it will only benefit the tiny group of people within proximity to the commune. But the commune can 1) expand and 2) inspire communes in other locations
• some needs are hard for a small commune to make, such as computer chip manufacturing, and other things they will need to get from the non commune world

But still, I can't see this as less than a good step forward?

Mine currently:
Fediverse@lemmy.ml
Selfhosted@lemmy.world
Linux@lemmy.ml
newcommunities@lemmy.world
Memes@lemmy.ml

It seems there are a lot of propaganda arising on certain lemmy instances parroting propaganda that lemmygrad and Communists support human rights violations, and equating Communists to the alt right.

This is an extremely ridiculous assertion, given the historical context of the left being the main force fighting Nazism and fascism. But I write this post as there are probably many people misled by all the dishonest propaganda out there, who may be accepting of reason before seeking to silence us.

Please link this post in other instances if they are parroting propaganda about Communists to justify demonizing us. Reasonable people will understand and oppose these motions.

What is NOT Communism? in short, communism is NOT:

• "when the government does stuff"
• "capitalism but everyone gets paid the same"
• an incursion on personal freedom, or forcing people to do what they don't want (unless the thing they don't want is not exploiting others and not wishing mass murder on ethnic groups, etc).

Then what is communism? in simple terms, it is the belief that the working class (i.e. the people, the masses) must own the means of production (factories, work places, etc) and control the direction of production in society, so that we produce for our own needs rather than to fulfill profits.

Why? we spend most of our lifetime working, so why should we cater it towards profits of a minority class of capitalists rather than our own and out community's needs and wants? Why shouldn't we be masters of our own destinies?

You may not agree with this, but this is not an excuse to silence us or lump us with genocidal ideologies

This thread is not meant to convince you with communism, but to demystify it and break the cold war era propaganda that some of you continue to parrot.

you support USSR? What about their human rights violations? (applies to Cuba, China, etc)

We do, but we do not support human rights violations as we believe there are tons of propaganda surrounding this. Equating this with Nazism is EXTREMELY DISINGENUOUS. The prevailing propaganda against the USSR is even acknowledged by NATO countries themselves. Nazism is an ideology founded on genocide, and this is easy to verify from Hitler's writing himself.

Maybe in the end, we are wrong and despite the propaganda, there are human rights violations. But our support for the USSR comes from their achievements to better the human condition, and we hope to build on it. There are no human rights violation that inspires our ideology like it does for fascism or Nazism.

Disclaimer: I am just a random Communist. I have no authority over lemmygrad or connections to the admins, just to make sure I don't upset the admins saying this.