I really stepped in it last night. My partner is livid with me for suggesting Stalin wasn’t the evil dictator he’s made out to be in the west. For a German who grew up with anti-communism and went to some very liberal universities for political science it was too much. They said something to the effect of “this feels exactly like if you said, oh Hitler wasn’t that bad, he was actually a good guy.” We’re in the midst of planning our wedding and they were suddenly at the point of doubting that they know who I am and if this is a relationship they want to maintain.
We have a hard time discussing politics as it is. We are still not so great at interpreting the nuances of way each other speaks, and our background knowledge is very different. So we have to figure out what we do from here.
I can’t come at this from the direction of “trying to convert them.” They already think I have gone into a conspiracy theory ridden and propaganda laden hole, and believe me, I ask myself the same thing every day. It really weighs heavily on me, as some of our close family members have fallen into conspiracy theory echo chambers.
We’ve decided we need to go back to basics and make sure our core values align, which I genuinely believe they do. They’re an anti-capitalist as well, although don’t have a strong idea of what to would be better, just that it shouldn’t be communism.
I’m not sure where to go after we sort out what our shared values are.
There’s a certain condescension I sense when it comes to the leftist sources I read, many on recommendation from GenZedong members. I’m often met with “leftists just make up all kinds of stuff to suit their narrative,” or “how do you know that’s a primary or reliable secondary source, it’s so easy to fake anything these days.” Meanwhile they go to Wikipedia and see that Stalin killed millions and signed a treaty with the Nazis, even as they understand that much of western capitalist media is propaganda as well. We can’t have any useful discussion on current events at the moment because we have vastly different knowledge of what’s happening, as well as entirely different analytical tools to pick it apart with.
They’re also terrified I’m going to say very extreme things in front of their family (privileged petite bourgeois liberals). I try to be careful but at the same time I won’t pretend to not be a communist. We have political discussions often and I’m not one to just sit those out. I’m sure my family would react poorly as well, but with the geographical distance to them it’s not as present an issue in our minds.
How do you all deal with this? How do you have these discussions and share these ideas with the more soc-dem or liberal minded people in your lives?
Listen, mate, you don’t need debate advice or communo-evangelical advice right now. You need relationship advice. There are contexts like working for capitalists or trying to organise radicalising liberals where you need to be shrewd about what you say and how you say it, but a relationship, especially a long-term romantic one, is not the place for being tactical or tactful. You need to be able to be who you are, and speak your whole mind, around the one person you expect to spend your life with.
With that in mind, you can see that your problem isn’t Stalin or spirituality, it’s how you approach conversations with each other. You said it yourself: You can smell the whiff of condescension from each other when you come to a disagreement, which means either that your do not respect the viewpoint being endorsed, or the core philosophy and worldview behind it. This is a serious point of tension, and needs to be treated as such. As a breakdown in communication due to an inability or unwillingness to move past a difference not of facts, but of outlook.
The difficult conversation you have to have isn’t one about how the Holodomor is propaganda, or you promising not to praise the USSR. You need to sit down with your partner and say, “I know we don’t see eye to eye on this, but this is important to me, and it’s clearly important to you as well.” You are both politically-conscious individuals and the politics you have arrived at are an expression of how you engage with and understand the world. You identities are bound up in, and so you need to navigate the topics with care and in a way that a disagreement about the topic doesn’t become a negation of your sense of self and feel like a rejection of your whole belief system.
Basically, this is not an online argument, so please don’t approach it like one. It’s not a problem that can be solved with a magic answer. You have to essentially be willing to say “I will disagree with you without disrespecting you and I ask the same of you in turn. We both love each other and have the best of intentions and want to understand how best to better the world, and I want to share my perspective with you and help you understand why I see the world the way I do.”
Be willing to avoid certain topics if your partner isn’t comfortable with them currently, and set your own boundaries as well. Have a negotiation about what engaging on this topic looks like, and what you would like to do together to help understand each other better. i.e. try to prepare a neutral ground based on trusting each other enough to have difficult conversations.
The bad news is that if you can’t come to an agreement about how to have the conversations, then that is an indication of a fundamental difference that you will not be able to resolve, and you will have to ask yourself how willing you are to live with that. But try. If you have that level of trust, it will hopefully work out to step 1 of the process.