I Was a Communist. I Feel Much Better Now.

I was a raging, full blown communist activist for years. I fought against police brutality and to make abortions available to anyone who wanted one, on demand. I pretended that it was best to let us overthrow the allegedly-elected government and to then force a “dictatorship of the proletariat”. For those who don’t know, the “dictatorship of the proletariat” is a super fun insanity that pretends the working class is in direct control of every decision when, truly, whoever is high up in the Communist Party makes all the decisions. But totally, for sure, for absolute realsies, we promise they do it with your best interest in mind. Trust us.

Back then, I pretended I was very oppressed after having been given basically free higher education and free health care for years and living a pretty affluent lifestyle, especially for an unskilled and unprofessional part-time worker in one of the most beautiful areas on earth. Truly easy and completely lacking in self-reflection were the years I spent organizing rallies and protests against the wars in the middle east, against the detention of illegal immigrants, and against what I thought was the police-state.

I hadn’t traveled much. I hadn’t yet seen countries where actual racism was actually systemic and people were disappeared from the street, tortured, and often killed simply for being the wrong color in the wrong neighborhood. I hadn’t yet experience actual transexuals be beaten to death for wearing the opposite gender’s clothing styles. I believed everything I said and I passionately screamed what I thought was the truth through megaphones. I led chants of, “this is what democracy looks like!” And chorus-cheering of, “Power! Power! Power to the people! We got the people power! Stronger by the hour!” As well as my favorite, “Which side are you on?”

Reading communist literature and talking with communists in secret backrooms of seedy bookstores involves just flat-out shitloads of logical fallacy, especially circular logic. For example, if you ask how we will eventually cede power back to the actual people after our violent, communist takeover in which we literally force a new government and economic system on the entire nation, you are met with answers such as, “The people will already have the power that entire time because they will own the means of production, we will give it to them.” See how that works? “We” will “give” it to “them”. “We will own it, but trust us, we will give it away.” 

“Ok, sure,” you may say to such an answer, “but how will we do it?”

The answers almost always then devolved into a series of assertions that you should read more Bob Avakian and that this is just something that works itself out as we go. 

Another of my favorite pieces of illogic was this constant response to the genuine questions of many people we would talk to in the streets. It went something like this: “why has communism never worked and what about all the millions it has killed?” To which the answer was then, and remains to this day: “None of that is true, these are capitalist lies to hide the true bliss of communism, as well as capitalist infiltration into communist states in order to make their system look bad from the inside out, combined with the fact that no one has ever really done it perfect yet, but we will this time. Trust us.”

Looking back, I’m impressed that this many people go along with such vague promises and empty outlines of progression of the plan. I’m impressed because it reveals the great lie and the great truth of this entire psychological operation: it is entirely emotional in nature. There is no logic to it. Not from the start, not in the middle, and least of all at the end.

What is required for a thinking person to support communist organizing, agitation, rallying, and protest is essentially an abdication of self responsibility at the core of every aspect of the person’s emotional makeup. When I began to look around at those who were organizing with me, I realized a harsh truth: not one of them was well. Not exaggeration, exactly zero of them were well, emotionally or mentally. I’m including myself, at that time. A few were relatively well physically, especially amongst the communist youth of the party. What does it say of a movement or organization when it is populated and led entirely by the broken?

Another strange psychological perk is that of The Rebel. We all relate to the rebellious stages of life and we all truly do experience oppression and unfairness toward which it is sensible to rebel against. Corruption actually does surround us in every level of our government, from local to federal. We should be upset, we should be organizing, and we should remove the aspects of our system that have become rotten. And there are nearly infinite, rotting pieces in this structure. We just shouldn’t pretend it is best to restructure or clean house through violent overthrow, growing out of personal failures and emotional disease, forcing it on an entire nation of individuals who didn’t ask for it, and then taking it upon ourselves to hopefully, one day, vaguely sort of somehow transfer power to….literally everyone.

The people around me, when I was a communist, were absolutely and thoroughly emotionally broken. The leader of my faction and region, whose real name I still don’t know to this day, would consistently talk of the constant, childhood rape at the hands of her local police. Her mother would escape drug and prostiution charges by letting this police person rape her own child, for years. That kind of abuse and torture takes a strength of soul and years and years and years of healing to repair. This leader of ours had never done an ounce of healing. Her genuine desire involved killing all cops. This, nearly twenty years before the outbreak of socialist-communist leaning freak-storms of outrage that poured across our city streets over the last few years, here in 2021. 

Another of our prominent leaders was a young man who once led a small gathering of us from a college-campus speak-out to running through the streets from the cops with our flags flying behind us. Why? Simply because the cops had shown up. The cops weren’t even threatening to shut down our un-permitted rally and they weren’t interfering. They were just there. Their station was literally across the street, so it wasn’t even surprising in the least. But, simply because they walked up, our fearless leader led us running and screaming first through the college building and then through the congested city streets and traffic. Why? To score some badass points? To pretend we were finally engaging directly against the “bad guys”? I can only be sure that it was pointless, immature, reactive, and misguided. Choices like that don’t come from true leaders of healthy stature, they come from strange creatures of needy egos who want attention and credit they didn’t do much to earn.

These cracks began to appear to me because I never stop questioning, thank god. I saw the lack of sense, especially in the post-revolution stages of the plan. I saw the failing hearts and minds of the people around me. I saw the constant self-pity and self-loathing oozing out of all my comrades. I saw how it was just another club, just another way to feel connected to something meaningful, and just another way to avoid fixing oneself and one’s community in ways that were real and meaningful.

The final crack appeared when I at last found out a piece of the puzzle that crossed the one line I’ve always been so grateful to possess: this is the line where anyone still enamored by the lie of the promise of communism will disavow me as a reject who broke under the pressures of the programming of the capitalist states. My line, I learned then and have reinforced in a million tiny and large ways since then, is in the nature of my being, which is to say that it surrounds my understanding that I am primarily a consciousness and soul and secondarily a physical body named Lindsey.

This was the breaking point: no one, not anyone, not agnostics or Christians or Muslims or Zoroastrians, are allowed to practice or believe in any faith or spirituality.  Not in a communist state and world.

Why? It should go without saying that spirituality and a faith in something beyond our flesh is anathema to communism. Otherwise, there would not be a hard line in the communist and socialist movements of pure atheism and materialism. While they’ll never see it, their obsession with atheism and materialism are literally faith-based and absolutely essential to the success of their mission.

Simply put: you cannot give your life to the state, communist or not, if you know that your soul transcends the state. You cannot accept the necessity of killing and sacrificing millions of lives to the atheist-materialist, psychotic dream of centralized, ultimate control of the entire economy if you believe that each of those bodies represents a unique consciousness and soul. 

When I realized this wasn’t just an idea about perhaps doing away with the old, outdated, religious organizations that spanned the globe, but an idea that required literally stamping out any and all hints of ANY spirituality, I left and I never looked back.  I am grateful for the line around my soul that led me to both experience this delusion of communism deeply, while also breaking free from it once I had fully understood its core.

Communism promises the impossible: everyone will have everything they need and want while working happily to produce what everyone needs and wants in perpetuity, amen. Inequality will end as every person gets exactly the same as everyone else, no matter their personal choices, level of ability, commitment to excellence, or love of their craft or work. The leaders with power will suddenly be incapable of abusing power, cementing their own power, further centralizing that power, or taking more than their fair share in this glorious, unicorn-coated future of humanity.  We just have to get rid of those damn capitalists. Capitalism is the only thing that promotes greed and power-hunger, obviously, or else why would we work so hard to end it?

It is neat that, in this glorious future, because we have no souls and are automatons that work happily forever, we have no responsibility to heal ourselves from childhood rape or economic harship and lack. 

The saddest part of the whole story is this: I don’t believe that even our broken, horribly abused leader was legit. I believe that was a classic CIA operative. She was fantastic at never doing a drop of work, grooming young people who were disaffected and broken into doing her bidding, and creating emotional foment to hurl in any direction she chose. Sure, maybe she was just that type of a maniac, but we all know the CIA and other operations infiltrate literally every group that exists, including massive knitting circles. They can’t help themselves. 

So, when you see a coordinated and media-promoted uproar that spans the nation in every major city, populated with youth and broken souls calling for communism, all throughout 2020, you have to see it for what it is. It isn’t just a series of unfortunate, personal failures, it is also a tool of your government to take even more power and control.

Who got power from this cascade of communist sympathy and agitation? Joe Biden: the crustiest fixture of concentrated power we could find in this system. Kamala Harris: the literal cop who jailed more black and brown people than anyone, unfairly and for longer than legally allowed. The corporations and psychopathic-elite families who have held a vice grip on our media and production for centuries. Not you. Not me. Not any small business owners I know. Not any regular people anywhere in this gigantic, beautiful country. Power only concentrated and flowed upward, during this entire communist-fete that spanned the nation.

The system wants you to break. The system wants you to give up your authority and sovereignty. The system wants you to crumple inward emotionally to the point that you are sure you can never heal so that it can entice you further into dependence on its offerings and wares. It whispers, “You can’t possibly do it yourself, let us feed you bugs and give you free housing and payment. We will offer you what we call healthcare, where you have no choice and no true health. We will take care of you like no one ever did or ever could…”

The truth is, you are the only one who ever could have taken care of you and you are the only one who ever will be able to take care of you. If you aren’t doing that, someone else owns your soul, heart, mind and body. You are their slave. They don’t relinquish their slaves easily and they’re not going to empower you to take back the system, once you give it to them.

Refuse communism. Read history. See the damage that the giant lie of forced, economic equality has done. See the power it has concentrated and kept amongst the top tier of our economic class. See how it has never enriched the lives or improved the quality of life of any peoples it has been invited to conquer. Don’t allow a weakened emotional self to invite in the vampire that promises more than anyone could ever deliver. Heal yourself. Feel the broken parts inside and take responsibility for them. I did. I was a communist. I feel much better now.