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Of all the things I actively hate on — a favored pastime ever since my crusty baby eyes first pried open to the world and was then violently apprised to the diverse horrors of online people and activities — this is going to be my Big One™. Mic check, tap tap, cough cough, is this thing on? OK let’s get straight into it.

White Americans (and other cohorts of western caucasity on socials) who identify as communists, who misuse and abuse terms like “comrade” to perform your radical leftishness, who proudly post the hammer and sickle symbol and use it as your profile pic: You have no idea the harm you cause by wearing communism as a costume.

Also, I don’t believe you. From what I’ve observed of so-called American “communists” on Twitter and the white people I’ve met IRL who say they align sociopolitically most closely with communism, I do not believe you know what you are talking about. I do not believe you understand fundamentally the knotty and inherent paradoxical and self-defeating nature of using authoritarian force for egalitarian governance. I don’t believe you understand the nuances of how to manage masses of heterogeneous people without using brute force. And I don’t believe you’ve unpacked how domino-effect dangerous it is to resort to psychological coercion, physical violence, and ethnic and cultural cleansing in order to achieve the Marxist fantasy of total class equality. So answer me this: Are you dumb or are you evil?

Ask anyone who’s actually lived under and survived a communist regime — or their children, or their grandchildren, if you’d like to witness how a lifetime of paranoia can get boiled down and amplified through each generation — and you’ll discover that they’re all carrying a piece of unimaginable trauma. My great-great-grandfather was killed in his sleep so that his ramshacks could be divvied up by the villagers in his home country; one of my mother’s best friends in college was banished from re-entering said country for a decade after being caught protesting. My parents, as are so many of the immigrants who’ve been forced to flee their home country, are still dealing with the PTSD — in its most capital, bold-faced, and under-lined meaning — as a consequence of growing up in that particular time and place. The reason I’m even being this vague about these anecdotes is evidence alone at how paranoid us subsequent generations have been taught to be of authoritarian forces that still are alive and well today.

If you haven’t been triggered enough to get this far, cool beans. Thanks.

I am speaking directly to you in these treacherous American times because I need you to really digest this message: that your cute little protest against capitalism should not come in the form of cheerleading communism for the edginess or aesthetics, especially when you don’t even engage with recent history that would have easily taught you how cruel and quixotic communist regimes can be. (Plus, do you even discern yourselves between Maoists, Stalinists, Marxists, et cetera? Not that I’ve observed, at least). So I ask you again: Are you dumb or are you evil?

And, yes yes, you are allowed to like or identify with whatever that you want to roost your disdain for social class inequalities on — and communism is an obvious and tempting one. But, as all things that white people like to co-opt and to make into a bastardized bespoke version of, try to understand it better. That starts with a little bit of introspection and perhaps a lot of research.

I see you online, bemoaning into the ethers all day long; you know what a Google is and you know that it is free. And please don’t flatten my message today by connecting this to a pro or anti stance on actual, lowercase-C communism — as it is with all governing bodies, it is complicated. Communism is by far one of the most difficult ideological paradigms to imagine as a realistic ruling arm, and I’m currently limited in bandwidth to give you a real think on that. On principle, I get it, it sounds nice? But you white people have got to be more conscionable with what you project into the world and cherry-pick out of of context.

—Not Your Comrade

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