We’ve all seen this — someone from a communist country who is here to regale everyone with how terrible it was and tell us that the only reason you’d be sympathetic to far left politics is because you live in the West and have never experienced communism yourself.
There’s a lot wrong with this line of reasoning. To name just a few errors:
It assumes the classic either-or dichotomy of communism and capitalism. You can’t criticize capitalism because the alternative is supposedly worse — pretty much this is just whataboutism.
It relies on emotional blackmail. Leaving aside the substance of the issues for a moment, this is the political equivalent of a guilt trip. It basically accuses someone of wrongthink on the basis of supposed socioeconomic privilege — pretty much this is just ad hominem.
It assumes that having a negative experience somehow makes you correct. “I lived in this system and it sucked.” Okay, and? You didn’t like living under the system. Wouldn’t it suffice to say, for instance, that there were food shortages that didn’t exist under capitalism. That would be an actual point. Instead, these people need to make it about themselves and what they went through — god forbid they make an argument that could be made by anyone lol — pretty much this is just an appeal to emotion.
One could go on because using your personal background in an argument, though not intrinsically faulty, often leads people to make shitty arguments. But this tendency is particularly pernicious, and pro-capitalist people seem to think that it’s some kind of “own” that there exist people who lived under communism who didn’t like it . . . well, we’re people who live under capitalism, and we don’t like it.
Maybe we have more in common than we thought.