• 4 Posts
  • 6 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: March 23rd, 2022
  • William Riker@lemmygrad.mltoCommunism@lemmygrad.ml•Coming in from /r/GenZedong, bringing a battalion of memeinforcements with me, where do I go comrades??
    0·
    2 years ago

    Good advice We’ve been acting as an educational WW2 history reddit. Well “acting” is the wrong word, because we are also that. (I’m really into WW2 and I’m a communist.

    WW2 got me into communism actually, my grandfather hated nazis and told me all about the communist partisans. After the war he got stationed in Belgian Congo. What he saw there made him a anti-imperialist. He even learned Swahili so he could talk to the Congolese people in their own language rather than French. He also disliked the Belgian-French.

    He was Flemish and Flemish in those days were treated as second class citizens (This didn’t apply to Flemish who spoke French, it was not an ethnic thing, but a language thing)

    My grandpa was a polyglot and spoke 7 languages (Flemish, French, German, Italian, Swahili, Serbian and Russian) though. He could learn any language in a matter of months. Swahili, he told me, is very easy to learn as it doesn’t have much words being context based. (For example “Matata” can mean “loud noise”, “trouble”; “worries” but also “fighting” or “war”)

    When Lumumba was murdered he turned commie, Titoïst really. As he admired the Yugoslav Partizans lot. And the Simbas. He considered returning to Congo to join them even. But Lumumba was killed and my grandpa wasn’t a soldier anyway. He was an airman.

    He wasn’t a big ideologue though, his sympathy for communism came from hatred against Nazis and sympathy for oppressed people (like the Congolese) (He didn’t hate Germans, just Nazis, we have a lot of family in former East-Germany. He’d go there a lot and liked the place)

    You’d think a former Air Force officer and current "Aeronautical Electrical Engineer " (after he quit the Air Force, he ran a state owned electrical plant) would have trouble getting behind the Iron Curtain, but that was never a problem. The other way around was more difficult. Our family from East-Germany didn’t visit us much in Belgium. Lots of paperwork and bureaucracy