I had some pretty brutal discussions with my dad who is a hardcore liberal of the “the answer lies somewhere between the middle of left and right” type. He agrees with a lot of socialist stances and class war but refuses to acknowledge that a revolution is needed to achieve socialism, that killing people wouldn’t make us better than the owning class and that violence is bad and that we should try to change the system by voting that voting will bring lasting change and not a revolution…all this kind of crap. He thinks that i got too “radicalized” and that im stuck in a bubble of propaganda and now he wants to have more control of the media i consume and that when he sees me watching or reading an article that i show him the sources of these articles. He really wants me to “keep an open-mind” which to him literally just means returning to being a liberal. The more of these discussions i have with my father the more i feel a distance between us and i would love if we just ignored our political opinions and kept living our lives how we always did but he insists that i am being groomed by some megalomaniac organization or a goofy ah evil person to join some kind of leftist jihad: “Yes you are entitled to have your opinion but you should also keep an open mind but the problem is that your opinion is not correct” that all i hear from him.
The topic of using violence is definitely a hard line for many people that they will not budge on.
The truth is is that almost anybody will commit or at least condone violence if the situation is dire enough, but for many of us Westerners and our parents it simply isn’t, and they will refuse to think they would budge on this because to them, the situation will never be that dire (even though in reality electoralism has done nothing to stop us killing millions in wars, coups, and causing climate change).
I’m not sure what the best route would be, continuing to try and frankly talk about it or continuing to casually drop it. I myself tried for years to talk politics with my mom but I finally had to let go and realize that she would never condone any tradition that has a history of pragmatic violence, and that it was that simple, and nowadays we get along great, and I just don’t talk politics with her.
They’re fine with institutional and/or proxy violence as long as it’s done by people with uniforms, or at least people with contracts.