After seeing a megathread praising Mao Zedong, an actual mass killer, and a post about a guy saying “99% of westerners are 100000000000% sure they know what happened in ‘Tiny Man Square’ […] the reasons for this are complex and involve propaganda […],” I am genuinely curious what leads people to this belief system. Even if propaganda is involved when it comes to Tiananmen Square, it doesn’t change the atrocities that were/are committed everywhere else in China.

I am all for letting people believe what they want but I am lost on why one would deliberately praise any authoritarian system this hard.

Can someone please help me understand why this is such a large and prominent community? How have these ideals garnered such a following outside of China?

      • TankieTanuki [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        141·
        11 hours ago

        They answered your question with an implied “yes” and provided relevant additional context by saying that so are all the other states. Their answer would only count as avoiding the question if you had asked something like “Is X more authoritarian than Y?” instead.

      • Jabril [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
        312·
        15 hours ago

        It isn’t a stretch, have you studied any leftist theory at all?

        The idea that a state is inherently “authoritarian” is an introductory level concept.

        The key difference between “tankies” and anarchists is that the former understands you need to change the economic substructure before you can change the super structure and the latter generally thinks what is essentially the opposite.

        • Kami@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          1·
          2 hours ago

          The keyword here is “theory”.

          Adopting one theory as your one and only point of view, like a religion, is nonsensical.

          I refrain from being dragged in such limited perspectives on reality, from politics to science. It’s always better to doubt of everything, especially about what people believe blindly.

        • Alaskaball [comrade/them, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
          30·
          15 hours ago

          Let us begin with the most popular of Engels’ works, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, the sixth edition of which was published in Stuttgart as far back as 1894. We have to translate the quotations from the German originals, as the Russian translations, while very numerous, are for the most part either incomplete or very unsatisfactory.

          Summing up his historical analysis, Engels says:

          “The state is, therefore, by no means a power forced on society from without; just as little is it ’the reality of the ethical idea’, ’the image and reality of reason’, as Hegel maintains. Rather, it is a product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has split into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel. But in order that these antagonisms, these classes with conflicting economic interests, might not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, it became necessary to have a power, seemingly standing above society, that would alleviate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of ’order’; and this power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it, and alienating itself more and more from it, is the state.” (Pp.177-78, sixth edition)[1]

          This expresses with perfect clarity the basic idea of Marxism with regard to the historical role and the meaning of the state. The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises where, when and insofar as class antagonism objectively cannot be reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable.

          It is on this most important and fundamental point that the distortion of Marxism, proceeding along two main lines, begins.

          On the one hand, the bourgeois, and particularly the petty-bourgeois, ideologists, compelled under the weight of indisputable historical facts to admit that the state only exists where there are class antagonisms and a class struggle, “correct” Marx in such a way as to make it appear that the state is an organ for the reconciliation of classes. According to Marx, the state could neither have arisen nor maintained itself had it been possible to reconcile classes. From what the petty-bourgeois and philistine professors and publicists say, with quite frequent and benevolent references to Marx, it appears that the state does reconcile classes. According to Marx, the state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it is the creation of “order”, which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the conflict between classes. In the opinion of the petty-bourgeois politicians, however, order means the reconciliation of classes, and not the oppression of one class by another; to alleviate the conflict means reconciling classes and not depriving the oppressed classes of definite means and methods of struggle to overthrow the oppressors.

          Lenin, state and revolution