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?
Yeah thus should be the main crux of things. There haven’t been real conflicts between anarchists and ML organizations outside of internet posting for decades now. The closest thing I can thing is during the Burkina-Faso revolution, some of the trade unions that called themselves anarcho-syndicalists were also allying themselves with the French government.
There’s just no real conflict otherwise. I’ve done organizations in both anarchist and ML orgs and it’s 99% identical. Maybe ML groups are more willing to endorse someone in an electoral race, maybe an anarchist group will be more willing to do something like petty theft from a grocery store or squatting. That’s been the only real difference I’ve noticed in tactics is that an ML group will usually try to stay above board and anarchist groups will commit crimes if necessary.
Otherwise there was never any real conflict. The people who comprised these movements came from largely identical political interests.