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?
I support your quest for nuance.
Mao was critical of his own policies which exacerbated the famine during the Great Leap Forward.
My understanding is that the executions were a form of justice doled out by the peasants (not Mao himself) against their former landlords and oppressors. As Mao said, “a revolution is not a dinner party”; it’s a class war. Violence is part of it. Given the scale, it’s plausible to me that some of the killings could have been unjust, but I would need to learn of the specifics in such cases before arriving at that condemnation.