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?

EDIT: Thank you to everyone who has responded! This thread has been very insightful :)

  • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
    8·
    18 hours ago

    Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t. Anarchists largely joined the red army and the bolsheviks, with a minority joining the whites or forming their own cells. There wasn’t a blanket “kill anarchists for thought crime” order, nor did the soviets sit back when groups like Makhnovschina started their banditry against soviet villages and camps.