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?

  • ristoril_zip@lemmy.zipEnglish
    118·
    15 hours ago

    I’d wager half or more of the tankie posts are bots, paid posters in 3rd world countries, or slave labor in 3rd world countries. The rest are a combo of incest, edge lords, nihilistic, and some vanishingly small number of actual true believers in the power of Fascist accelerated forced Communism.

    Marx and his allies believed Communism can’t come about by force, only by natural progression following the unavoidable natural collapse of capitalism. Our experience seems to demonstrate that attempting to force any of it only ever sets the process back.

    • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
      31·
      7 hours ago

      Ignoring the conspiracy theory about communists being paid to be communists (I wish, instead I pay dues to my org), this in particular is false:

      Marx and his allies believed Communism can’t come about by force, only by natural progression following the unavoidable natural collapse of capitalism.

      Marx was revolutionary. The fundamental transformation from a society where private ownetship is principle and capitalists in charge of the state into one where public ownership is principle and the working class in charge of the state requires revolution. The idea that capitalism paves the way for socialism by centralizing and increasing the number of proletarians as compared to capitalists and entering worse and worse crisis doesn’t mean that you can only have a revolution in a developed capitalist country, or that we simply wait on our hands for capitalism to collapse and pray socialism takes its place.

    • FunkyStuff [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      10·
      15 hours ago

      Marx and his allies believed Communism can’t come about by force

      Any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.

      • davel@lemmy.mlEnglish
        12·
        14 hours ago

        There’s an endless supply of confidently incorrect Redditors who can’t help but libsplain things they know nothing about.

    • davel@lemmy.mlEnglish
      134·
      15 hours ago

      I’d wager half or more of the tankie posts are bots, paid posters in 3rd world countries, or slave labor in 3rd world countries.

      And yet no Lemmy admin will take your wager, because they have access to way more information than you do, and they don’t see evidence to support it.

      Marx and his allies believed Communism can’t come about by force, only by natural progression following the unavoidable natural collapse of capitalism.

      Anyone who’s done even a Marxism 101 amount of reading knows this to be false. Neither Marx, Engels, Lenin, or any other major figures said that nature will just inevitably take its course all on its own. All of them were revolutionaries who advocated for influencing its course, not standing idly by.

      The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it. — Marx