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 :)
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.
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
Many people have objected to my point.
But you’re all saying Marx said violence would occur at times as part of the transition from pre-Communism to Communism. I agree.
What I said is that Marx and his allies didn’t believe that it was possible to FORCE Communism into place - especially from a place of contented “capitalism” (not that anyone in Earth is actually doing capitalism either) - by violence.
And we’ve seen it everywhere every time people claiming to be Marxist and claiming they want to establish a Communist society who pick up arms and start murdering their way through the proletariat on their way to the bourgeoisie to hopefully get to the owners.
The end state is not a stateless classless moneyless etc. society. It’s a bunch of traumatized workers & middle class subject to a new group of owners surrounded by toadies ready to have their breaks wet.
BECAUSE the circumstances for the violent worker uprising against the owners (and maybe their bourgie servants) MUST come around naturally. Those circumstances are a natural outcome of capitalism run amok. They cannot be forced to occur, certainly not by violence.
Actually when Marx said “We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall make no excuses for the terror” he was talking about a rap battle.
😂