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?

  • agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works
    75·
    11 hours ago

    Uh, I don’t think you understood their point. Tankies aren’t communists, they’re authoritarians with a red paint job. We’re not talking about nuanced Marxist thinkers, we’re taking about people who think “Just line everyone who doesn’t accept my exact interpretation of communism up against the wall” is rational praxis.

    There are plenty of ways to rationally arrive at Communism, but really the only way to get to Tankie is, as the top comment says, rejecting Western propaganda in favor of the propaganda of so-called “communists”.

      • agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works
        31·
        2 hours ago

        Unfortunately not, I have had conversations with them. And I know your next line is going to be "But they’re just trolling, no one really thinks that, and I call horseshit. That “trolling”, when do religiously adhered to, inspires weak-willed onlookers into sincere belief.

        • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
          1·
          11 minutes ago

          Unfortunately not, I have had conversations with them.

          Any examples? As it stands, you’re not beating the “I use a strawman as a club to terminate discussions” allegations.

        • FlyingCircus@lemmy.world
          2·
          1 hour ago

          No, I don’t think they’re trolling. I think that you mistake any comment that is vaguely supportive of China or Russia or that contradicts the mainstream western narrative about those countries as wholesale support for anything those countries do.

    • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
      33·
      3 hours ago

      Uh, I don’t think you understood their point. Tankies aren’t communists, they’re authoritarians with a red paint job. We’re not talking about nuanced Marxist thinkers, we’re taking about people who think “Just line everyone who doesn’t accept my exact interpretation of communism up against the wall” is rational praxis.

      These people don’t exist, so effectively the purpose for maintaining this as your definition is to use it as a discussion-terminating club against those that uphold socialism as it exists in real life, tacking on the sins of this strawman like a scarlet letter A.