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
    41·
    9 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.