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 :)
You saw him get run over?
I don’t think I’ve ever seen that footage
:)
feel free to elaborate, otherwise I think this is a Mandela effect
No, you’re right. I’ll admit my memories may be propaganda.
But come on homie, you can’t be fans of xi & Putin.
I am not fans of either of them, nor am I fan of any other world leader.
That doesn’t mean I’m going uncritically accept every propaganda narrative that the country I live in pumps out about its state enemies.
Well said.
For what specific reason do you think it’s laughable to be a fan of Xi Jinping? I mean, I don’t think it’s useful to view major world leaders in a simplistic lens like that, but for your average Joe that doesn’t have time to develop a very complex understanding of geopolitics, is it really so foolish to identify Xi Jinping as being generally good?
Like if you look back 2000 years at some historical figures like the Gracchi brothers in the Roman Republic. They’re complicated and there’s a lot of discourse about them, if they were altruistic or if they were opportunists, their personal participation in slavery, patriarchy, all the bad stuff. But the broad strokes is that they were popular reformers who did some things that were massively beneficial to the Roman workers. Would you look at a high school or undergrad student that looked at the Gracchi and said they’re a fan like they’re crazy?