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?
Some people just have a Right Wing mindset. They’re drawn to concepts like loyalty & obedience to authority and gravitate to political doctrines that stress those values. If Communism makes economic sense to you but you’re politically uncomfortable with shallow/non-existent hierarchies or don’t feel that everyday people can be trusted with political power you gravitate towards being a ML. If you’re willing to force those views on others by threat of state violence you’re now a Tankie.
But anarchists are definitely also in favour of forcing their views on others by a threat of violence? Like, I’m a Spaniard, the anarchists famously resisted fascism in the Spanish Civil War using weapons. Projects often praised by anarchists such as the Rojava or Zapatistas also have plenty of violent power in their region, and exert it when needed to defend their project and ideology.
I don’t like your framing of “right wing essentialism” in Marxists, it sounds almost eugenicist the way you’re describing it, as “people predisposed to authoritarianism”. I’m a tankie not because I love state violence, but because the only large societies that have managed to actually collectivize the lands and resist western imperialism have been Marxist-Leninist. Failure to utilize such state repression mechanisms against fascists and capitalists is what led to the fascist coup in Spain, to the failure of the German revolution, or to the murder of Allende.
Right? We get to this place only after having exhausted all other options, not for bloodlust or a “will to power” or whatever-the-fuck horseshoe theory straw men people make up in their heads. The Paris Commune and other methods have all failed, and to this day no other method has been successful.
I agree with that “right wing” and “authoritarian” are two different things, but lots of people, including tankies are absolutely “predisposed to authoritarianism”. It has nothing to do with eugenics though, because the genetics behind it are universal to humanity. It’s all about how people are brought up, the social influences they encounter, and level of education.
I don’t think many non-tankies, or even anti-tankies, would disagree with this statement. However, it does seem to be a frying pan to fire situation. It’s no good escaping the grasp of “the west” if the cure is worse than the disease, and that’s almost always the case.
The Soviets are gone and modern Russia is little more than a Mafia state. China is ascendent, but it’s also growing more capitalist by the hour, and even with the current US administration, we still have more freedoms in America than in China. Whether that remains true is yet to be seen, but if America falls to authoritarianism and joins Russia as a second Mafia state, we know we can count on tankies to cheer it on, oblivious to how much worse that will be for pretty much all of humanity.
This form of sloganeering sounds nice on paper, but isn’t actually what happened. If we look at various movements led by Marxist-Leninists, we can see the following general rule:
Russia turned from a brutal Tsarist semi-feudal backwater into a socialist state.
China turned from a colonized agrarian country into a socialist state.
Cuba turned from a fascist slave colony into a socialist state.
Vietnam turned from a colonized agrarian country into a socialist state.
And many, many more examples. In many of these examples, life expectancy increased by 50-100%, the economies were democratized, literacy rates skyrocketed, land reform dramatically reduced risk of famine, and more. The idea that the working classes have it worse in socialism than what came before is fundamentally absurd.
The US Empire is far more brutal to the working classes than China could ever hope to be, especially at an international scale. China isn’t “becoming more capitalist,” it’s gradually developing to greater degrees of socialization and is already a socialist state. What Marxists are cheering on is the end of the US Empire’s hegemony, its negative impact on the world is declining due to this downfall.
Actually I think that if Amerikkka became a pile of rubble tomorrow it wouldn’t be worse for pretty much all of humanity. I think the opposite is true.
If you think the US goes away when the authoritarians take over, you are delusional. We’ll just be an overt empire instead of a (ostensibly) covert one.
I’m well aware of the concentration camps, and I’m also aware that China also has concentration camps and that Chinese media can’t talk about it - including social media. I’m also aware that you’re going to tell me that’s just Western propaganda and that China is just sending Uyghurs to amusement parks in Xinjiang or some other nonsense. The US has bullshit explanations for our concentration camps too. They are just processing centers, or the people held there are terrorists and drug smugglers. I accept Chinas bullshit just as much as you accept Trump’s.
Millions of Americans are resisting our camps, and they likely won’t survive 2026. Trump’s project of consolidating power is failing, in spite of the assistance he gets from Russia. Our prison system should really be what you use as a distraction, because that’s going to be a lot harder to reform, though in many blue states there has been a lot of progress.
The US is authoritarian, your statement seems to imply that it isn’t. it’s a dictatorship of capital, as someone living in the US, your humanity is largely contingent on your ability to pay rent. Those who are unable to will end up unhoused, the targets of state violence, disenfranchised, and increasingly likely to end up in the worlds largest prison system.
The world is authoritarian, including China. The US under Trump and his cronies is more authoritarian than before to an extreme degree, and you guys think that’s great. So, no whining about authoritarianism from you please.
I don’t, and I don’t think anyone else commenting here does. just another unfounded assertion
I think that the US was authoritarian before Trump, and it will continue to be after him unless the political economy fundamentally changes.
I don’t think America’s concentration camps will go away in 2026. They didn’t go away after Trump lost in 2020.
Can you show evidence that China has concentration camps?
Can I show evidence that you won’t hand wave away as “propaganda”? No. I know already that no evidence counter to the courts predetermined conclusion will be admissable.
Do you think your psychological analysis holds up against the people in this thread who are describing why they ended up believing what they believe?
Yes because tankies are wicked, tricksy and false.