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?
I just want to point out that there was a time a little over a century ago when anarchists were Public Enemy #1, and there was a huge propaganda campaign to make anarchists look like murderous uncultured savages. Vestiges of this portrayal still remain in the cultures of core capitalist nations.
Of course, this couldn’t be further from the truth. That shows you how powerful the propaganda is and how important it is to analyze the power dynamics you find yourself in the middle of and correct your worldview around who’s been deceiving you and how.
A valuable heuristic is to look at specific policies (especially foreign policy) in the present day, and note the times when your stance is on the same side as the neoliberal establishment.