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 :)
Serious contemporary historians, not airport bookstore historians, do agree with much of what we say, because after the fall of the USSR, they got access to troves of Soviet government documents spanning decades, which dispelled much Western Cold War propaganda.
Yes, mostly agree is not a difficult bar to pass when the US was lying about 99% of what they say. Of course almost everything the US said was a lie and historians agree with tankies on most of what actually happened. I can say “The US lied. Communism benefits the average person. These countries were handicapped by the US. China is not committing human rights abuses.” A historian would agree with 3/4 of those, but that doesn’t make what they said reasonable. This is why every argument feels like bad faith, because saying they agree with most of what tankies say implies the other claims must have credence as well.