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?

  • starelfsc2@sh.itjust.works
    12·
    9 hours ago

    I do not know better than the united nations or several peer reviewed journals. The journal also has references to dozens of historians. It is possible some small group on the internet know more than they do, and are interpreting it better than people who do it as a job, I just find that unlikely. The UN believes it is a persecution if not a genocide. I am a layman on this topic and will defer to experts, because I know there is a lot of astroturfing and I have previously seen arguments that seemed flawless but were missing key details that an expert showed why they were flawed.

    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-xinjiang-rights/muslim-minority-in-chinas-xinjiang-face-political-indoctrination-human-rights-watch-idUSKCN1LQ01F/

    https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14623528.2020.1848109

      • starelfsc2@sh.itjust.works
        12·
        8 hours ago

        The sources used in your link are sourcing Chinese tabloid Global times. I am fully convinced it’s astroturfing at this point.

        • mathemachristian [he/him]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          1·
          43 minutes ago

          A reuters article about some UN article. Not even the UN article itself.
          And a journal article citing Zenz multiple times, Plus other citations that are however themselves based on zenz. it looks like zenz all the way down.

          vs

          a whole historical rundown replete with sources

          Yours is essentially an appeal to authority, davel obviously went through the trouble of researching the entire history behind the conflict.

          Your rebuttal? “Wow you must be a paid troll actor”

          And that’s how I became a tankie 😄

          Thanks for the live demo

        • davel [he/him]@lemmy.mlEnglish
          51·
          8 hours ago

          Wow, one of the twenty-odd links isn’t from a Western source? Must be a foreign secret agent!

          Deeply unserious.