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 :)
This is disproven as of 2025, though, to the best of my knowledge. This misinfo comes directly from Khruschyov’s secret speech, but with the opening of the Soviet Archives the official agenda of Stalin has been found, and he wasn’t enclosed getting drunk for days as Khruschyov said but actually had hours-long meetings the following day to the invasion. Or maybe you mean something else?
Yeah, someone informed me here.
I didn’t know much about it, but the story I remember reading was something like “the Nazis are invading” and Stalin’s attitude was “shut up that’s impossible; it’s too soon”.
I’m honestly not too surprised that it’s false because it didn’t make much sense. Everyone knew it was inevitable.