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 :)
I hate this trend of using scary foreign words to refer to prisons in socialist countries. Soviets didn’t have prisons, they had gulags. Chinese didn’t have prisons, they had laogai.
I am yet to encounter this applied to fascists, Franco putting political prisoners in cárceles. I guess it’s a tool reserved only for left-punching.
Weren’t most of the executions during Maoism carried out by decentralized grassroots councils of peasants and workers? Isn’t this the wet dream of any anarchist?