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 :)

      • Amnesigenic@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        18 hours ago

        “People who have similar political ideas say similar things to me and I think that’s problem” lol

        • masquenox@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          arrow-down
          5
          ·
          24 hours ago

          Well, this is just a wild guess… but perhaps it’s got something to do with the fact that I haven’t encountered one of you in the last decade that doesn’t sound just like every other tankie?

          • Amnesigenic@lemmy.ml
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            18 hours ago

            That’s called ideological consistency, the fact that a bunch of people who ostensibly agree on politics and society say similar things is in fact normal, if your cohort doesn’t do that it’s a fairly strong indication that you’re all fucking clueless

          • FunkyStuff [he/him]@hexbear.net
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            7
            ·
            23 hours ago

            But you didn’t read the responses, so are you just skimming through them and responding based on vibes? It seems wrong to land at any concrete conclusions based on that level of investigation.

            • masquenox@lemmy.dbzer0.com
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              arrow-down
              5
              ·
              22 hours ago

              It seems wrong to land at any concrete conclusions

              Any and all conclusions regarding tankie ideology’s political emptiness has already “landed.”

              • FunkyStuff [he/him]@hexbear.net
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                7
                ·
                22 hours ago

                A few comments before in this thread you criticized “tankies” for being creepos that speak using animated gifs once they’ve run out of arguments. Do you think that responding to someone asking you why you never read the stuff you reply to with crude generalizations to justify never reading is better than a gif reaction?