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 :)
Uh, I don’t think you understood their point. Tankies aren’t communists, they’re authoritarians with a red paint job. We’re not talking about nuanced Marxist thinkers, we’re taking about people who think “Just line everyone who doesn’t accept my exact interpretation of communism up against the wall” is rational praxis.
There are plenty of ways to rationally arrive at Communism, but really the only way to get to Tankie is, as the top comment says, rejecting Western propaganda in favor of the propaganda of so-called “communists”.
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Those people don’t exist. You’re making things up.
Unfortunately not, I have had conversations with them. And I know your next line is going to be “But they’re just trolling, no one really thinks that”, and I call horseshit. That “trolling”, when so religiously adhered to, inspires weak-willed onlookers into sincere belief.
Any examples? As it stands, you’re not beating the “I use a strawman as a club to terminate discussions” allegations.
This is just intellectual dishonesty. We both know that every side has its extremists, and to deny their existence simply makes you look like a liar.
Sure, so we can say the people OP is referring to in their post do not actually share the views described by the comment I replied to, if that makes you feel better. The people that get the word “tankie” thrown at them that actually meet that comment’s description are extremely few in number, perhaps a dozen on the entirety of Lemmy.
Personally, I think you’re making an unconvincing argument.
In what way?
Because even if the statement was hyperbole when referring to the majority of the tankie population, it still rings true for some of them- an inconvenient truth that you outright denied initially and were forced to backpedal on/reframe.
Most rational people are going to see this, see someone obviously using hyperbole, see someone obfuscating reality to serve their purposes, and dismiss you outright.
Beyond that, while it IS hyperbole to say tankies as a monolith believe in executing political dissidents, it is NOT hyperbole to say tankies as a monolith continue to support several states which DO believe in executing political dissidents.
I wouldn’t color myself an anarchist necessarily, but I do find myself increasingly believing that anarchists are, for the most part, some of the only internally consistent ideologues. Fuck all states seems to be the only reasonable position when all existing states fucking suck.
No, I don’t think they’re trolling. I think that you mistake any comment that is vaguely supportive of China or Russia or that contradicts the mainstream western narrative about those countries as wholesale support for anything those countries do.
You would be incorrect, I do no such thing. I’m speaking about a specific phenomenon, as I described.
Can you link to an example? Because I haven’t encountered such a person yet in my 6 months on Lemmy (admittedly not a long time).
I have deliberately avoided interacting with people like that for a while, and I don’t really feel like digging back like a year to find a specific examples, especially since you came out of the gate unshakably convinced that it never ever happens.
But I assure you they exist. No I’m not generalizing pro- Russia/China sentiment. I’m talking about people who advocate the forceful spread of their ideology through violence.
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‘i assure you my straw man exists’
“Every anecdote that challenges my biases is a lie”.
Bad faith bullshit
These people don’t exist, so effectively the purpose for maintaining this as your definition is to use it as a discussion-terminating club against those that uphold socialism as it exists in real life, tacking on the sins of this strawman like a scarlet letter A.