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 :)

  • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
    71·
    11 hours ago

    It’s no good escaping the grasp of “the west” if the cure is worse than the disease, and that’s almost always the case.

    This form of sloganeering sounds nice on paper, but isn’t actually what happened. If we look at various movements led by Marxist-Leninists, we can see the following general rule:

    1. Russia turned from a brutal Tsarist semi-feudal backwater into a socialist state.

    2. China turned from a colonized agrarian country into a socialist state.

    3. Cuba turned from a fascist slave colony into a socialist state.

    4. Vietnam turned from a colonized agrarian country into a socialist state.

    And many, many more examples. In many of these examples, life expectancy increased by 50-100%, the economies were democratized, literacy rates skyrocketed, land reform dramatically reduced risk of famine, and more. The idea that the working classes have it worse in socialism than what came before is fundamentally absurd.

    The Soviets are gone and modern Russia is little more than a Mafia state. China is ascendent, but it’s also growing more capitalist by the hour, and even with the current US administration, we still have more freedoms in America than in China. Whether that remains true is yet to be seen, but if America falls to authoritarianism and joins Russia as a second Mafia state, we know we can count on tankies to cheer it on, oblivious to how much worse that will be for pretty much all of humanity.

    The US Empire is far more brutal to the working classes than China could ever hope to be, especially at an international scale. China isn’t “becoming more capitalist,” it’s gradually developing to greater degrees of socialization and is already a socialist state. What Marxists are cheering on is the end of the US Empire’s hegemony, its negative impact on the world is declining due to this downfall.