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 :)
Which is naturally a disgusting phenomenon to see queer people support oppression of people like them. But I guess needing to fit in is indeed a strong counter to cognitive dissonance.
Is queer support for Palestinian liberation “a disgusting phenomenon” as well, due to socially reactionary views from Hamas? Nobody supports China’s lacking queer rights, but instead the fact that they are continuously improving, both in general and with respect to queer rights. The major obstacle in China with respect to queer rights are the social conservativism of older generations, it isn’t a fixed, static aspect of China but a phenomenon caused by the new society still needing to overcome lingering elements of the old. It’s the same for Palestine, social progress is something that unfolds over time and is expedited by progressive movements, such as national liberation from genocidal settler colonialism.
Funny how you run interference for bigots like that.
I’m not? Like I said, I support the LGBTQIA+ movements in China and Palestine. What I don’t support is looking at social progression like it’s a static, unmoving phenomenon intrinsic to Palestinians or Chinese people, or socialism. Try listening to what queer Palestinians and Chinese citizens are saying. They certainly aren’t saying “I support the IDF over Hamas” or “overthrow the CPC!” Using Cuba as an example, they went from socially reactionary positions to passing one of the world’s most progressive family codes precisely because of the emancipatory nature of Marxism-Leninism.
Or, maybe, you’re the propagandized person programmed to look for reasons to hate China?
Yes, I should just disregard LGBT oppression from my camp like a good campist
But it isn’t being disregarded. I think China should change a lot of things, LGBTQ rights included. If they did reforms like Cuba tomorrow it’d be a positive thing, for sure. But then there’s still the issues of education, animal agriculture, corruption, liberalism growing in the CPC, among other things.
It just becomes really useless to have a discussion about politics when you adopt this “let’s find the good guys and the bad guys” mindset, which I think ironically you might say is the essence of ‘campism.’ You’re acting like the reason we like China is we think they’re ontologically good and everything they do must be for a good reason, when that’s just not true and an absolutely infantile way to see the world.