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?
Some people just have a Right Wing mindset. They’re drawn to concepts like loyalty & obedience to authority and gravitate to political doctrines that stress those values. If Communism makes economic sense to you but you’re politically uncomfortable with shallow/non-existent hierarchies or don’t feel that everyday people can be trusted with political power you gravitate towards being a ML. If you’re willing to force those views on others by threat of state violence you’re now a Tankie.
But anarchists are definitely also in favour of forcing their views on others by a threat of violence? Like, I’m a Spaniard, the anarchists famously resisted fascism in the Spanish Civil War using weapons. Projects often praised by anarchists such as the Rojava or Zapatistas also have plenty of violent power in their region, and exert it when needed to defend their project and ideology.
I don’t like your framing of “right wing essentialism” in Marxists, it sounds almost eugenicist the way you’re describing it, as “people predisposed to authoritarianism”. I’m a tankie not because I love state violence, but because the only large societies that have managed to actually collectivize the lands and resist western imperialism have been Marxist-Leninist. Failure to utilize such state repression mechanisms against fascists and capitalists is what led to the fascist coup in Spain, to the failure of the German revolution, or to the murder of Allende.
I agree with that “right wing” and “authoritarian” are two different things, but lots of people, including tankies are absolutely “predisposed to authoritarianism”. It has nothing to do with eugenics though, because the genetics behind it are universal to humanity. It’s all about how people are brought up, the social influences they encounter, and level of education.
I don’t think many non-tankies, or even anti-tankies, would disagree with this statement. However, it does seem to be a frying pan to fire situation. 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.
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.
Right? We get to this place only after having exhausted all other options, not for bloodlust or a “will to power” or whatever-the-fuck horseshoe theory straw men people make up in their heads. The Paris Commune and other methods have all failed, and to this day no other method has been successful.