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 :)
No it’s not. I would also consider myself an ideological Marxist, but I am no tankie.
A tankie is someone who claims to value leftist ends of any kind (including Marxism-Leninism) but supports or defends authoritarianism, classism, stratification, or any of the inequitable historical socio-economic paradigms. Vanguardism is not meant to be perpetual, it is a means borne of desperation with the aim of a fundamentally opposite ends. It is not the ends itself, as it is a form of extreme rightism, but one specifically meant to be transient.
This doesn’t actually apply to the vast majority it’s applied to, though. Functionally, it’s a strawman with the characteristics you’ve described, applied to shut down conversation from those supporting socialist states.
This is a misframing of vanguardism. Vanguardism is transient, but it’s by no means extreme rightism. All it means is that the most politically advanced of the revolutionary class should formally organize and prepare for revolution, a concept Marx himself participated in.