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?
but there is no “assumption” I am operating under. My default position for any institution is distrust. People as individuals I empathise. People as groups I don’t trust.
I have no illusions that others are doing alright. On the contrary. I think “doing alright” is an insidious way of sweeping your dead bodies under the proverbial rug for the sake of “the greater good”. Easiest way to lose your humanity.
No amount of greater good can justify doing evil.
Factual analysis is a myth. People draw their own conclusions as they see fit, let alone assuming there is no bias or error in the data. Introspection, admitting to failure, looking out for one another are the missing gems to find nowadays.
This is just your own personal justification for not doing any investigation, yet feeling comfortable with repeating claims a group we already have established lies about their enemies. We aren’t talking about any sort of moralism here, but analyzing concrete reality and continuously engaging with it to further and deepen our knowledge of it.
There’s absolutely nothing insidious about me saying that the enemies of the US Empire are not the evil empires the US alleges them to be. To the contrary, my goal is to understand the world so as to change it for the better. Conjuring up ideas of dead bodies where they either do not exist or exist in far smaller quantities than portrayed by geopolitical enemies does a service to the far greater evil in legitimizing their demonization, furthering their goals.
the gaslighting continues.
You seem smug about your own “well learnedness” but fail to think about the claim
But I am not the US am I. And I am not arguing this. I am saying atrocities are conveniently dusted off saying “there is no evidence” while also asking people to waste their time to provide said evidence only for you to dismiss it as hearsay.
you’re unwilling to admit the skeletons in your own closet for which evidence exists.
which is it? as a neutral observer you’re just playing the same goalshifting and fingerpointing as western imperialist apologists. Don’t pretend you’re any different.