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 :)
For the same reason people fall into fascism. Capitalism is putting the screws to people. Rent is too high, food is too expensive, people are on a treadmill, and dissatisfaction hangs in the air like miasma. People are mad, and they don’t know at what. They sense something is rotten, they dont have the words. Fascism co-opts leftist talking points, but pulls a bait and switch with the Jews and migrants and whoever.
Tankies also start from this choking miasma, you look at Tankie propaganda, its compelling. The US commited genocide and war crimes, and is more racist than you know. Capitalists are terrible, yadda yadda you know it. Tankie propaganda also frames politics as a team sport. When you look at the US (or you can look at it as the “Nato Empire,” which can be an interesting way to think about it), as the ultimate evil, can be easy to see anyone opposing them as good or worth supporting.
Agreed. But I think “liberalism” is the underlying problem. Fascism is its extreme.
possibly? Being a liberal is the default where I live. Its generally considered the opposite of “conservative.” I give liberals (in the US politics sense) a bit more grace than most leftists. It is as far left as most people consider “allowable” in the US. They don’t hold very many abhorrent social opinions; they are quite supportive of queer rights, they volunteer at soup kitchens with me, oppose nazis, are environmentally conscious, etc.
Their main issue is that they have never been taught to view the world differently. So they talk about environmentalism, and they get behind bike lanes and electric cars, but they cannot conceive of restructuring cities to make use of more public transportation, or say blowing up fossil fuel infrastructure in minecraft. They want to help the homeless, but they can’t imagine just housing people, they support shelters and clothing drives and the salvation army, and other stop gaps within the system. I’ve long since resigned myself to the fact that people who think what I think are rare, and even various other stripes of leftists (anarchists, syndicalists, MLs, etc) are all gonna be a vanishingly tiny minority. I don’t think most liberals are so far gone we can’t reach them.
(Unless you meant like, neo liberalism, with like Thatcherist and Reaganite austerity, in which case yeah, basically fascism).