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 :)
Sure, so we can say the people OP is referring to in their post do not actually share the views described by the comment I replied to, if that makes you feel better. The people that get the word “tankie” thrown at them that actually meet that comment’s description are extremely few in number, perhaps a dozen on the entirety of Lemmy.
Personally, I think you’re making an unconvincing argument.
In what way?
Because even if the statement was hyperbole when referring to the majority of the tankie population, it still rings true for some of them- an inconvenient truth that you outright denied initially and were forced to backpedal on/reframe.
Most rational people are going to see this, see someone obviously using hyperbole, see someone obfuscating reality to serve their purposes, and dismiss you outright.
Beyond that, while it IS hyperbole to say tankies as a monolith believe in executing political dissidents, it is NOT hyperbole to say tankies as a monolith continue to support several states which DO believe in executing political dissidents.
I wouldn’t color myself an anarchist necessarily, but I do find myself increasingly believing that anarchists are, for the most part, some of the only internally consistent ideologues. Fuck all states seems to be the only reasonable position when all existing states fucking suck.
Marxists and anarchists support using violence against fascists, capitalists, landlords, slavers, etc. The major difference is that Marxists acknowledge the utility of the state for doing so, while anarchists go for more horizontalist structures (even if they also end up forming states and semi-states, like the Spanish anarchists did). The idea that either of us want to wholesale slaughter everyone that disagrees with us is just fantasy, though.
What purpose did this comment serve? You just refused to acknowledge the observational truth in my comment and steam rolled past it with a claim that wasn’t disputed or relevent to the conversation, and then ended it with a strawman.
Edit: as long as you continue to utilize deceitful rhetoric while talking to me, I will continue to call it out, and everyone outside of the echo chamber will acknowledge your delusional behavior. Refusing to acknowledge reality is not a persuasive argument.
What observational truth? The people in the OP aren’t as the user described. The number of people that meet the definition given is close to nil on the Fediverse, yet people get called a tankie all the time.
“Tankie” is just a pejorative for those who uphold existing socialist states as legitimate, which covers the large majority of Marxists and a decent number of anarchists. The people in the OP are “tankies” by the definition I gave, it’s consistent and clear. They uphold existing socialist states as legitimate, and this is the norm among Marxists.
Call out whatever you like, it’s going to backfire, because what I’m saying is more in line with reality. Unless your point is that Marxism itself is extremist and therefore “tankie,” calling the norm position among Marxists extremist isn’t particularly useful.