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 :)
Principally, I would say that I’m more convinced by the argument that a state is necessary to engage in class warfare, and that therefore a proletarian state is a necessary precondition to the creation of socialism, than I am by the idea that the abolition of the state outright is capable of accomplishing anything besides creating a power vacuum.
Historically, anarchist and communist movements look very similar when they actually get their hands on power, because the reality of doing things at scale in an industrialized society overrides whatever perfect theory the revolutionaries had in their minds when they started.
Yeah they look similar to outsiders, but it is my view that they aren’t internally similar, and that we can absolutely find fundamental differences in the outcomes of marxist and anarchist projects.
Can you elaborate on the outcomes of anarchist projects?