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?


Is this a parody?
No. The great majority of MLs on Lemmy were born, raised, and still live in the imperial core, just like most other people on Lemmy. We got the same education, indoctrination, and propaganda as everyone else, so most of us started out as liberals with largely the same beliefs as everyone else. We believed all the same Cold War propaganda as everyone else. Investigating and peeling away the layers of propaganda and lies is actually a long, slow, and not particularly pleasant, effort.
Speak for yourself, peeling off cold war propaganda is an incredibly liberating process for me. It actually gives me hope that revolution is possible and that not only things can potentially be done, but have already successfully been done.
At the time I was a lib even if I didn’t identify as such