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 :)
That’s a very long and convoluted way of saying “tankies treat communist theory as dogma”. As a tankie: I didn’t become a tankie by reading theory, I became a tankie by reading demonstrable facts.
I don’t support the Soviet Union because “it followed Marx and Lenin”, I support the Soviet Union because it provided universal healthcare, free education to the highest level, it abolished unemployment, it guaranteed housing and abolished homelessness, it created the lowest levels of economic inequality seen in the history of the region, it defeated Nazism and saved tens of millions from extermination, it almost tripled life expectancy and saved tens of millions from abject poverty, hunger and disease, and it gave support to emancipatory anticolonial projects everywhere in the globe. Running the numbers is not “atrocity minimization” as you claim, it’s pragmatic experimentalism.
For me, it’s actually backwards: it just so happens that the projects that in my view have achieved the most liberating and emancipatory goals in history were following Marxist doctrine, which for the unfamiliar, is explicitly materialist and experimental in nature.
It’s been fun to watch the tankies dribble in and do exactly what they are accused of. Thanks for going along with it and making everyone here’s point for them.
Your original comment (translated to understandable English from your pompous-ass style): “tankies treat theory as dogma, disregard empirical evidence and data as propaganda, and mold their worldview as a contest to see who’s more anti-western”.
My reply: “me being a tankie is actually the result of data comparisons between capitalist and AES states for the measurable empirical improvements in quality of life and the reduction in victims, together with the support for emancipatory projects elsewhere”
Your reply: “tHaNkS foR pRoViNg My PoInT”
Imagine unironically typing like that, lmfao
CS undergrad I bet, they all talked like that when I had to share lectures with them. It’s just funny that this particular specimen is waxing on about data and evidence based thinking and not just doesn’t present any but actively ignores it since it’s in this very thread 🤣
do you often make a habit of mocking people for how they talk or communicate? Not very proletariat of you, elitist scum.
Surely the proletarian way of writing is overly pompous using obscure latinisms?
And no, I don’t make a habit of mocking people for how they type, my original response was detailed and serious, but when the commenter above decided to become a smug shit, I lost any reason to respect them.
I mean, yes, actually, the pseudo-intellectualism that people like me demonstrate, (which maybe includes a pompous vocabulary to you “actually educated” folk), is the proletarian way of writing. Surely you’re not implying that someone privileged enough to get a college education AND spend their time online demeaning people is the proletarian speaker in this conversation?
You lost any reason to respect them? Crazy low barrier. You sure are a person of the people.
See, I’m guilty of that kinda stuff, too. And I’m annoying and preachy like you, too.
Damn dude, just stop replying. You are so bad at posting.
Disengage
What do you think a tankie is?
It used to mean a communist who supported the USSR’s decision to send in tanks to Hungary to protect the revolution from reactionary forces, but now it’s just a thought-terminating straw man for the modern red scare.
lol comparing being a genuine communist during the red scare to your plight of being trolled on the internet by actual working class people is so out of touch.
What part is out of touch?
A red scare is manifestly happening - see Maduro being kidnapped this morning. Trump constantly talks about jailing and deporting socialists. And online, the term tankie is being used as a way to discredit and slander all communists. People are very serious about their tankie hate here.
And it’s 2025, things that happen on the internet have real impacts on IRL society.
I get that you’re just trolling me (great SLAM, btw), but if you’re actually a leftist, you might want to think about who you’re serving when you try to undermine other leftists.
Btw: tankies aren’t leftists. They are authoritarians. That’s not leftism.
The out of touch part is that you feel comfortable posting your thought crimes online while simultaneously trying to push a “tankie is the new red scare :<” narrative.
There is so much wrong with this I don’t even know where to begin. Why wouldn’t I publicly push against a the beginnings of a red scare? Especially in a leftist space?
I suspect you’re just a troll though, so I’m going to stop feeding you now.
Yeah, feel free to crawl back into your hole.
Let me break something down for you, lil guy.
You have two choices.
You can do your best to prove me wrong and submit a better argument. I’m not revising anything I said, because you still sound like the dipshit in this scenario. You gotta try again.
Or you can back off with the cop-out “not feeding the troll” after failing to provide even a single shred of an attempt to defend your position. To everyone watching: you lost. Your side: foolish. Optics: bad. Potential comrades: pushed away.
So if you’re right, why don’t you fucking tell me how, dipshit? Because to everyone watching, you just said some dipshittery.
I wasn’t talking to you