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?
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.
Personally, I’ve never looked at it like the states that oppose the US are inherently good and worth supporting (sometimes they are, sometimes they’re not). Objectively speaking, our support means nothing. I don’t have any ICBMs to give to those enemy states. So what I do think is that the way we talk about the enemies of the United States can make a difference in terms of providing license for imperialist intervention which is always a bad thing.
Example: whether you believe Nicolas Maduro stole the 2025 elections or not, propagating the narrative that he did makes it easier for Americans to accept Trump invading Venezuela. If no Americans believed that claim to be true, the cost of an invasion would be higher for the ruling class, so it’s materially meaningful to have control over that narrative. This means that, even if the principled thing to do would be to condemn it, an anti-imperialist who believes he stole the election might choose to avoid the subject.
That hypothetical person isn’t supporting an evil dictatorship, because support from private citizens with no capital and no power means nothing. They’re instead just applying a miniscule amount of personal power in the opposite direction of empire’s interests. The same applies for any enemy of the United States. I don’t “support” Iran, Hezbollah, Ansarallah, Hamas, the PFLP, China, Russia, Cuba, etc. I often deny criticisms aimed at those entities when I hear friends or family make them, with the goal of undoing a bit of the effort that US empire undertakes to villify them and grant itself moral license to slaughter their people.