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 :)

  • AlexanderTheDead@lemmy.world
    11·
    7 days ago

    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.

    • FlyingCircus@lemmy.world
      2·
      7 days ago

      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.

      • AlexanderTheDead@lemmy.world
        12·
        6 days ago

        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.

        • FlyingCircus@lemmy.world
          2·
          6 days ago

          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.

          • AlexanderTheDead@lemmy.world
            13·
            6 days ago

            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.