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?
Quoting a different comment from this thread:
That doesn’t sound to me like any kind of good faith argument as much as an excuse to praise the consolidation of power in one person, which I still have trouble understanding how anyone on the fediverse is for - doesn’t it go completely against everything decentralization stands for? How is it so easy to understand the corruption of business billionaires but impossible to understand that a single person in charge of the means of distribution could easily become corrupt and authoritarian?
When I think of a “tankie”, I do not think of a Marxist-Leninist arguing in good faith, I think of the people who praise oppressive regimes simply because they are communist, and hold no place for debating alternatives to or safeguards against giving one corrupt individual complete power over a nation. Authoritarianism is not synonymous to communism (see: fascism) and it seems crazy to me to believe that it does not exist, or that it is somehow good.
Perhaps you are not one of the people falling for everything certain nation-states say; in that case, I wouldn’t consider you a tankie. But those people absolutely do exist.
Bedtimes are authoritarian, your parents are dictators
I’m not going to speak for that user but in general I think they are referring to a few things:
All states are authoritarian. The idea that communists are especially authoritarian to a point that it means they deserve to be attacked and defeated by “non-authoritarian pro-democracy” nations is essentially an ad campaign by the US and their allies to justify their cold war aggression against communists. We are talking about the British and US empires, during the jim crowe era, accusing the USSR and China of being authoritarians and themselves as democratic. You see how this is nonsense right? There is no way that the British empire, a monarchy with an imperialist bourgeoisie was more democratic or less authoritarian than the USSR, even if most of the lies about the USSR were true. The slave holding jim crowe indigenous genocide USA, with its colonial holdings all over the world, was more democratic and less authoritarian? It just can’t be so. The reality is that this word is essentially meaningless, every state has a monopoly on violence and is authoritarian.
None of these people had power consolidated to one person. Stalin, Mao, all of them had a lot of people involved in the decision making process. This is well documented and even admitted by the US in their internal documents about Stalin specifically.
I have been organizing in the real world with leftists of all kinds for over a decade, and unfortunately have seen a bit of the online left in that time as well.
A lot of people call themselves things and don’t even know what they mean.
I think calling them tankies is reductive and ignorant because it is misrepresenting every party involved and only serving to paint well meaning MLs as bad because people who are not actually MLs are being allowed to represent us.
+1 for keeping the convo civil