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 :)
Of course there is implied comparison. If one doesn’t “fall into the tankie mindset” they must necessarily believe in something else. And if nothing else is equal to the task before us, which I assert to be the case, one must be either a tankie or resigned to extinction. I presumed based on OPs choice of instance and comm that the something else they believe and implicitly compare to “tankieism” is anarchism. OP asked why someone would be a tankie and I told them why I am a tankie rather than what they seem to be.
Exactly what i was talking about teams: "if you don’t agree with us you must be < insert whatever is perceived as the current enemy >
I consider anarchists misguided, not my enemy. My enemy is the bourgeoisie and not because they disagree with me but because they exploit me, my peers, and the environment. Do you never argue with people who aren’t your enemy?
This is factually false since, for example, I don’t fall into the tankie mindset and I do not believe in one thing in particular.
I am against the exploitation of the workers and the environment, but I am not fooled by Chinese propaganda or whatever.
I hate to break it to you but you do in fact have beliefs. You might not think about them very hard, they might be totally incoherent, you may have passively absorbed them from capitalist propaganda, but you wouldn’t bother speaking if you were really as vacuous as you claim to be.
However I don’t support capitalism either and, by your logic, the fact that you are so verbal about your ideas (and the fact that they are limited to a very specific set of ideas) is because you have absorbed another form of propaganda, correct?
If you don’t support capitalism but you’re completely incapable of resisting it because you refuse any clarity of thought and practice, to the point that you actively get in others’ way because they have those things, you do support capitalism.
You don’t consciously support capitalism but you uncriticaly accept and repeat all their lies about every serious alternative. You are a useful idiot of theirs. I suppose you also think that Venezuela is a ‘narco terror state’? And if not why do you believe the state department when it lies about its other enemies? And no, it does not follow that just because someone who actually thought nothing would be quiet that someone verbose must be dominated by propaganda. I went through an anarchist phase myself as a dumb college kid. What moved me past it was not exposure to Chinese propaganda but a more thorough examination of capitalist propaganda and how it informed my view of the rest of the world even as I nominally rejected its source. After deworming my brain a bit the numbers on emissions and renewable installations spoke for themselves.