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?
That’s just a straw man. The “critical” in “critical support” stands for criticism of the states which anti-imperialists support. A guiding principle of Marxist analysis is ruthless criticism of all that exists.
That that’s a “guiding principle” doesn’t even begin to imply that it’s something in which people actually engage.
Now that you mention it though, I’d say that it’s plainly obvious that tankies fail specifically by not engaging in criticism and instead engaging in apologetics. They stubbornly and often even angrily avoid even facing, much less analyzing, the inherent issues with state “communism” and instead dedicate their time and effort to making excuses for and distracting from any and all examples of those inherent issues.
You can join our weekly news megathread! We often analyze what countries like China are doing and criticize it. We criticize Putin, too, obviously (though sometimes the criticism has been that Russia is not aggressive enough so you might find that horrifying).
Here are frequent criticisms of AES states from MLs off the top of my head:
spoiler
I keep hearing that MLs are “campists” who don’t engage in nuance, but the side I typically see lacking nuance is the “anti-authoritarians” who refuse to acknowledge any successes of AES and label anything short of universal condemnation as “apologetics”. That’s actual campism.
You’ve probably heard of the expression “when someone is accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression”. There is a similar dynamic going on here: When someone is accustomed to black and white thinking, shades of gray look like whitewashing.
This is disproven as of 2025, though, to the best of my knowledge. This misinfo comes directly from Khruschyov’s secret speech, but with the opening of the Soviet Archives the official agenda of Stalin has been found, and he wasn’t enclosed getting drunk for days as Khruschyov said but actually had hours-long meetings the following day to the invasion. Or maybe you mean something else?
Yeah, someone informed me here.
I didn’t know much about it, but the story I remember reading was something like “the Nazis are invading” and Stalin’s attitude was “shut up that’s impossible; it’s too soon”.
I’m honestly not too surprised that it’s false because it didn’t make much sense. Everyone knew it was inevitable.