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 :)
Edit: The amount of conjecture and thought terminating cliches in this thread is through the fucking roof lmfao. Peak reddit.
A lot of tankies are actually posting how and why they believe what they believe. If anyone’s seriously interested in an answer look at this thread from https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/60633370?scrollToComments=true
There are 206 comments in total at this time.
My journey started here:
https://hexbear.net/comment/3763871
How they piqued my interest:
https://hexbear.net/comment/5606499
The reason I switched:
https://hexbear.net/comment/5355388
It was a combination of them just not being horrible “redfash” monster everyone says they are, them being able to consistently back up their seemingly “obviously wrong” takes and me and seemingly no one else being able to come up with better answers.
In discussions tankies were the only ones who had good faith discussions, obviously they didn’t always, but if it wasn’t just an internet slapfight the tankies were the ones citing sources and having incredibly nuanced understandings while me and the other libs didn’t really. All I ever saw was a “nuh-uh” backed up by “obvious” claims that “everybody” knows like your “mao zedong was the worst mass murderer”.
There is a post I could make about this “black book of communism” statistic now, having read about these sorts of claims, but not on my phone.
Is this a parody?
At the time I was a lib even if I didn’t identify as such
No. The great majority of MLs on Lemmy were born, raised, and still live in the imperial core, just like most other people on Lemmy. We got the same education, indoctrination, and propaganda as everyone else, so most of us started out as liberals with largely the same beliefs as everyone else. We believed all the same Cold War propaganda as everyone else. Investigating and peeling away the layers of propaganda and lies is actually a long, slow, and not particularly pleasant, effort.
Speak for yourself, peeling off cold war propaganda is an incredibly liberating process for me. It actually gives me hope that revolution is possible and that not only things can potentially be done, but have already successfully been done.
So you support Russia invading Ukraine, China doing a genocide?
Because that’s literally what Tankies believe in
I didn’t support Russia until I learned the history of the region going back to 2013. Now I critically support it like most other marxists.
I used to condemn China for committing genocide until I learned that it actually isn’t. Even installed xiaohongshu and could see for myself.
That’s what I meant by
See this comment for an example of a typical debate between a tankie and a lib.
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I don’t think they’re redfash monsters, I just know most historians disagree with what they say, and as someone who is not an expert, I will trust the experts over the people I see post 18 paragraphs that the one time I looked into was not very relevant and often just cause more confusion. An easy example is china’s treatment of the uyghurs, I have yet to see a response that isn’t, as you say, a thought terminating cliché.
See that for me was quite the opposite. The people everyone was piling on as tankies had demonstrably better knowledge of not just both history and current events but could trace a lot of the claims levied against them, like the uyghur genocide hoax, to their source, in this case Adrian Zenz, and really completely decimate them.
Those contradictions kept piling on, tankies were rebutting “common knowledge” and backing up seemingly ludicrous claims in depth and clearly previously researched. Whereas the libs were just consistently out of their depth, either insulting, claiming without anything to back it up or in the best case throwing around tangentially related articles or wikipedia entries that were obviously just the first results from an ad hoc google search. Until just sort of all came crashing down and sent me reeling, my whole worldview coming undone. My family and especially my wife got really worried even, but it kind of tapered away and settled into a new approach to things that feels like I am actually able to take at all these complex and finally have the tools necessary to understand them if I invest the time to do so.
I do not know better than the united nations or several peer reviewed journals. The journal also has references to dozens of historians. It is possible some small group on the internet know more than they do, and are interpreting it better than people who do it as a job, I just find that unlikely. The UN believes it is a persecution if not a genocide. I am a layman on this topic and will defer to experts, because I know there is a lot of astroturfing and I have previously seen arguments that seemed flawless but were missing key details that an expert showed why they were flawed.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-xinjiang-rights/muslim-minority-in-chinas-xinjiang-face-political-indoctrination-human-rights-watch-idUSKCN1LQ01F/
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14623528.2020.1848109
I’ll spare people a wall of text and just drop a couple of links for those interested: [1] [2]
The sources used in your link are sourcing Chinese tabloid Global times. I am fully convinced it’s astroturfing at this point.
Yours is essentially an appeal to authority, davel obviously went through the trouble of researching the entire history behind the conflict.
Your rebuttal? “Wow you must be a paid troll actor”
And that’s how I became a tankie 😄
Thanks for the live demo
Brother this took me 15 seconds to find, this is very low effort astroturfing https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/countries/2022-08-31/22-08-31-final-assesment.pdf
e: also all the interviews with matching details https://www.npr.org/2018/11/13/666287509/ex-detainee-describes-torture-in-chinas-xinjiang-re-education-camp But again the entire UN agrees this is happening, and the only one who says it’s not is the country that benefits from saying it’s not.
Ok? I had already seen that report. My point was that these tankies don’t just linkdrop some ad hoc google results but repeatedly provide deep insight with a lot of context. If the original commenter didn’t even put in the effort of googling the primary source but davel has this sourced historical write up it is clear to me who has put in more time into researching this topic. If this keeps happening repeatedly and consistently one starts to question the default narrative and starts to look into it oneself. And from there it starts to unravel.
No, there is only a handful of countries that believe there is a genocide. I don’t even know how many still use the word “genocide” and how many just silently dropped it.
Wow, one of the twenty-odd links isn’t from a Western source? Must be a foreign secret agent!
Deeply unserious.
No they are sourcing a Chinese tabloid which is governed by China to prove that China did not do something, while every other country’s reporting, including Chinese historians interviewed, says it is happening. This is the only link I checked to see if it was worth looking over the rest. I am using the most likely conclusion that either they did not care to see the source was from a Chinese tabloid because it confirmed what they already believed, or they are a foreign agent, which have been confirmed to exist on every social media platform. You should be wary I am one too. Either way it’s not worth anyone’s time.
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Serious contemporary historians, not airport bookstore historians, do agree with much of what we say, because after the fall of the USSR, they got access to troves of Soviet government documents spanning decades, which dispelled much Western Cold War propaganda.
Yes, mostly agree is not a difficult bar to pass when the US was lying about 99% of what they say. Of course almost everything the US said was a lie and historians agree with tankies on most of what actually happened. I can say “The US lied. Communism benefits the average person. These countries were handicapped by the US. China is not committing human rights abuses.” A historian would agree with 3/4 of those, but that doesn’t make what they said reasonable. This is why every argument feels like bad faith, because saying they agree with most of what tankies say implies the other claims must have credence as well.