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 :)
Actually existing socialism actually exists: imperfect, flawed, with tragic excesses and rightist deviations. But it exists.
And I’m interested in the real world, not creating an ideal world in my head that can’t actually become reality.
How socialist is a system that crushes the working class beneath it’s boot heel, though? Is that really the working class seizing the means of production because that just seems like someone else beating us to the punch and becoming our new overlords.
The working class in China are not being crushed under anyone’s bootheel, though. They really do enjoy a dictatorship over the bourgeoisie, which has been used to great effect to improve working class lives. Yes, a dictatorship of the proletariat as mediated by the party, but vast swathes of the working class people are the party. And those who are not, well, there is a reason the party has an over 90% approval rating and it’s not some disgusting racist trope about Asians being sheep. It is because they’ve watched their quality of life rise by leaps and bounds, repeatedly.
Yes I’m sure the suppressed LGBT really enjoy the weight of that boot as much as you enjoy its taste
Yes, a country that 70 years ago was feudal has some backwards social policy. Is that an own?
The difference betweent China and the west in this regard, is that social justice victories in China are not constantly threatened by right wing parties and far-right Nazis.
Nuance? In my hate thread? You get out of here with that nonsense!
It’s more or less the same position the rest of us “tankies” have. We push back on bourgeois framing of the flaws of real socialism, be it fabrications, exaggerations, or minimizations, but we acknowledge that there are real flaws.