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 :)

    • davel@lemmy.mlEnglish
      157·
      6 days ago

      These kinds of answers are just the silliest. If you don’t know why we think the things we do—which you obviously don’t—then don’t “contribute” to the conversation with the first thing that pops into your head. It’s okay to not know things.

      • FlyingCircus@lemmy.world
        72·
        5 days ago

        They’re not going to do that, because investigation of socialist positions would require them to confront the cognitive dissonance of their own beliefs. And once you go against mainstream liberal groupthink, you risk being ostracized by people calling you woke a tankie.

    • belated_frog_pants@beehaw.org
      22·
      5 days ago

      You can see it plainly when the defense comes up as “well your country lied about the one i like”

      My dudes, they are both awful and both kill for sport and are horribly racist. That’s how they have such power to begin with.

      This isnt sports. You can hate them both.

      • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
        2·
        4 days ago

        Reductively equating fundamentally different states at a qualitative level isn’t some grand, higher-level wisdom, but selective blindness to material reality and a decision to simply not compare because the outcome doesn’t matter to you. Claiming, say, Cuba or Virtnam “kills for sport and is horribly racist” and equating it to, say, the US Empire and Israel is pure dishonesty.