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 :)

  • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
    2·
    6 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.