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How do people actually fall into the "Tankie" mindset? (anarchist.nexus)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 6 days ago) by stinky@anarchist.nexus to c/anarchism@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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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 :)

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[–] TankieTanuki@hexbear.net 28 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

[Enemies of the American empire] tell you that, oh, by the way, those propaganda outlets in the west also lie about us

Western propaganda outlets absolutely do like about their enemies though. It's verifiable. They lie about them more than anything else.

The primary goal of the empire is maintaining its hegemony. Since the biggest threats to that hegemony are its rival states, it undermines support for them by libeling and slandering them. The empire doesn't much care about how great you think it is. As long as you hate every alternative more, they're not threatened. The reason Stalin and Mao were demonized more than anyone else in modern history is because they scared the living shit out of the capitalists.

Example of their lies

My "tankie story", so to speak, began in 2019 just before the Hong Kong protests kicked off. I followed the progression of that story through Marxist news sources like Proles Pod:

A Chinese man murdered and dismembered his girlfriend, stashed her body parts in a suitcase, and fled to Hong Kong. China couldn't extradite him back to the mainland, so the Chinese authorities in Hong Kong crafted an extradition law. Hong Kong capitalists opposed it, fearing extradition for their financial crimes.

For a long time, I heard nothing about the story from mainstream American news sources. Then one day, NPR broached the subject. I thought "oh boy, someone is finally covering this story!"

All that NPR had to say about it was "There are protests in Hong Kong. The protesters want more democracy. China is against them because they hate democracy." I was flabbergasted! There was no substance at all to the reporting. Absolutely none of the inciting background was covered. I was introduced in real time to the way that even "good" liberal, Western news sources like NPR flatten all stories about enemy countries into simple good vs. evil narratives.

[and] actually almost all of what we do is awesome and people who claim otherwise are automatically suspect.

This is just a straw man. The reason the concept of "critical support" is so common in Marxist anti-imperialist spaces is because we acknowledge nuance and limit our support to productive actions.

I'm going to throw back once more to my experience with Proles Pod, a podcast that was widely criticized as being one of the most "Stalinist" media in existence. I was introduced to them through an interview with the hosts conducted by Breht O'Shea on Revolutionary Left Radio. They spent the first twenty minutes enumerating all their criticisms of the mistakes that Stalin made.