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

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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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[–] Gorillazrule@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I'm nowhere near well versed enough on the topic to chime in. But isn't this the same excuse people try to throw against supporters of Palestine? "Oh yeah you support ending the genocide in Palestine? Did you know they throw LGBT people off the rooftops".

Regardless of the truth/inaccuracy of the statement. It seems like it's not really that relevant to the conversation and just thrown out there as a cheap gotcha. Does the suppression of LGBT individuals mean that their overall quality of life hasn't improved? Does a country have to be perfect and not have other social changes that need to be worked towards in order to acknowledge progress? This is not an endorsement of China, again I'm not knowledgeable enough on the topic. But just a criticism of this rebuttal.

[–] FunkyStuff@hexbear.net 8 points 1 week ago

They didn't respond but I think the main reason they're using that specific rebuttal is because the more orthodox argument which goes, "It's bad to like China because China is even more authoritarian than Western countries" has already been deployed elsewhere in the thread and received a solid enough response. Actually taking that conversation further would require analyzing information from several sources that have conflicting biases, and a lot of effort in general, so the conversation dies there. Other arguments they could've used include accusing China of being imperialist, more capitalist than the West, faking their statistics, censorship, not a legitimate government, or something along those lines.