this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2025
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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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[–] Oofnik@kbin.earth 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Actually I think this comment unintentionally answers OP's question.

I think a common tankie story is:

  1. Realization that much of western media is propaganda or influenced by propaganda.

  2. Finding that enemies of the American empire (and Europe) with some semblance of power agree that western media is propaganda, and these people are MLM communists.

  3. After they've established credibility with their accurate criticisms of western capitalist society, tell you that, oh, by the way, those propaganda outlets in the west also lie about us, actually almost all of what we do is awesome and people who claim otherwise are automatically suspect.

Number 3 is a mistake, I think, but it's an understandable one. This isn't super fair to tankies but the analogy I'd give is to people who fall under the spell of someone like Jordan Peterson: he sounds smart, and he lulls you into a sense of security with good advice about taking care of yourself, keeping your house clean, etc., and then once he's gotten your trust he gently introduces stuff like "oh by the way evolution proves that men and women shouldn't work together" or whatever, and because he's made sensible points up until then, your guard is down and you don't critique it in your head before accepting it.

[–] lmmarsano@lemmynsfw.com -1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

That almost works, except critics of western propaganda exist everywhere especially in academia & intelligentsia. The west doesn't try to suppress them. So why out of everyone, those guys with a salient agenda over the critics without a discernable one?

[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 3 points 7 months ago

Campism, aka team sports. Critizism from academic figures is (not entirely incorrectly) identified as managed opposition, and for sure they are not a team you can simp for with the hope of them "winning".