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?
According to these guys, they’re a CIA strawman operation.
Other than that, it may have started with “I’m 13 and this is deep” and persisted with ideological thinking. 🤷
This isn’t the whole story, just throwing my ¢2 in the conversation. There was a recent memorial in Canada about deaths attributed to communism. They had to remove the names off that monument as it was pretty much all fascist. So you’re prettty much stating that you’re pro fascist if you’re against communism. And yes, it’s the communists who not only defeated the German fascists, but also the Italian ones as well.
And yes, it’s the communists who not only defeated the German fascists, but also the Italian ones as well.
And Japanese fascists. which is who was “mass murdered” by the Chinese after being colonized and brutally ruled by the Japanese for 14 years. The Chinese lost over 22 million people fighting fascism
You make it sound like no one else fought against the Fascists.
Lol no they don’t shut the fuck up
So you’re pretty much stating that you’re pro fascist if you’re against communism
Even if it were true that communists only killed fascists, this would not follow
And yes, it’s the communists who … defeated the German fascists
They deserve credit for this, but they also deserve blame for their earlier cooperation with fascist Germany
They didn’t cooperate with fascist Germany, they signed a non aggression pact after they tried to rally the rest of Europe against fascist Germany and the Europeans said no and then signed their own agreements with Germany. The soviets being the last to try and avoid war with the fascists through a non aggression pact after the Europeans decided to cozy up to Germany means the soviets were the least culpable in the situation. Considering their entire economy was fucked after world war 1 and the Germans were already saying Slavic people were subhumans controlled by Jewish Bolsheviks before the non aggression pact was signed, there is literally no reason to assume bad faith on the Soviets part for trying to stave off more war for a few years to prepare for the inevitable.
They deserve credit for this, but they also deserve blame for their earlier cooperation with fascist Germany
The Soviet Union had a non-aggression pact with fascist Germany because it was already at war with fascist Japan. It then had a non-aggression pact with fascist Japan while it was at war with fascist Germany. The entire pact was just the Soviet Union not wanting to fight in two different fronts against fascists.
The Soviet Union was already waging war against fascists in 1935. Can’t say the same for the rest of the Allies outside of the Republic of China.
+1 for a world history lore drop.
Where can I learn more about this?
they also deserve blame for their earlier cooperation with fascist Germany
This is a widely repeated misconstruction of the events in Reddit and Lemmy. I’m gonna please ask you to actually read my comment and to be open to the historical evidence I bring (using Wikipedia as a source, hopefully not suspect of being tankie-biased), because I believe there is a great mistake in the way contemporary western nations interpret history of WW2 and the interwar period. Thank you for actually making the effort, I know it’s a long comment, but please engage with the points I’m making:
The only country who offered to start a collective offensive against the Nazis and to uphold the defense agreement with Czechoslovakia as an alternative to the Munich Betrayal was the USSR. From that Wikipedia article: “The Soviet Union announced its willingness to come to Czechoslovakia’s assistance, provided the Red Army would be able to cross Polish and Romanian territory; both countries refused.” Poland could have literally been saved from Nazi invasion if France and itself had agreed to start a war together against Nazi Germany, but they didn’t want to. By the logic of “invading Poland” being akin to Nazi collaboration, Poland was as imperialist as the Nazis.
As a Spaniard leftist it’s so infuriating when the Soviet Union, the ONLY country in 1936 which actively fought fascism in Europe by sending weapons, tanks and aviation to my homeland in the other side of the continent in the Spanish civil war against fascism, is accused of appeasing the fascists. The Soviets weren’t dumb, they knew the danger and threat of Nazism and worked for the entire decade of the 1930s under the Litvinov Doctrine of Collective Security to enter mutual defense agreements with England, France and Poland, which all refused because they were convinced that the Nazis would honor their own stated purpose of invading the communists in the East. The Soviets went as far as to offer ONE MILLION troops to France (Archive link against paywall) together with tanks, artillery and aviation in 1939 in exchange for a mutual defense agreement, which the French didn’t agree to because of the stated reason. Just from THIS evidence, the Soviets were by far the most antifascist country in Europe throughout the 1930s, you literally won’t find any other country doing any remotely similar efforts to fight Nazism. If you do, please provide evidence.
The invasion of “Poland” is also severely misconstrued. The Soviets didn’t invade what we think of nowadays when we say Poland. They invaded overwhelmingly Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian lands that Poland had previously invaded in 1919. Poland in 1938, a year before the invasion:
“Polish” territories invaded by the USSR in 1939:
The Soviets invaded famously Polish cities such as Lviv (sixth most populous city in modern Ukraine), Pinsk (important city in western Belarus) and Vilnius (capital of freaking modern Lithuania). They only invaded a small chunk of what you’d consider Poland nowadays, and the rest of lands were actually liberated from Polish occupation and returned to the Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian socialist republics. Hopefully you understand the importance of giving Ukrainians back their lands and sovereignty?
Additionally, the Soviets didn’t invade Poland together with the Nazis, they invaded a bit more than two weeks after the Nazi invasion, at a time when the Polish government had already exiled itself and there was no Polish administration. The meaning of this, is that all lands not occupied by Soviet troops, would have been occupied by Nazis. There was no alternative. Polish troops did not resist Soviet occupation but they did resist Nazi invasion. The Soviet occupation effectively protected millions of Slavic peoples like Poles, Ukrainians and Belarusians from the stated aim of Nazis of genociding the Slavic peoples all the way to the Urals.
All in all, my conclusion is: the Soviets were fully aware of the dangers of Nazism and fought against it earlier than anyone (Spanish civil war), spent the entire 30s pushing for an anti-Nazi mutual defence agreement which was refused by France, England and Poland, tried to honour the existing mutual defense agreement with Czechoslovakia which France rejected and Poland didn’t allow (Romania neither but they were fascists so that’s a given), and offered to send a million troops to France’s border with Germany to destroy Nazism but weren’t allowed to do so. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was a tool of postponing the war in a period in which the USSR, a very young country with only 10 years of industrialization behind it since the first 5-year plan in 1929, was growing at a 10% GDP per year rate and needed every moment it could get. I can and do criticise decisions such as the invasion of Finland, but ultimately even the western leaders at the time seem to generally agree with my interpretation:
“In those days the Soviet Government had grave reason to fear that they would be left one-on-one to face the Nazi fury. Stalin took measures which no free democracy could regard otherwise than with distaste. Yet I never doubted myself that his cardinal aim had been to hold the German armies off from Russia for as long as might be” (Paraphrased from Churchill’s December 1944 remarks in the House of Commons.)
“It would be unwise to assume Stalin approves of Hitler’s aggression. Probably the Soviet Government has merely sought a delaying tactic, not wanting to be the next victim. They will have a rude awakening, but they think, at least for now, they can keep the wolf from the door” Franklin D. Roosevelt (President of the United States, 1933–1945), from Harold L. Ickes’s diary entries, early September 1939. Ickes’s diaries are published as The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes.
"One must suppose that the Soviet Government, seeing no immediate prospect of real support from outside, decided to make its own arrangements for self‑defence, however unpalatable such an agreement might appear. We in this House cannot be astonished that a government acting solely on grounds of power politics should take that course” Neville Chamberlain House of Commons Statement, August 24, 1939 (one day after pact’s signing)
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this
I won’t claim to know objectively, although I roughly agree with a lot of the theories people are offering in other comments. One thing to add: The lack of critical thinking ability, I think, is crucial in letting this stuff develop. I think a lot of what’s going on there is just conversations between people who just all make decisions based on emotion (how well what’s being said “resonates” with them, how confidently it’s presented, how it lets them be part of an “in-group” which then gives them a feeling of belonging, etc) instead of because they have the tools to be able to evaluate the arguments and have decided they believe in them. That’s why it is entirely unconvincing to put arguments in front of them. They simply don’t care to evaluate them and they don’t have the tools if they did want to. It’s just not how they operate.
I saw an extremely revelatory post on lemmy.ml on some kind of math principle with an objectively accurate answer (with a pretty straightforward proof of that answer included), and the comments were full of people presenting the wrong answer and arguing why, using exactly the same super-confident presentation and style of “resonant but empty” argumentation that they use when they talk about politics.
And I thought, oh. Makes sense. They just like sounding like they know what they’re talking about, and everyone else is the stupids. That’s how they interact. It’s not really new, there have always been political theories that don’t make a ton of sense with wide communities of people who fall in love with them anyway. It’s just on the internet now, and so it’s easier for them to find each other and self-select themselves into little communities where critical analysis on the topic is actively attacked if it ever rears its head.
Brain damage and a inability to find balance.
Some people just have a Right Wing mindset. They’re drawn to concepts like loyalty & obedience to authority and gravitate to political doctrines that stress those values. If Communism makes economic sense to you but you’re politically uncomfortable with shallow/non-existent hierarchies or don’t feel that everyday people can be trusted with political power you gravitate towards being a ML. If you’re willing to force those views on others by threat of state violence you’re now a Tankie.
Most people come to Marxism through being disaffected by the liberal systems we grow up in, work in, etc, and look to Marxist theory for answers. This leads us to organizing in real life, reading more theory, and gradually beginning to read western framing of socialist states and other designated “baddies” more critically, seeking a multi-sided and comprehensive view. There’s a lot to unpack in your comment regarding preconceptions you have about China, largely being western, Red Scare style framing, but what I answered is why I’m a Marxist-Leninist and uphold socialist states as legitimate.
For a look at theory, I made an introductory Marxist-Leninist reading list you can take a peak at.
There is no one answer. Dr. Bob Altemeyer‘s book “The Authoritarians” sheds some light on the psychology.
Regardless of what you think about vanguardism as a means to leftist ends, they also seem to miss the logical point that vanguardism and the state are meant to wither away. It is a theoretical rightist means to a leftist ends, it is not itself leftist.
But again, if you read The Authoritarians you find that logic and reason do not matter to them. Trying to reason with an authoritarian is pointless.
Simple answer: The things you think you know aren’t the truth. They’re just propaganda.
They can’t see that any government is going to create corruption so they picked the government they have the least experience with to side with. Of course at the heart of the tankies is a huge amount of fud being generated by russia and the ccp.
why one would deliberately praise any authoritarian system this hard.
To quote Bertrand Russell: “Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.”
To put it simply, a lot of tankies crave power but just don’t want to admit. They are simply faux concerning for their own ulterior motive. I saw a meme from one of the .ml instances stating that communism simply “wants to improve” society. But I was like: didn’t you guys suppress free elections and speech and persecuted anyone who simply disagrees at the slightest?
It’s not uncommon for many authoritarian communists to become eventually become fascists, especially after the end of the Cold War. The ex-leader of Red Army faction became neo-fascist in 2000s. A local politician in my country ran on xenophobic platform, but was a member of a Marxist-Leninist party in the 1970s. All that said, it means these people simply run on whatever ideologies, so long as they can attain power for power’s sake.
The destruction of american hegemony is a material necessity and their rivals thus require critical support. Call it campist if you want, i don’t see western proletariat doing anything to put an end to the America’s genocides and ecocides.
I just want to point out that there was a time a little over a century ago when anarchists were Public Enemy #1, and there was a huge propaganda campaign to make anarchists look like murderous uncultured savages. Vestiges of this portrayal still remain in the cultures of core capitalist nations.
Of course, this couldn’t be further from the truth. That shows you how powerful the propaganda is and how important it is to analyze the power dynamics you find yourself in the middle of and correct your worldview around who’s been deceiving you and how.
A valuable heuristic is to look at specific policies (especially foreign policy) in the present day, and note the times when your stance is on the same side as the neoliberal establishment.
Tankie brigade incoming in 3… 2… 1…
I’d argue that they functionally don’t exist.
Sure, here you run into them here in this universe…not a great sample size. I’m a really social person who spent years in deep leftist Canada…and I’m one of the most radical socialist (whatever you want to call it…all the terms are fraught) folks I’ve met. I’m definitely nowhere near a tankie.
I’ve met exactly one true “tankie”. Good friend…always making excuses for atrocities…it spills over into radical support for modern day Russia etc…but dude is also a silver spooner who works for his dads investment firm.
The process is probably identical to how people fall into the alt-right/far-right mindset. Their life sucks, they have connections to no-one, nobody fucks them. But then this one group start showing them sympathy and camaraderie and things start to look better.
And some of them just get born into it.
