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 :)
People deify their favorite State and overlook the bad it does. All States commit atrocities so it is easier for everyone to look away rather than say “I like x about how y nation handles z” and be specific about it.
You say this, but I bet you and almost everyone here support the Allies during WWII even though most of the Allies had colonial empires and had already committed multiple genocides to build those empires. I do not think people here would seriously think that the principled socialist position is to hold “neither Berlin nor Moscow nor London” signs while the Blitz was happening or to hide in a cave while the Nazis were exterminating people in death camps because the British were also starving Bengalis to death.
States should not exist. Dont know what this rant wants to project but thats what I think, full stop.
So you support neither the Allies nor the Axis during WWII because both sides comprise of state actors? Non-state actors didn’t exist in any meaningful capacity during WWII. Even partisans and underground resistance groups were affiliated with the Allies.
What does this have to do with the discussion in the post? This is just whataboutism.
No, it’s asking you to apply your theory to practice. Take from the theoretical and apply it to history and reality.
Its definitely not. Its blanketing all people of WW2, no matter their political or personal beliefs, and presenting them as a unified block that I must answer yes or no to appease. Obviously the Nazis being stopped was a good thing. But I dont have to worship the nations that did it to appreciate it. Nor do I have to exonerate them of their atrocities to say that this one course of action was good. Stop dealing in dichotomies and absolutes.
His point is that this is the same kind of critical support that MLs want to extend to AES states. MLs have a lot of criticisms of, e.g., contemporary China. They just think it is one of the better available realistic alternatives, and deserves qualified support over (say) the United States. MLs agree that a stateless society is the eventual goal (and that China is flawed), but believe that as a matter of practical real-world tactics, it is better to support China against the US in the same way it was better to support the US against Nazi Germany.
That’s the goal of all communists, including MLs. The disagreement lies in the path to get there.
It’d be great to get dialogue going on hows though. Or really to talk to anyone in my day to day thay isn’t a capitalist.
Marxists-Leninism doesn’t attract people whose disposition is towards a stateless society. They may offer a vague “some day”, but all their effort is in the opposite direction.