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 :)
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.
If you read the many comments in this thread, not to mention other threads on this topic, a significant chunk of western leftists who are ML arrive at Marxism Leninism only after going through a more anarchist phase, and only through a lot of examination of the world and themselves, coupled with a lot of study and reading, do they move from anarchism to come to recognize the undeniable accuracy of Marxism Leninism to reflect the real world and to offer an actually-working methodology for revolution.
Your fallacious description of people’s process towards becoming Marxist Leninists as being the same sort of way that poor, ignorant, emotionally needy people latch onto a cult, is ridiculous, and the kind of things liberals like to say of all of us on the anticapitalist left to comfort themselves into maintaining their simplistic “I’m right but they’re wrong” worldview and avoid having to engage with the many real reasons people become anticapitalists. But that’s what you’re doing. Don’t be like the liberals. Try to understand the real why of things, don’t make up nice little bedtime stories that ensure you don’t have to examine your own misconceptions.
No one is born into Marxism Leninism, anarchism, or any other ideology, and saying that is a grotesquely anti-anarchist thing to say.
Did I touch a nerve or something? Did I too accurately describe your origin story?
Oh, of course not. I am a liberal. Proudly. And I don’t mean the kind of wishy-washy liberal that American center-left calls themselves, but the real thing.
That’s naive. Of course people who are born in China will be indoctronated more into the chinese version of communism versus any other ideology. And people who are born in America will be indoctronated into a slightly different direction by default. I’m talking about the masses, not the 1% or whatever who decide about these things mostly for themselves.
The real thing? So, are you proposing economic liberalism and laissez-faire? This is ridiculous
Wikipedia
ie, not an economic philosophy.
Britannica
Primarily about individual freedom.
Cool story.