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

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 3 hours 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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[–] mathemachristian@lemmy.blahaj.zone 13 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Edit: The amount of conjecture and thought terminating cliches in this thread is through the fucking roof lmfao. Peak reddit.

A lot of tankies are actually posting how and why they believe what they believe. If anyone's seriously interested in an answer look at this thread from https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/60633370?scrollToComments=true

There are 206 comments in total at this time.

My journey started here:
https://hexbear.net/comment/3763871

How they piqued my interest:
https://hexbear.net/comment/5606499

The reason I switched:
https://hexbear.net/comment/5355388

It was a combination of them just not being horrible "redfash" monster everyone says they are, them being able to consistently back up their seemingly "obviously wrong" takes and me and seemingly no one else being able to come up with better answers.

In discussions tankies were the only ones who had good faith discussions, obviously they didn't always, but if it wasn't just an internet slapfight the tankies were the ones citing sources and having incredibly nuanced understandings while me and the other libs didn't really. All I ever saw was a "nuh-uh" backed up by "obvious" claims that "everybody" knows like your "mao zedong was the worst mass murderer".

There is a post I could make about this "black book of communism" statistic now, having read about these sorts of claims, but not on my phone.

[–] F_State@midwest.social 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

me and the other libs

Is this a parody?

[–] mathemachristian@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 day ago

At the time I was a lib even if I didn't identify as such

[–] starelfsc2@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I don't think they're redfash monsters, I just know most historians disagree with what they say, and as someone who is not an expert, I will trust the experts over the people I see post 18 paragraphs that the one time I looked into was not very relevant and often just cause more confusion. An easy example is china's treatment of the uyghurs, I have yet to see a response that isn't, as you say, a thought terminating cliché.

[–] mathemachristian@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

See that for me was quite the opposite. The people everyone was piling on as tankies had demonstrably better knowledge of not just both history and current events but could trace a lot of the claims levied against them, like the uyghur genocide hoax, to their source, in this case Adrian Zenz, and really completely decimate them.

Those contradictions kept piling on, tankies were rebutting "common knowledge" and backing up seemingly ludicrous claims in depth and clearly previously researched. Whereas the libs were just consistently out of their depth, either insulting, claiming without anything to back it up or in the best case throwing around tangentially related articles or wikipedia entries that were obviously just the first results from an ad hoc google search. Until just sort of all came crashing down and sent me reeling, my whole worldview coming undone. My family and especially my wife got really worried even, but it kind of tapered away and settled into a new approach to things that feels like I am actually able to take at all these complex and finally have the tools necessary to understand them if I invest the time to do so.

[–] starelfsc2@sh.itjust.works 1 points 21 hours ago

I do not know better than the united nations or several peer reviewed journals. The journal also has references to dozens of historians. It is possible some small group on the internet know more than they do, and are interpreting it better than people who do it as a job, I just find that unlikely. The UN believes it is a persecution if not a genocide. I am a layman on this topic and will defer to experts, because I know there is a lot of astroturfing and I have previously seen arguments that seemed flawless but were missing key details that an expert showed why they were flawed.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-xinjiang-rights/muslim-minority-in-chinas-xinjiang-face-political-indoctrination-human-rights-watch-idUSKCN1LQ01F/

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14623528.2020.1848109