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 :)
While your prose is a little embellished, I think it’s a good diagnosis of the situation.
One thing I’ll say is that your appeal to the sciences might not be the most persuasive. Science can certainly inform the realm of philosophy and ideology, but I don’t believe that it’s equipped to answer the sorts of questions the latter broach. Axioms cannot be proven in the real world.
It’s funny though. I know .world blocks hexbear, but even in this thread, I’ve seen Marxist-Leninists call themselves materialists/empiricists - just as you claim them to be dogmatists.
I always appreciate seeing discussion on Lemmy with MLers tho. I’m apprehensive to adopt their ideology in full, but as someone who’s American Gen Z and growing up in the decline of an Imperial Core nation, I’m looking for ways that can get us out of this real, perceivable, falsifiable hellscape of a country. American Conservatives can’t do it, American Liberals got us here via the Rachet Effect. The only other option is Left, but I see dangers in moving that direction as you have to avoid falling into the same traps that fascists do.