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 :)
China’s opposition (or lack of it) to Israel is controversial among MLs. I’m not familiar with the specifics of Russia’s opposition to Israel or what RT has claimed about it, but I’ll grant you that it’s probably similar to China’s dynamic with Israel.
I strongly disagree with the characterization of everything else as false propaganda, however.
I’m inclined to side with people like Jeremy Corbyn, Aaron Maté, and academics like Stephen F. Cohen and David S. G. Goodman who all expressed skepticism over the Skripal poisoning. IIRC, he was supposedly exposed to poison on the doorknob to his home at a time when he wasn’t even in the city.
If the idea that Ukraine has a Nazi problem is Russian propaganda, then most Western media outlets prior to 2022 qualify as Kremlin propagandists. The Neo-Nazi problem is highly regional. Ukraine is a divided country, which is why it entered a civil war in 2014. You referenced the far-right party Svoboda’s mere 2% of the national parliament, however, in the Neo-Nazi stronghold of the western Lviv Oblast, where statues of Stepan Bandera are erected, that share rises to 34%[1]. Furthermore, their influence is outsized, because they’re highly organized. NATO armed and supported the Banderite Azov Battalion beginning in 2005.[2] Today, that group has been upgraded to encompass multiple brigades.[3] Ukraine is the only country in the world with a Neo-Nazi group formally integrated into its federal armed forces. Starting in 2014 under Poroshenko’s coup regime, after massacring leftists in an inferno in Odessa, these fascists began traveling to the east to ethnically cleanse Russian Ukrainians in pogroms.[4] Zelensky ran on a platform of peace with Russia, which is still the dominant position, but was powerless to rein in the NATO-backed far right in his country.
I don’t believe RT has ever claimed that Putin is a communist. Presumably you’ve enumerated his ties to Russian nationalists to suggest that he and the Russian Federation could not possibly be genuinely opposed to Nazis. But even Russian nationalists share the Federation’s immense pride in the victory of the Red Army in the Great Patriotic War, for which the country still holds huge annual parades. A guiding tenant of past and present Nazi ideology is a boiling hatred of Russians, which is why they exterminated 18 million Russian civilians in that world war. Nationalism is characterized by pride in ethnicity and nation, and so nationalists tend to dislike people who consider them subhuman and want to kill them. Thus, opposition to Nazis and concern for the security threat they pose make sense from the perspective of both the left and right within Russia.
Apologists for Ukraine and its endless proxy war on behalf of NATO which is decimating Ukraine’s population and propelling the entire world towards WWIII and thermonuclear brinkmanship are IMO the embarrassing, useful idiots for the far-right and their genocidal ambitions in the Donbass.
https://ukraine-elections.com.ua/en/vybory/result/11 Svoboda translates to “Freedom”, which is how it’s listed here ↩︎
Per Col. Larry Wilkerson ↩︎
https://azovlobby.substack.com/p/how-we-learned-to-stop-worrying-and ↩︎
https://tankie.tube/w/11tj9DFjVqbdfBMzqVSUU1 ↩︎
Because you’re a tankie and unlike actual communists, you people like to make excuses for horrible regimes.
Stephen F. Cohen who is on the record as saying that Putin is not an autocrat, Russia’s invasion of a sovereign country was justified, and disputed evidence on MH17.
Aaron Maté who regularly appears at events hosted and paid for by the Russian government.
Corbyn is on record as saying the evidence points towards Russia, even if he urged caution at the time before the evidence became overwhelming.
Bad faith argument. I didn’t say that. I said tankies make excuses for anti-communists, and authoritarian capitalists. People like Putin and his government, an argument you have just repeatedly proven to be true.
Actual communists don’t make excuses for anti-communists, the far right, and corrupt oligarchs.
Russian propaganda. Ukraine didn’t pose a serious security threat to Russia prior to Russia’s invasion.
Meanwhile in Russia:
I point out that Putin venerates an actual bonafide fascist, has and had ties with actual fascists, and you proceed to make excuses.
Once again, this is not what actual communists do. It’s what cosplay communist tankies and bad faith actors do.
Ukraine didn’t start the war. Certainly not on behalf of NATO. Blatant Russian propaganda.
The war started by Russia is decimating Ukraine’s population, correct.
Threats of nuclear war. Russian propaganda.
Russian propaganda from someone who has just repeatedly made excuses for far right nationalists and anti-communists, while claiming to be a communist.