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 :)
First thought: Mattias Desmet’s book The Psychology of Totalitarianism, may offer some insights.
… Oh, I thought I was going to have a long list of thoughts about this. But none better not already covered in that^ are yet springing to mind.
As a couple of poster here are already demonstrating, they discover that western nations have lied about communist nations, but they don’t learn the more fundamental lesson that they shouldn’t trust everything a nation says. So instead of adopting a nuanced view, they just counter believing everything a western nation says with rejecting everything a western nation says and instead believing everything a communist nation says.
Yep.
I’m perhaps older than some here, so I saw something similar after 9/11.
Western media, especially American media, were often blatantly biased in favour of the US government and the so called ‘war on terror’. Especially when stuff leaked out about torture, mass killings and abuses. People turned to alternatives and often found channels like Russia Today. And to be fair, at first glance Russia Today did (certainly at the time) appear to be far more nuanced than mainstream media. It was certainly and often justifiably critical of what the US and its allies was up to around that time. But people who spent a lot of time uncritically watching Russia Today, often ended up believing the Russian government propaganda mixed in with truths.
I think it’s also in large part due to the human tendency to simplify reality. Reality is often complex, but we prefer to thing in categories, like black and white. And so you often see people thinking in or blindly accepting false binaries. Side A bad, so side B
badgood. (e: brain fart)It’s surprisingly common. I mean, look how common it is to think of Germany as the bad guy in WWI, when the reality was far more nuanced. The British empire really wasn’t great.
And in WWII the nazis were obviously evil, but that doesn’t mean the allies were particularly good either. For example, Roosevelt didn’t do that much to stop the deportation of up to 2 million Mexicans and Mexican Americans, putting Japanese Americans in concentration camps wasn’t moral, America was still virulently racist, and contrary to what you may have been led to believe about the Soviets up to 1 in 4 rapes by allied troops were perpetrated by Americans. Churchill arguably helped kill up to 4 million Indians during the war. Etc. etc.
I think it’s also in large part due to the human tendency to simplify reality. Reality is often complex, but we prefer to thing in categories, like black and white. And so you often see people thinking in or blindly accepting false binaries. Side A bad, so side B bad.
Agreed.
Nuance is difficult, and arguably more to the point, it’s sort of vague and insubstantial, not least because an awful lot of it necessariky boils down to “I don’t know.” People generally prefer something more solid to which to cling, so tend toward absolutes and unjustified certainties. And the most attractive ones are binaristic, because then you don’t even have to provide support for your claimed position - all you have to do is find fault with the (generally falsely dichotomous) alternative.
The Post 9/11 situation with Mass Media and RT is why it’s so desperately important for a Government to not lie or cover up it’s actions. Another example of this is Al Jazeera. The US Government’s dedication to hiding its dirty deeds opened the door for AJ to establish credibility which they later used against the US and it’s Government.
instead believing everything a “communist” nation says.
Your comment is on point, but it is your username that makes it perfect
Burn the palaces, baby 😎
Kinda like how when someone finds god, they go hardcore devout-mode, only surprisingly…. More ignorant.
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.
What you are seeing in ‘tankie’ and “read theory” communities is an anti scientific epistemic style that treats ideology as a filter that outranks evidence. When they say the reasons are “complex” and involve propaganda, they are not doing ordinary source criticism that checks documents, reconciles contradictions, and updates beliefs under constraint.
In the sciences, “theory” is a deliberately fragile summary of what has survived contact with data, it must expose itself to being wrong through clear predictions, and good practice means you actively cultivate the ability to withhold belief when the evidence is thin or messy; in a lot of sociology, and especially in Marxist derived subcultures, “theory” often functions less like a falsifiable model and more like a lens, a vocabulary, or even a doctrine that tells you ahead of time what counts as evidence and what must be discounted as “ideology,” which flips the direction of inference so that evidence is recruited to serve the framework rather than constrain it.
Tankies are invoking a built in rule that inconvenient data about a favored regime can be dismissed as structurally tainted by bourgeois institutions, Western media, liberal academia, or intelligence services
That move makes the worldview functionally unfalsifiable, because counterevidence is reclassified as propaganda while any supportive anecdote is treated as proof. Historically this connects to Marxist Leninist political practice where the vanguard party claims privileged access to historical truth and where “correct line” competes with open inquiry, so truth becomes something defended for its political usefulness rather than tested for its correspondence with reality.
The Cold War did involve real propaganda and information warfare on multiple sides, and that kernel of truth gets inflated into a blanket permission slip to disregard any hostile reporting and to treat doubt as ideological contamination. Online this becomes a status ritual in which fluency in canonical texts substitutes for empiricism, and where moral anger at capitalism plus anti imperial identity incentives push people to defend any state positioned against “the West.”
The result is that atrocities are minimized, rationalized as necessary, or outright denied, not because the evidence is genuinely ambiguous but because the community’s habits convert theory into a replacement for falsifiable claims.
Yes, every tankie tells me facts are ‘propaganda’. and ‘everything is propaganda’.
Which is, as you said, a worldview in which there is no such thing as truth, facts, or objectivity. Everything is ideology and nothing can exist outside of it. It’s a form of relativism, wherein mass atrocities, oppression, and violence are totally cool, as long as it’s your side that is doing it. If the other side does it, only then is it ‘bad’.
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.
That’s a very long and convoluted way of saying “tankies treat communist theory as dogma”. As a tankie: I didn’t become a tankie by reading theory, I became a tankie by reading demonstrable facts.
I don’t support the Soviet Union because “it followed Marx and Lenin”, I support the Soviet Union because it provided universal healthcare, free education to the highest level, it abolished unemployment, it guaranteed housing and abolished homelessness, it created the lowest levels of economic inequality seen in the history of the region, it defeated Nazism and saved tens of millions from extermination, it almost tripled life expectancy and saved tens of millions from abject poverty, hunger and disease, and it gave support to emancipatory anticolonial projects everywhere in the globe. Running the numbers is not “atrocity minimization” as you claim, it’s pragmatic experimentalism.
For me, it’s actually backwards: it just so happens that the projects that in my view have achieved the most liberating and emancipatory goals in history were following Marxist doctrine, which for the unfamiliar, is explicitly materialist and experimental in nature.
It’s been fun to watch the tankies dribble in and do exactly what they are accused of. Thanks for going along with it and making everyone here’s point for them.
Your original comment (translated to understandable English from your pompous-ass style): “tankies treat theory as dogma, disregard empirical evidence and data as propaganda, and mold their worldview as a contest to see who’s more anti-western”.
My reply: “me being a tankie is actually the result of data comparisons between capitalist and AES states for the measurable empirical improvements in quality of life and the reduction in victims, together with the support for emancipatory projects elsewhere”
Your reply: “tHaNkS foR pRoViNg My PoInT”
epistemic style that treats ideology as a filter that outranks evidence
cultivate the ability to withhold belief when the evidence is thin or messy
flips the direction of inference so that evidence is recruited to serve the framework rather than constrain it
competes with open inquiry
status ritual in which fluency in canonical texts substitutes for empiricism
Imagine unironically typing like that, lmfao
do you often make a habit of mocking people for how they talk or communicate? Not very proletariat of you, elitist scum.
Surely the proletarian way of writing is overly pompous using obscure latinisms?
And no, I don’t make a habit of mocking people for how they type, my original response was detailed and serious, but when the commenter above decided to become a smug shit, I lost any reason to respect them.
CS undergrad I bet, they all talked like that when I had to share lectures with them. It’s just funny that this particular specimen is waxing on about data and evidence based thinking and not just doesn’t present any but actively ignores it since it’s in this very thread 🤣
What do you think a tankie is?
It used to mean a communist who supported the USSR’s decision to send in tanks to Hungary to protect the revolution from reactionary forces, but now it’s just a thought-terminating straw man for the modern red scare.
I wasn’t talking to you
lol comparing being a genuine communist during the red scare to your plight of being trolled on the internet by actual working class people is so out of touch.
What part is out of touch?
A red scare is manifestly happening - see Maduro being kidnapped this morning. Trump constantly talks about jailing and deporting socialists. And online, the term tankie is being used as a way to discredit and slander all communists. People are very serious about their tankie hate here.
And it’s 2025, things that happen on the internet have real impacts on IRL society.
I get that you’re just trolling me (great SLAM, btw), but if you’re actually a leftist, you might want to think about who you’re serving when you try to undermine other leftists.
Btw: tankies aren’t leftists. They are authoritarians. That’s not leftism.
The out of touch part is that you feel comfortable posting your thought crimes online while simultaneously trying to push a “tankie is the new red scare :<” narrative.
There is so much wrong with this I don’t even know where to begin. Why wouldn’t I publicly push against a the beginnings of a red scare? Especially in a leftist space?
I suspect you’re just a troll though, so I’m going to stop feeding you now.
Go read “on practice” and “on contradiction” by mao zedong. Hilarious conjecturing based purely on vibes, nothing to back anything up. The fact that you’re waxing on about tankies getting radicalised by ignoring data while ignoring every “tankie” telling their story about radicalisation in this very thread and not presenting anything to back up your steep claims makes it pure comedy.
They really keep doing this and then wonder why no one likes their tired repeated points.
More data for you to ignore I guess lmfao
they are not doing ordinary source criticism that checks documents, reconciles contradictions, and updates beliefs under constraint.
absolutely no self awareness bud
Award for least self-aware lib of 2025 goes toooo… It was a hotly contested category folks but TropicalDingdong was able to snatch it with seconds to spare
It’s a tiny fringe, just here on Lemmy they can be quite noisy 🤷
This goes for almost any obnoxious behavior on the internet. It’s about 5-10% of people who are just assholes (of whatever description), and everyone else is fine. It only seems like the whole place is jerks because of how noisy the jerks are, and how skilled they are at amping up the normal people into noisy arguments that go nowhere.
Any time you’re in one of those comments sections, take a step back and look at the number of people who are actually initiating the dickishness and you’ll see that it’s a tiny tiny minority.
not really my experience now that they have legitimate fash instances. getting Sybil downvoted is pretty hilarious though.
“Communities”
Top community: 15 subscribers, 5 users/month
I rest my case
the jerks also go around… harassing and insulting people. and like take a personal quest to ban/report you because you upset them.
normal people who disagree with you don’t do that. like i read internet comments i don’t like, laugh, and move on with my life. and if i engage in reply I’m not insulting/harassing the person, going into their comment history to report old comments, etc.
commies are eternal protesters
nice to have something to do i guess
it’s the same mindset that has “good cops” backing “bad cops” no matter what. the idea that someone like them can be wrong is an affront to lots of people, because it makes them face the reality that they could be wrong some day as well. and nobody enjoys admitting they’re wrong. so instead of thinking critically, they circle the wagons and reject anything that criticizes anyone like them.
Interesting, is it difficult for people to admit they are wrong? As someone who’s almost always wrong, I cannot fathom why it would be so hard to admit wrongness.
because it’s shameful. it invites shame and ridicule.
being correct is good. being wrong is bad. people don’t want to be bad.
being comfortable with wrongness, fault, etc, requires a lot of education and maturity that very few people ever attain. and it also requires having an ego that can tolerate the ridicule/rejection that comes with admitting fault you will receive from a lot of people, which is kind of a lonely position. admitting you are wrong is opening yourself up to social rejection.
basically if you never admit you are wrong you can hang out with other like minded morons and never feel alone and sad. hence why such communities tend to be so emotionally compelling for people, and so hard to get out of. you have to be willing to go be alone to break out of such mindsets, and as social animals, a lot of human beings are pathologically afraid of being alone.
Tribalism
They opposed one tribe so they joined another
This. Treating politics like team sports.
You can see it plainly when the defense comes up as “well your country lied about the one i like”
My dudes, they are both awful and both kill for sport and are horribly racist. That’s how they have such power to begin with.
This isnt sports. You can hate them both.
why one would deliberately praise any authoritarian system this hard.
To quote Bertrand Russell: “Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.”
To put it simply, a lot of tankies crave power but just don’t want to admit. They are simply faux concerning for their own ulterior motive. I saw a meme from one of the .ml instances stating that communism simply “wants to improve” society. But I was like: didn’t you guys suppress free elections and speech and persecuted anyone who simply disagrees at the slightest?
It’s not uncommon for many authoritarian communists to eventually become fascists, especially after the end of the Cold War. The ex-leader of Red Army faction became neo-fascist in 2000s. A local politician in my country ran on xenophobic platform, but was a member of a Marxist-Leninist party in the 1970s. All that said, it means these people simply run on whatever ideologies, so long as they can attain power for power’s sake.
Edit: grammar
like everyone else who thinks they know best, they crave the power of forcing others.
Actual answer: It’s pretty much just teens who get radicalized by youtube channels such as wow_mao, yugopnik, hakim, badempanda and most notably thedeprogram podcast, and young students joining ML/Maoist book clubs in their unis though that’s more of a hit and miss since some book clubs actually read Marx and Lenin. They have audiences in the hundreds of thousands, sometimes even millions so it’s not a “small, underground current”.
Through these communities and channels they learn what I’d describe as “falsified pop theory” that usually manifests as exclusively Stalin/Mao and out of context quotes from actual Marxists like Lenin. This results in uncritical support of China and other ML countries like Vietnam and Cuba (all of whom are bourgeois states and literally nothing about them resembles DOTP), embrace of nationalism, maoist third-worldism which is where the “unlimited genocide on the first world” comes from and just endless moralism that you’ve heard time and time again which is explicitly anti-marxist. At times, they might also show support to Islam for some reason.
If my tone sounds a bit harsh, that’s because they’ve completely bastardized marxism and just continue being more and more annoying with their “agitprop” (making communist memes and throwing them into social media void to spread “marxism” or something, revolution through reddit and lemmy), quote farming, absolute glazing of certain historical figures and just dogshit takes in general.
precisely this, I would say with a touch of “just wanting to belong”. I think a lot of people who end up in tankie circles are chronically online, and have a hard time socializing. echo chambers don’t really care, and will treat anyone who regurgitates the same talking points as an equal. maybe that’s just around here though, there’s plenty of leftists around but I have yet to see specifically ML/maoist groups that aren’t just more than reading theory. I imagine it’s easy to fall into that kinda “western country bad” thought pattern when the only people who you interact with tell you it’s righteous and justified with zero nuance.
I’m a socialist and am lucky enough to meet a lot of leftists irl, and I get along with all of them regardless of specific viewpoints. unfortunately, the people who are the loudest on lemmy aren’t the kind of people you meet walking down the street, so they end up lacking the “challenging your own ideals” bit of developing rational and sane viewpoints.
Yugopnik is a tankie? I don’t listen to deprogram, just his channel
aren’t those groups funded by China?
No, in the same way how feminists aren’t funded by The Big Feminism™, online incels aren’t funded by The Big Incel™ or Linux evangelists on Lemmy being funded by GNU project. Not everything has to do with geopolitics or geopolitical influence, it’s sometimes just a matter of ideology and communities around these ideologies.
If anything, I’d argue that ML’s are closer to being a CIA psyop than some agents of China or some shit
Saying that Hakim is almost exclusively Stalin/Mao is actually an impressively uneducated take. I’d say half of Hakim’s videos are atrocity propaganda of western imperialism, which is absolutely necessary, and I’ve learnt more about the horrors of capitalism through him than through anyone else.
Some people just have a Right Wing mindset. They’re drawn to concepts like loyalty & obedience to authority and gravitate to political doctrines that stress those values. If Communism makes economic sense to you but you’re politically uncomfortable with shallow/non-existent hierarchies or don’t feel that everyday people can be trusted with political power you gravitate towards being a ML. If you’re willing to force those views on others by threat of state violence you’re now a Tankie.
But anarchists are definitely also in favour of forcing their views on others by a threat of violence? Like, I’m a Spaniard, the anarchists famously resisted fascism in the Spanish Civil War using weapons. Projects often praised by anarchists such as the Rojava or Zapatistas also have plenty of violent power in their region, and exert it when needed to defend their project and ideology.
I don’t like your framing of “right wing essentialism” in Marxists, it sounds almost eugenicist the way you’re describing it, as “people predisposed to authoritarianism”. I’m a tankie not because I love state violence, but because the only large societies that have managed to actually collectivize the lands and resist western imperialism have been Marxist-Leninist. Failure to utilize such state repression mechanisms against fascists and capitalists is what led to the fascist coup in Spain, to the failure of the German revolution, or to the murder of Allende.
I agree with that “right wing” and “authoritarian” are two different things, but lots of people, including tankies are absolutely “predisposed to authoritarianism”. It has nothing to do with eugenics though, because the genetics behind it are universal to humanity. It’s all about how people are brought up, the social influences they encounter, and level of education.
the only large societies that have managed to actually collectivize the lands and resist western imperialism have been Marxist-Leninist.
I don’t think many non-tankies, or even anti-tankies, would disagree with this statement. However, it does seem to be a frying pan to fire situation. It’s no good escaping the grasp of “the west” if the cure is worse than the disease, and that’s almost always the case.
The Soviets are gone and modern Russia is little more than a Mafia state. China is ascendent, but it’s also growing more capitalist by the hour, and even with the current US administration, we still have more freedoms in America than in China. Whether that remains true is yet to be seen, but if America falls to authoritarianism and joins Russia as a second Mafia state, we know we can count on tankies to cheer it on, oblivious to how much worse that will be for pretty much all of humanity.
Tankie brigade incoming in 3… 2… 1…
I am all for letting people believe what they want
Until those beliefs attempt to control others who don’t share the same beliefs. That’s the limit. I don’t understand why it’s so difficult for certain groups to leave people alone.
That’s exactly the complaint against tankies. Tankies are specifically authoritarian “communists”, who defend the violent enforcement of “communism” by authoritarian states. Tankies explicitly want to control others who do not share their beliefs, that’s the material distinction between a tankie specifically and a Communist in general.
because they aren’t liberals, in the libertarian sense.
they don’t want freedom, they want control of other people. freedom of belief and others having different belief is viewed as a threat to be met with hostility. other people being different, acting different, etc is all viewed this way.
What does being a decent person have to do with political ideologies?
They can’t see that any government is going to create corruption so they picked the government they have the least experience with to side with. Of course at the heart of the tankies is a huge amount of fud being generated by russia and the ccp.
Corruption is a very generic word, can you be more specific?
Ah FUD. Its a tuerky based meat i think in the us. Its right along other lunch meat but its called FUD. It so rarely bought.
Too often these criticism’s of “tankies” involve calling questioning blatant cold war lies as tankie behavior and very often i get accused of being a tankie by both liberals and “anarchists” because i oppose the democrats its far past time to retire the word.
Pretty standard radicalization pipeline stuff I think. Groupthink gets enforced by mockery and removing dissenting views, accessible memes to get new people interested, sense of community and belonging that is conditional on being uncritical about the dogma. Everything gets framed as being about which side you are on, and discourse is seen as a means to advance the cause and not a way to consider what is true. They are visibly criticizing the US empire, people recognize that as correct and unfortunately buy into the idea that the other side must be the good guys.
I find myself endless reminding people that there isn’t always a “good guy”. Sometimes it’s bad guys vs bad guys or bad guys vs worse guys.
telling people they are bad people usually doesn’t go over well with those people.
most everybody wants to be the hero and be on the side of good. very few people actively seek to be evil, but a lot of them are totally ok doing evil if they think it’s for a greater good. mass murder and human suffering is totally justifiable if the goal of it is to advance your utopian beliefs, it’s not so justifiable for its own sake.
Yeah, this is spot on.
It’s all about playing into the bias of psychology and controlling the narrative. Truth is to be ignored, and everything/everyone is to be subordinated to the ‘cause’, which is usually a form of idealism wherein the ends justify the means, no matter how awful the consequences of the means would be.
Hence the ‘killing a few million folks is necessary for the ‘freedom’ of 100 million’ types of rationalizations.
