Your position doesn’t make sense. We know that testimony on atrocity propaganda is sometimes a complete fabrication:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony

So that is one of the things worth considering, but that hypothesis isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card and needs to be weighed against other factors like the variety of sources and people involved, their history and material interests, etc.

Yes, I am saying things need to be scrutinized instead of just taken at face value if they comport with our prejudices, I apologize if that takes the wind out of your sails, but blind faith won’t lead you to good conclusions.

What did they say?

It’s nice to know there are cool people on blahaj zone. Near the start of the reddit migration I saw that there was a bit of a red scare going on there. Are things a bit better now?

Edit: I looked up that user’s comment in the modlog a yeesh, they really went whole-hog with Park’s spiel. As an aside, people say some really unhinged shit, like since then there was another comment about how the only thing to do about the DPRK is invade and diplomacy is a waste of time.

We got at least a couple of takers, and I expanded a little on some of my views. What do you think?

I should mention that one thing that probably skews matters is a prevalent thought (that I mostly agree with) among communists that the criticism of rivals of one’s state to appease liberals is not a good use of time. The reasoning goes that you aren’t really in a position to correct those problems, so spending time on these things when speaking publicly is only going to support the basis for a “left opposition” to those foreign states even if that’s not your personal aim. A version of this has been used by the FBI.

Because of this, I think your sampling might have been sabotaged by people operating on that principle, because convincing a liberal to be an anarcho-bidenist [someone who claims to be a radical but supports US foreign policy and/or the Democrats] isn’t really a useful effort.

Eh, I’ve seen errors here and there (and called them out, as you can see) but I think they are generally putting forward decent arguments with better evidence. The Yuri Gagarin stan for example is very well-read and intelligent, you just need to demonstrate good faith (and maybe catch him in a not-bad mood). Anyway, here’s the thread that I just made. Feel free to upvote for visibility, we’ll see how it goes.

Your “no u” line about how actually I am telling children’s stories doesn’t work as well as you think it does. The crux of my case is that these states aren’t monoliths and potemkin villages but actually have complex internal politics where people of varying viewpoints are able to openly disagree and protest, as is observably true in these countries! Not everyone in the Russian legislature supports the war, and they generally did okay with this position. There are all sorts of left/right debates in China among various politicians and journalists and so on. To call this kabuki theater or totally inconsequential without any actual evidence is silly.

Also your timeline is bad. The Great Famine ended circa '61 and the Cultural Revolution began in '66. The Cultural Revolution certainly had its issues, but it didn’t cause a famine. Deng did end the Cultural Revolution, sort of, but only after Mao’s death and the purging of the Gang of Four (prior to Deng’s re-ascent).

As an aside, I don’t think Deng was ever imprisoned in connection to the Cultural Revolution, though he was half-purged and assigned to menial duties in one case and basically paid leave in another. It’s quite interesting how pissed Mao and his clique were at Deng and yet they held their hand, relatively speaking. Wasn’t it supposed to be a death sentence to oppose Mao, as the liberals tell it? Of course, Mao took pride in trying to rehabilitate people (even the last Chinese Emperor and captured Japanese soldiers!), so he would in almost all cases resist having someone killed or left to rot in prison.

There’s a wild bias in western media in trying to make a Khrushchev out of Deng, but Deng himself vociferously refuted those comparisons while in office, calling Khrushchev a fool, a traitor, and so on, and saying that being compared to Khrushchev was an insult (which is true).

That’s a little heartening. Lemmygrad is aware of this thread, but I’ll try to word the post to not tip my hand too too much, and then I’ll link it back here and you can watch it (actually, you can post in it if you want since you’re on a lemmy.ml account, but that’s up to you).

Let me tell you from experience that sometimes people only look ridiculous because of prejudices we are bringing into the interaction (though some people are ridiculous).

Should I include Russia or is that too easy?

As an aside in the meantime, what do you make of the fact that I am quite willing to talk about negative elements despite being a “tankie”?

Your comment got removed before I saw it. If you’d like to give it another shot, I guess maybe check the modlog to see what rule you broke and reword it a little.

You are pushing in the direction of “he said/she said”. If I made a thread over on lemmygrad and actually asked about this, would you accept that as evidence?

The beliefs of Marxism / Leninism . . . or any of their offshoots (i.e communism / socialism)

I suppose it’s just a matter of syntax, but I first read this as a very silly statement wherein “communism” is an offshoot of “Marxism / Leninism”.

Anyway, don’t worry, I’m familiar with the “real Marxism has never been tried!” line that some people have for various reasons, but I a) can’t see how this is particularly useful as a distinction compared to other states and b) don’t think this remotely answers my question.

I think you and I both know why the so-called marxists who say “real Marxism has never been tried” exist, or at least our beliefs on the matter are a close enough parallel that it’s not a very enticing discussion, but what you have failed to do is explain the basic prompt of why a westerner would support a state like China.

I can give an internally-consistent answer for these groups and yourself coming to their beliefs: You all live to varying degrees in a bubble of western Discourse and pseudo-historical mythmaking.

The “never been tried” Marxist believes everything the State Department says about its enemies but still believes in some sort of ever-failing communism like a good little Trot because they are, for the time being and in part motivated by their social position, appalled by what capitalism has wrought even in the imperial core and want something better even if they struggle to conceive what that could be in practical terms, since every success of socialism has been transmuted into an ultimate failure. Nonetheless, “there must be an alternative,” and that possibility, however hazy, is worth fighting for over the corrupt establishment.

The liberal believes everything the State Department says about its enemies and comes to the reasonable conclusion (if we assume the State Department is honest) that socialism has failed its many chances and therefore “there is no alternative”. They are more likely to have a higher social position than the previous group because it is much easier to say capitalism works when it works for you.

The “tankie” is typically the worst off of the three groups in social position, with long term prospects that look pretty grim, and this has pushed them into a desperation to find a way to improve their prospects since they can’t afford a hazy future and communalist circle-jerking but the invisible hand of the free market would crush them even faster, so they do something that these other groups are not driven to, which is some level of serious research, and by this means they were able to accept that the State Department lies as often as it speaks and that they have been born into the slightly unnerving position of being nestled in the imperial core as the empire runs roughshod over as much of the world as it can. Whether they simply concluded that states like Russia or Iran were plainly the lesser of two evils for their opposition to NATO, or they found a more extreme position like genuinely believing in the project of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, they were able to develop a framework that gives them a path forward where previously they felt they had none.

Of course, various biographical details can also be vitally important, like being the descendant of defectors vs generic diaspora, or knowing people who are. I’m white as the driven snow, but I know Chinese people from both groups. The “tankie” one didn’t persuade me on very much (though I learned a lot about the Korean War and various elements of the 20th century PRC) but the diaspora descendant taught me things that I still am trying to process, because they made genuinely ridiculous claims (e.g. Mao burning down libraries during the Civil War) that I have not been able to find repeated by even the most ridiculous anti-PRC rag when I search online. There’s a bizarre sort of cult to intergenerational trauma that seems to emerge where stories are embellished and exaggerated over time (deliberately or not) and the truth of these stories cannot be questioned because, in so many words, “it’s their truth.”

I meant it when I said I’m still processing it, because to me it’s in many respects a bizarre behavior even though it’s actually not that hard to explain sociologically (view it like religious trauma and it’s trivially simple). I think there is more to learn from it, but I couldn’t tell you what.

Pardon me, I thought you were responding to a different comment (I was replying in my inbox to many different disputes). Seeing the actual context, this is ridiculous. You accuse me of being a paid actor and then say that you have no reason to present evidence of the accusation?

Let us imagine that I was a paid actor and would behave exactly as you expect. Aren’t there other people reading the conversation? Wouldn’t it be worth proving to them that you aren’t just going on paranoid rants because your ideology has no way to deal with the concept of westerners freely disagreeing with you on these issues?

You can visit North Korea and never see their work camps either.

Firstly, there is much more restriction on tourist movement in the DPRK for a litany of reasons, mostly pertaining to national security. Tourists in Xinjiang can move pretty freely, though if they are going all over the place they will cumulatively need to pass through many checkpoints.

Secondly, “work camps” here is what people call prison labor in Bad Country. The DPRK has prisons, certainly, and we can have discussions about penal labor, but it’s much less notable than people pretend and much less secretive as well.

Thirdly, “work camps” are not remotely comparable to committing genocide against one tenth of the entire population of the region, which is the claim that was popularly made against Xinjiang before it got walked back to “cultural genocide”.

Such fierce condescension and yet you’re the one pushing a children’s story. All these hundreds and thousands of representatives, all the millions of Party members, are just puppets under the Bad Guy’s control. There was no violence to install him, the existing government put him there (since I assume you don’t endorse Chinese elections) and then he played an Uno Reverse and now they are all an extension of him, with all of Chinese politics then becoming merely being a matter of how much people chaff under the collars and fetters he fixes to them. When politicians fight each other? When journalists fire back and forth in the papers? When policy goes one way and then pivots? It’s all just a Potemkin Village with a few hundred million people as the staff.

So no, “someone like me” cannot understand how such a thing could exist outside of a children’s cartoon or a similar sort of story told to an audience that is very much suspending its disbelief.

And yet surely these people must have a reason to believe it, don’t they? Even if one assumes they are wrong, this doesn’t just come from nowhere, it must have some cause to seem reasonable to them, right? They are like you, thinking human beings, and no progress can be made in understanding the disagreement if you start from them being, in so many words, intellectually inferior to you.

There are literally pictures of bloodshed.

Not in the Square itself, which was the scene of many absurd claims by defectors, like the “tanks crushing people to wash them down the gutters” cartoon bullshit.

Here are interviews with some of the leaders of the protest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vu3zmbFGwQA

You say this and yet, what videos? How many have you actually watched vs assumed were there vs read the headline? I’ve seen a bunch of photos and videos and all of them were either hoaxes (calling normal buildings camps), ridiculous misunderstandings (like saying the screeching of brakes was screaming victims), or gross misrepresentations (e.g. normal prison transfers being a slate of new genocide victims). But if you just skim through what just so happens to trend on Reddit, you’ll see atrocity after atrocity and not stick around long enough to see the retraction, or the people in the comments debunking it, and so on.

There’s a reason neoliberal outlets walked their claims back to “cultural genocide” over time, because there was nothing there except the testimony of like three people from a region of 15 million.

Yes, thank you for being understanding. I think it’s better to avoid calling people brainwashed because – as one liberal in this thread pointed out – it denies agency which our interlocutors plainly do have which makes them much more responsible for their bad epistemology than the theory of “brainwashing” allows for.

If we want to persuade people – and I’ve seen that you have incredible enthusiasm for that cause! – we must do our best to meet them where they actually are rather than where we imagine them to be.

I’ll get off my soapbox here, I just wanted to mention it. I wish you all the best in your efforts!

You’re changing the question, I mean the Chinese government and so did you in your previous comment. I’m sure you’re aware that “tankies” don’t just give a blanket endorsement of, for example, patriarchal social norms in China, and believe there are many cultural elements which must be the object of struggle. One must conclude that you didn’t include that because it was beyond the scope of your claim when you said “China”.

What was that about bad faith?

That claim is mutually exclusive with Taiwan being “its own nation” distinct from China. It is definitionally its own government, but it claims to be a superset of the nation of China (because of also claiming Mongolia and some smaller territories). Nations are a social construct based on historical group identities, so the PRC is the same nation as the ROC was back when the ROC controlled the mainland. The ROC claims to still be that nation (plus Mongolia) which the PRC currently administers.

There’s no substance to this, you have no evidence and merely impugn my character.