Many people on lemmy.ml deeply respect and admire authoritarian governments and organizations.
Iran, China, North Korea, Soviet Union…
The West has many flaws. But our flaws are nothing compared to these guys.
Iran hangs homosexuals. Iran shot 30,000 people in less than than 2 weeks. The Soviet Union had to build a fucking Iron wall to prevent people from escaping. The Soviets lied about the Chernobyl nuclear explosion. China censors the internet. China wants to eliminate Islam. North Korea is a totalitarian hellscape. Watching anime is a crime.
Why is lemmy.ml so fascinated with authoritarians?


.ml Is made by and ran by Marxist-Leninists.
Marxist-Leninism being an entirely made up bullshit ideology from Stalin to paint any and all actions he committed as “communism” or “progress to communism”.
Its also the adopted “ideology” of every self proclaimed communist state such as China, North Korea, Vietnam, etc. Any contradictions of the ideology between how these states practice it is brushed off by M-L fans as “Marxist-Leninism with <INSERT COUNTRY> characteristics”.
To a M-L fan, none of the core principles of communism actually matter, and are never actually pursued. They don’t care about::
And both hilariously and bafflingly, they will point to what benefits a respective M-L country has as “proof” that that country is following or pursuing communism, even if that country blatantly shows it refuses to adopt those big three above. They also blame the West, specifically the USA for those faux communist countries failing to achieve communism.
I.E. M-L fans fall for bread and circuses very easy as long as they’re told its a communist bread and circus
So TL;DR, .ml’s are Marxist-Leninists who don’t actually care about socialism or communism and are voluntary NPC propaganda machines for authoritarian regimes that abandoned a pursuit of communism long ago.
my favorite part was when you pointed out corruption and capitalism so rife in every country that is supposedly communist, they say it’s ‘necessary for the transition’… right.
some of them are still under the delusion that Russia still a ML state…
Eerily similar to the MAGAs who are happy to suffer the “temporary” pain of tariffs today, since it’s going to “Make Us Great” in the ill-defined future