Why make/go to another political echo chamber over potentially getting "ratio'd" (which is meaningless and doesnt say anything about one's argument). Anyone has the right to post something no matter what people around think. Posting all this on an instance that would be INSTANTLY defederated by instances like lemmygrad is pointless and we'd just end up with less debate and more polarization.
Hey, I just wanted to clarify something because I wasn't sure from reading your comment, but Lemmygrad federates with everyone by default, except instances that have caused us troll waves in the past. We federate with e.g. lemmy.one and beehaw.org, but they instantly blocked us on day one.
They did indeed, but as you are fully aware, the Taliban's rule of Afghanistan is currently very friendly with China and Russia, and is very staunchly anti-american
No thanks. I don't give a fuck about getting ratio'd. Let the people decide. Assuming this platform ever gets more traction, which it seems to be doing, the vast majority of the people that come here won't be tankies so... no, no I don't think I will go somewhere else.
One of the main reasons I've switched over to feddit.de. Hope more instances have the sense to block servers that are openly pro-imperialism and pro-totalitarianism.
Because they don't engage in good faith. Right and 'left' fascists don't value truth as anything more than a tool.
That's why it's so easy for them to switch from (say) genocide denial on the issue of China and its genocide of populations in Xinjiang, Tibet, Outer Mongolia, and throughout the (Artificial and Imperialist) borders of the state.
Because they will often come into a conversation knowing full well that what's happening is a genocide. But since their objective isn't to reach truth, their argumentation doesn't reflect the things they know.
It's one of the recurring traits of Fascism- Disdain for reality. The way this trait is shared by reactionary authoritarians like those who run the Chinese state is quite telling about the nature of these 'left' authoritarian ideologies.
The 'left' is in quotes here because these groups are something-phobic, socially reactionary and abusive as often as not.
@xTechDeath Because you were in the above thread; probably just has something to do with how #Mastodon includes mentions in replies, I didn't add or remove anyone to my responses here
"There are only two positions in the world, mine and an extreme caricature of some awful opposite" is not a particularly useful place to get started on good faith argument.
What you call caricature is reality. I am not a western neoliberal and I have every reason to push back against western chauvinism. Largely, there are two positions in the world, one being Anglo imperialism and the other is rest of world that suffers from it. Nuances are a secondary concern. Hairsplitting distractions stopped working long ago.
I am tired of how malicious people are, that purposely believe lies about Tiananmen Square and Tankman and even go ahead to spread them, frankly speaking. There is a CNN Crew footage since the past 9-10 years where no "Tankman" ever got crushed. There are fingerprints everywhere regarding CIA's involvement in Tiananmen incident, and how "democratic students" were paid in scholarships, vacation trips and other means to cause havoc. There are photos of those terrorists burning Chinese soldiers, vehicles and infrastructure first, which was responded to by PLA soldiers aptly.
You can only ever have good faith arguments with people who do not go "see see poo poo" the moment they hear China.
I have done no such thing lol. I’ve made two comments one making fun of the guy that said china isn’t part of world news and this one. Your comment trying to paint me in this light just reeks of desperation or the inability to read
So posting one article about china bad is an influx of new users with a predominantly western liberal mindset echoing the corporate media narrative. Seems like a bit of a reach.
If someone posted some bad shit about USA nobody would give af and would mostly agree, you just seem like you don’t want anything critical of china
Indeed, the "they're all a bunch of tankies over there" narrative is one of the more common objections I see to Lemmy when I mention it as a valid Reddit alternative over on Reddit. Bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, mind you - we need non-tankies to balance things out. Here's hoping that there's enough new blood coming in anyway to manage that.
Meanwhile in Taiwan, the island's equivalent of the Tiananmen massacre from the KMT dictatorship (the 228 incident) has its own memorial park and museum.
No need for a self-inflicted legitimacy crisis when you respect your citizens' basic rights.
When USA can have a China puppet government, just like US puppet DPP exists in Taiwan (part of China BTW), we can talk about legitimacy crisis. I wonder if Confederate States once again united to divide USA, how would Americans talk to outsiders having nuanced conversations, considering, losing to China in all kinds of fields already makes their citizens wish for nukes.
If you're not Taiwanese yourself (i.e., one of the people who's actually affected by what happens there), I definitely don't care about your opinion on this topic.
One of the big instances, Lemmygrad, is basically dedicated to that crowd. If the influx of Reddit refugees doesn't counterbalance them then at some point I'll probably move to an instance that doesn't federate with them.
It's a large number, but it's hard to tell how large because the CPC keeps that information tightly under wraps. The official statement claimed just 200, but recently declassified diplomatic cables from the UK give an estimate of 10,000 dead (source). The original source was inside China's State Council. It's important to remember that the actions taken that day were far from universally supported even inside the party. There was a massive purge afterward of officials that were deemed to be sympathetic to the protestors.
Edit: This estimate likely has fog of war issues itself, though, since it was sent so shortly after the massacre. Other estimates are far lower, but still much higher than the official figures. The CPC does not want to admit the extent that it screwed up and killed its own citizens.
10,000 is absurd and it's a disgrace that the absolute bullshit reporting that some hack journos gave at the time is still treated credibly. Do you think there were machine guns on roofs and tanks deliberately pulping bodies, too?
That's what I said in the edit. That said, the CPC really isn't helping the situation. They have shown themselves to be highly untrustworthy when it comes to any level of transparency.
Citation: Other stories as-covered by western media. The CPC has censorship laws, but when they actually publish official statistics on something, those are pretty accurate. Their estimate on Tiananmen fatalities is much more like the statistics published by most journalists than the 10k number or even that hack's revised 2k - 3k count, and their accounting of events is much more like the ones that have held up over time among western journalists (the square was cleared without killings, there weren't machine guns on rooftops, most protestors left peacefully, there was no mulching of corpses, etc.)
There were many estimates from western press at the time that were in the realm of reason, those claiming it was a few hundred dead. There's no excuse for the 10k guy unless you want to argue he suffers from hallucinations.
You're essentially relying on cultural osmosis from the same culture that uncritically parrots the 10k figure and other such nonsense that you see spouted on Reddit. If you keep digging, eventually you will find that just about every story holding up that Ba Sing Se vibe is a fabrication.
There’s no excuse for the 10k guy unless you want to argue he suffers from hallucinations.
There's a pretty good excuse. He was told a piece of information by a source
You’re essentially relying on cultural osmosis from the same culture that uncritically parrots the 10k figure and other such nonsense that you see spouted on Reddit.
I brought that specific one up because I found it first, but walked it back when I found out it was unreliable. But more broadly, I'm looking at hundreds of citizens being killed by their own government. In the US, the closest to that was race riots against Black people that ended a hundred years ago. We're not censoring discussion of them and there are efforts to reconcile with the nation's past, even if some dullards don't want their precious feelings hurt.
There’s a pretty good excuse. He was told a piece of information by a source
Oh, "a source" gave him information that was completely incongruous with any observation made by people on the ground? It sure seems like using "a source" to launder absolute bullshit would be effective if it can merely be brushed off after the fact, so it's a good thing western rags don't do that constantly.
I brought that specific one up because I found it first, but walked it back when I found out it was unreliable
That's the lovely thing about anglosphere propaganda, you don't need to censor the truth (well, mostly) so long as you make your version of a story a thousand times more accessible than the other versions of that story.
But more broadly, I’m looking at hundreds of citizens being killed by their own government.
Remember the death total there includes soldiers, and we are talking about militants who killed unarmed soldiers clashing with the PLA, with students being deliberately driven into the crossfire by student leaders.
In the US, the closest to that was race riots against Black people that ended a hundred years ago.
If we mean "against their own citizens" then, uh, sure, I acknowledge that the types of conflict the US is involved in is very different from what China does. China fights off color revolutionaries domestically while the US kills millions abroad, an unknowable number of migrants, and is in a constant process of lynching black people and occasionally protestors to those lynchings.
We’re not censoring discussion of them
Are you kidding? There've been ongoing efforts for the country's history to censor discussions even just of chattel slavery in schools, to say nothing about how talking about the summary executions otherwise referred to as "officer-involved shootings" are basically considered satanic CRT material and any attempt to call the no-note-"suicide"-by-hanging of BLM organizers a lynching when the cops say otherwise makes you a conspiracy theorist.
Can you imagine if this happened just once in China? An ethnic minority pretty much ritually murdered in the form of historic violence against that ethnicity, written off as "suicide" and brushed under the rug with no further contest, despite of protests from the victims' parents that the thesis makes no sense.
and there are efforts to reconcile with the nation’s past
The current head of state, the leader of the so-called left wing party, is an unrepentant segregationist who justified his actions with a "states' rights" argument as recently as, like, 2019 (and he just hasn't been challenged on it since). Do you think the dashiki stunt helped us towards reconciliation? There is no effort to "reconcile" with shit. There's an allowance for more black drone pilots, but reparations or even just basic restitution for the destruction and theft wrought on black communities is a pipe dream.
China teaches about the June 4th incident in its schools, it's a matter of public knowledge, and claims to the contrary are made by ignorant redditors who read 1984 and just kind of imagine what China's domestic policy is based on vibes.
I'm not sure I understand China's reactions here... if nothing happened, then why not just let them congregate and "remember" something that supposedly didn't happen? What's the harm? If they were blocking traffic or riots were involved, it would understandable to want to stop it, but if it's peaceful, where's the harm? Unless of course, something did happen that they want people to forget...
China doesn't say nothing happened, what they say is that counter revolution happened, and it was effectively suppressed. Why would you let someone celebrate the equivalent of an extremist movement?
Effectively suppressed by tanks and rifles? What exactly is the problem with acknowledging what happened if it can be seen as a deterent for future counter-revolutionaries?
China didn't have anti protest gear at that time, that's why they took tanks over there, there weren't any of those trucks that shoot water and the like, basically what they had where guns and the military since the police wasn't that well equipped. And as I said in me previous comment, they do acknowledge it, as a counterrevolutionary movement that must be stopped. Think about it in the same way that how the US handled the Black Panthers, they were basically risking the status quo (the bourgeoisie staying in power) and they effectively suppress them through different means.
Right, the point I was trying to make was; they acknowledge that people died in the protest (300 or whatever it is), so what exactly is the issue and necessity to deny what happened? Why this obsession with "setting the record straight" when there is nothing really to refute?
It wasn't a massacre of peaceful students, but a skirmish between PLA soldiers and armed detachments from the pro-capitalist / free market reform movement. The protest movement, as evidenced by their own accounts, called for market liberalisation, and free market reforms, rallying around a replica of the statue of liberty. After the movement had been building in the square for seven weeks, unarmed soldiers were sent in to disperse the protesters, after which many soldiers were beaten to death, torched, and lynched. The New York Times death count went from 2600, to many thousands, to 8000, to tens of thousands. In reality only around ~200 (including soldiers) were killed or trampled, in smaller clashes outside the square. The on-scene New York Times reporter disavowed the article, especially about machine-gunning of protesters. A wikileaks cable from a US ambassador to the US state department, confirmed that no killings or machine-gunnings took place in the square.
Well, one could say it doesn't make sense to let people rally nowadays for this, since there's probably counter intelligence funding that's propelling the massification of this news and so on, so why would you let some people go and complain that you suppressed a US coup d'Etat attempt?
So you argue that the massacre makes sense, that it is fair for the Chinese government to kill whoever took part in the protest. I just don't understand why denying the extent or rationalizing it through 'they attacked first', when killing counter revolutionaries seems to be a completely valid reason for killing people who took part
How many colonies does China have? How many countries has it invaded? How many wars has waged?
Fascists like you and followers of the capitalist death cult can only say this: Tibet, because they drove the feudal lords and dalai lama paedophiles; Taiwan, because the bourgeois dictatorship claimed that land as theirs, as if it isn't historically all one China, a similar story with Malvinas, I guess you also think they belong to the British; Hong Kong, which was a British colony but for some twisted reason you think they should be it's own thing, because again it historically has not belong to China; the Uyghur thing, which even Western sources deny and/or doubt of its veracity and which was propelled by a right-wing organisation pro US imperialism; and delirious ideas about China being "imperialist" in Africa or South America because it trades with them and builds infrastructure, instead of providing bogus "financial aids" which then end up in the hands of US puppets like you did in Argentina with IMF funds. So basically all of the "imperialism" you claim is China trying to recover its historical territories lost in the process of the proletarian revolution.
Meanwhile, I don't see any of the likes of you denouncing the plethora of colonies Europe and the US has been having and continue having for centuries. Why are you no so openly in favour of a Hawai'ian independence movement but you are so fervently obsessed with China? I know why, because you have fascists freudian slips and you can't even realise about it yourself, since you live surrounded by people who justify themselves, and you have never interacted with a person from the Global South that's not a fascist. By the way, the things I'm telling you, this is not "tankie" stuff, I have Peronists friends, Trotskyists friends, and all over the spectrum in Argentina, and they all know what you people say is complete and utter disgusting, the thought that everyone agrees with this kind of thought is something only maintained in first world imperialist countries. Don't fool yourself.
I feel like our focus on the 20th century really limits our understanding of the depths of human depravity.
This is an image of two Assyrian soldiers forcing a captured Babylonian to grind the bones of his family.
And you might say "Wow, that's a really mean thing to say about the Assyrians!" No, this is them bragging about doing it in immortal stone form.
This wasn't printed out on a laser printer, it wasn't etched using a laser engraver. It probably took weeks or months to lovingly create this work. They were really proud of their depravity and wanted to share it with the world.
Hey, tankies, decent countries don't have to violently suppress their populations and then lie about it. Oh, and socialism is worker ownership of the means of production, not whatever the fuck they're doing in China.
(inb4 people assuming I must support the US since I hate China)
Yeah, China doesn't do those things, like UK arresting anti-monarquie protestors. Or Canada arresting truckers. Or France arresting people who doesn't want to work untill they die....
One thing western liberals will never understand is that once you branch out into the world, and really have the opportunity to live and experience the customs of difference societies, you'll quickly realize that different countries have 'vastly' different ideas about what they believe their relationship to the government should be.
I'll never forget the British chick on some UK television program, that was stumped by an ISIS sympathizer in the UK when she asked him "what happens to most people who don't want to obey the law in your country?," and he replied back, "what happens to most people who don't want to obey the law of Britain? 'They get arrested'." She froze on the panel and got dead silent, before pivoting to something else.
Saying "decent countries" clearly has a perverse slip within the thought, the idea of a collective I in the our countries and an objectifying negation of the I in the other group. Basically good ol' civilisation and barbarians. The same rhetoric you and your people have been using to oppress me and my third world brothers and sisters all around the world. You really think you need to do the missionary work of educating the beasts, don't you?
Well. The person you replied to is a moron IMO, but I can kind of see what he's saying. 'Decent' can 'potentially' be a reasonable standard by seeing the way that people vote with their feet. American citizens aren't looking to escape the US to get into Afghanistan, but plenty of Afghan's would love to escape into the American heartland if they had the opportunity. 'Godless secular republic', all things considered.
What he wouldn't understand is that the US was a leading forerunner that explains why that country remains an undeveloped shithole in the first place.
There's a difference between a country that has a monopoly on violence and can use that for enforcement, compared to a state that responds to people just making their voices heard with cannons and guns. A cat nipping my fingers is annoying. A lion gnawing my head off is deadly.
The crackdown wasn't against the peaceful protestors who they let just kind of do their thing under supervision for somewhere around 6 weeks despite it basically being the equivalent of the section of Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House. The CPC became less friendly as it became aware of NED bullshit and, critically, unarmed soldiers being immolated and lynched by militants who were using naive protestors as cover. The CPC nonetheless gave everyone some time to clear out (I forget the time table but I think it was 24 - 72 hours) and even once it was over the deadline they didn't just start blasting.
The problem with this is that we don't really know if it's true. It's the CPC's official story, but they've created an atmosphere so hostile to truth or transparency that it's not trustworthy.
I do. Where's the Chinese equivalent to the FOIA that allows citizens to force officials to release documents? There isn't one, because the CPC doesn't value that type of accountability.
That goalpost was moved so far the astronomy should go into that. There's a lot of links posted here, but from previous conversations you have unique ability of completely ignoring everything, so what's even the point?
See, this is a sort of epistemic nihilism that is used for question-begging the western narrative. I give you a counterproposition and you say "Well the CPC is so untrustworthy that we just can't know that that's true!"
Which part do you doubt? That the protest had been going on for many weeks? We have contemporaneous reports. That the CPC wasn't very hostile to the protestors for most of that period? We have footage of the protestors and unarmed soldiers coexisting -- sometimes even having something of a fun time together, each group singing songs!
We have photographs of the lynched corpses, with the protestors idly looking on (because what else could they do?). We have contemporaneous reporting on the CPC setting a deadline for the square to be fled. We have footage of one of the more radical student leaders, Chai Ling, saying that she will deliberately direct her clique to stay (even as she flees) so that they will shed blood.
We have a smaller amount of footage of the night itself, but that tells us many things. For example, there was a protestor (not a student) who was on a high-profile hunger strike. He negotiated the peaceful evacuation of a group of students who didn't quite realize what they were signing up for by staying. We also have some distant footage of the fighting in the surrounding area (because the square itself didn't see violence, as even western journalists confirmed).
The 1984 narrative Reddit spoonfeeds people is incredibly flimsy, even if all you do is look at reporting from Brits, Americans, and Germans.
Speaking of, have you ever watched the full Tank Man video? You can find it on Youtube quite easily. If you haven't seen it, please do me a favor and predict what happens and write it down for yourself -- no need to show anyone else, myself included. Then, watch what happens and compare that to your guess. I think you will find it to be an interesting exercise.
It also precludes the fact that prior to State formation and complex agriculture, tribal society wasn't exactly all that peaceful either. Violence is fundamental to human behavior.
Being human means that by our very nature, we possess the ability to change our nature. Just because violence is part of who we are doesn't mean it has to be a part of who we become.
Nature is violence, but its arguably more about cooperation. especially in highly social species like us.
Being human means that by our very nature, we possess the ability to change our nature. Just because violence is part of who we are doesn’t mean it has to be a part of who we become.
True, but I'd suggest that to anyone looking at the weight of history, it's far beyond any doubt to make the correct observation that people 'tend' to. Simply sort of hand-waving it away and saying "well there's no law of nature that says it has to be that way," to me is analogous to saying "yeah, and there's no law of nature that says we couldn't build an elevator to the moon, either."
Nature is violence, but its arguably more about cooperation. especially in highly social species like us.
Eh, I'd say this is debatable. I'm not saying cooperation isn't part of who we are, but humanity's overwhelming tendency to indolence explains why violence is often a consideration that makes its way through our minds at the first pass. Most people don't have a respect for the law out of high minded morality or a desire to be cooperative. They obey it because they're afraid of violent social retribution. Human beings are moral scavengers driven by opportunity and prudence, 'more' than, but not exclusively, moral ideals out of a sake of 'doing the right thing'.
It's always easier to beat a child than it is to raise it. It's always easier to steal money than it is to earn it. It's always easier to cheat your way through your work, than to do it the correct way. I don't see that attitude changing anytime soon. But I don't disagree with the core point I think you're getting at.
Well, aside from that violence does still exist outside of states as you say, it was to explain my earlier comment about all states being violent, since their role is to mediate class antagonisms, which has historically manifested as the owning classes keeping the bulk of the working classes in a state of desperation for the sake of manipulating bartering power.
Right. I understand the point. But it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone to think State’s exercise violence in a much greater capacity, because State’s are much more powerful than individuals.
To me it’s a criticism that ranks right up there with the complaint that State’s are inherently dishonest, and they are, to be sure. But if State’s are inherently violent/dishonest, it’s only because people are inherently violent and dishonest. That’s something that sits at the root of what humans are, and by extension, wraps itself up in qualms of everything humans do and create for themselves.
Cooperation is definitely a part of who we are, to be sure. My whole point though is that if you look at civilization, their existence isn’t a spontaneous occurrence, despite the fact that civilizations require an ‘enormous’ level of cooperation to sustain themselves. It isn’t ‘natural’, in that sense. Cooperation follows coercion, which is needed to keep the peace, just as it’s more easily and eagerly used to conduct violence.
It always frustrates me a little when people look at a problem and say "that's just how things are." Here it's the thing about humans being violent. In a trivial sense, that is true, but I think that obfuscates that in most situations violence has a set of politically-meaningful sources, even if it's personal violence. Being beaten as a child, being forced into crime, being taught that violence is appropriate to protect your "pride", the Other being dehumanized, the list goes on.
Except that's not my argument. I'm not simply hand-waving it away, washing my hands of it and saying, "well that's just how people are." I'm saying that when you contend with the weight of history, you have a massive burden of proof to overcome to sustain that proposition.
Of course humans have the capacity to be both malevolent and benevolent, cooperative and competitive, good 'and' bad. You're not going to see me disagree that our violent characteristics get stimulated much more vigorously than our cooperative side. But the question I put to you, is why does that have a much stronger purchase on guiding our behavior than the alternative? It's because it's more expedient, as far as our nature is concerned. All State's do as a matter of conduct is amplify those same traits humans have; in much stronger form and with much greater reach. I'm all for blunting the darker side of humanity, but it takes political mechanisms, coercion, and yes, the implied threat of violence to drive that mode of conduct. The same things that State's need to exercise military violence against others.
People entertain a lot of contradictions in their lives. They believe 'far' too much of the moral marketing bullshit they run on themselves, and will endlessly salivate over their high minded moral ideals, and accomplishments, whatever have you. But in practice, 'nobody actually believes this'. Because anybody that thinks most people are good, will never voluntarily leave their social security card on the ground, expecting to pick it up right where they found it an hour later. For the same reason, I'm not going to tell you who I am. Where I work. Or post my credit card details in this comment. And guess what, 'neither are you'. Nobody 'actually' believes that. Even if I don't think you're a bad guy, just as the model of science is skepticism because the alternative is unintelligible, socially, I have to work with the model of distrust because it fits the general situation far 'easier' than the alternative. If you walked into 100% of situations with the model of full cooperation and trust, you'd be taken advantage of by everyone in your workplace; you'd believe all sorts of garbage and nonsense, and you'd be hollowed out and hung out to dry. And that generalizes. From the individual, to the State.
If you believe that State's are inherently violent (I do) but people are inherently cooperative (I don't), then it should be the easiest thing in the world to get all the right people into power. But it isn't.
I call bullshit on this view of the things. I have no desire to explain in detail but I lived in one of those countries and my dad was in front of those tanks.
I replied to the guy who wanted evidence that my dad was in front of the communist tanks. I never said it was in China, I said I lived in one of those countries, which in this case was Poland. I thought this is Worldnews so we don't only talk about China.
But Ok, for some reason it got deleted by the moderator. I see. I guess it's best to block that instance from my side, my involvment doesn't lead to anything here.
Nice job trying to justify the Tiananmen Square massacre. Now can you justify the detention of 32 people and the restriction of the square itself which took place yesterday?
I plan on actively posting to counter the constant barrage of tankie propaganda that is very clearly an issue here. Misinformation is a very real issue that we face in our society and unless we actually do something about it, it will only continue to get worse.
@Senokir In general they are, at the very least, hostile to folks who do so. It's a main reason I use #Lotide (via narwhal.city) rather than #Lemmy (although there are newer #Lemmy instances out there now that I'm considering joining eventually)
It is my understanding that that has been the case for a long time, yes. But I also hope that with the large influx of new users that we will overshadow any bad actors attempting to spread misinformation.
There were words like "sl**" that where normal words in Danish or something like that, which caused issues with multi language stuff, that's why it was removed.
@gary_host_laptop In any case, I'm not salty about it, because it's now configurable (which it always should have been IMHO), just using it as an example to point out the bias and pro-censorship leanings of those running the #Lemmy software project, who I believe are also running lemmy.ml unless something changed recently
It is a very real issue so it'd be nice if you'd stopped doing it yourself. Also this is not world news, this is a China news, world news is not whatever the US and its European eunuchs oppose to.
I’m not saying there can’t be news about China, what I’m saying, and I’ve seen this a multitude of times, is that there is something that Usonians and Europeans do a lot, is that they post news about their countries as if they would be the world. In my book “World News” means something the entire world should care about, not just the Anglosphere and Europe, the description seems just a silly thing to put as a placeholder, at least that’s how it has always worked in this community, news that the entire world cares about. It is a good rule that something global would involve at least 2 countries, or some event that it is really worth mentioning, like a natural disaster in some country, etc.
@gary_host_laptop Now that's a fair point. I generally dont love the designation of "world news" to anything not happening in the #USA. Over at narwhal.city, where I'm basically the head mod, there's only one news community, @News. If you wanna post American news there, fine, but foreign news is just as appropriate.
Well, I didn't mean that you cannot post about anything regarding the US, for example if the US would achieve something like a nation wide legalisation of abortion again, I think that's something worth noting of posting here, since it's something the global population of people who can give birth would appreciate, or if it's something that involves the US and some other country doing whatever (positive or negative thing). I like the idea of having a place to look for news that involve the world because you tend to see thing you may not see otherwise, specifically news about countries that don't have many internet users, specifically in a platform where the main language is English, where otherwise it would get filled with mostly news regarding Anglo-speaking countries, specifically in an instance that tries to be general purpose and "international" in some way. I think it also makes sense that your instance's community works that way, since it's probably a smaller community. Also having specific subs for countries news makes it so that they have more attention even from people not native to that country, and allow me to see the countries I'm interested.
I gave reputable sources for my information. Please enlighten my as to how spreading this news and reminding everyone of the very real Tiananmen Square massacre that occurred on June 4th, 1989 is misinformation.
Here you have a list of different types of media that talk about what happened, in short it was a counter revolution backed by the bourgeoisie where they tried to basically bring back the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and overthrown the dictatorship of the proletariat. I don't think we're going to get to any conclusion because you already seem to have the neoliberal capitalist ideology too ingrained in your mind, which is okay I guess. I really don't care about what you believe, but what I do think is reasonable is that this is not world news. It's always what about, what about with you liberals. What about China, what about North Korea, what about Cuba, but why don't you try and look a little bit under your own rug? Because there seems to be quite a bit of hidden corpses in your back lawn, they smell disgusting and you try to hide it with other countries inner struggles. If the world were to mass shit post like you people do every time an anniversary of a massacre, repression, illegal occupation or invasion, pillaging and destruction of a country, slavery and what not you have committed, every day would be memorial day of the countless atrocities you have committed. Let's be a little less hypocrites, no country is perfect, but the US and Wester Europe are at the top list of the worst, so don't come pretending like you are beacons of democracy and hope. In the Global South, where I live, you are considered butchers and beasts.
This is a literal video of some news broadcast of the time, it records throughout most of the time and it's boring as hell, nothing happens, a few injured people and some tanks in the end. There are more dead people when the G20 comes to Latin America to do neoliberalism.
That's what i'm saying. If you don't believe chinese media (for whatever reason, racism probably), you can look at the stuff non-chinese reporters filmed there.
Okay, let's go through this slowly and rationally.
First of all, this community is self described as being "News from around the world!" China is a part of the world and this is news from China. This is news from around the world. If you are trying to insinuate that any post involving news from China does not belong in this community then why did you not seem to take issue with this post that was also about China and was posted in this community?
Clearly you take issue with the fact that this news paints China in a bad light, not with the fact that it is about China to begin with. So your claim of "I really don’t care about what you believe, but what I do think is reasonable is that this is not world news." VERY CLEARLY does not hold water.
Let's move onto the next issue that I have with your thought process. You just spent quite some time defending the Tiananmen Square massacre and didn't even respond in any way to the actual news article that I posted which is about restricting access to the physical location and detaining 32 people. This isn't just a post saying "it's the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre" which you seem to be defending.
You also state "It’s always what about, what about with you liberals. What about China, what about North Korea, what about Cuba, but why don’t you try and look a little bit under your own rug?"
I never said "what about" a single time. In fact, this post is not a response to anyone telling me anything so it wouldn't make any sense for me to say "what about, what about". Furthermore, I never claimed in this post or anywhere else for that matter that America is perfect. I even take issue with many of the things going on in America too. However, that is in NO WAY relevant to the news that I posted or the Tiananmen Square massacre.
So lets review, your claim that this post doesn't belong in this community is absolutely ridiculous. You refuse to address the actual article that I posted about and instead just tried to justify the Tiananmen Square massacre instead. And finally, your last point was "well what about under YOUR rug" while claiming that I was the one saying "what about, what about".
I'm not saying there can't be news about China, what I'm saying, and I've seen this a multitude of times, is that there is something that Usonians and Europeans do a lot, is that they post news about their countries as if they would be the world. In my book "World News" means something the entire world should care about, not just the Anglosphere and Europe, the description seems just a silly thing to put as a placeholder, at least that's how it has always worked in this community, news that the entire world cares about. It is a good rule that something global would involve at least 2 countries, or some event that it is really worth mentioning, like a natural disaster in some country, etc.
The post you mentioned, as you see, involves two countries, Argentina and China in joint cooperation as how they are going to go around doing trade and commerce. I'm sure that if you look a bit you'll see a post I did a long ago where I talked about this issue and proposed some rule so that actual World News would be posted, since there the same always happens where Usonians post stuff like "Some US state does something", and that's most definitely not world news. I don't have any issue with you posting news that contain a pro-Western imperialist point of view, I will not report those, I may debate with you on the comments but that's it. But this is by no means a world news scenario, as I mentioned, if the world would start shit posting every day would be memorial day to remember atrocities committed by your own government on your own people, and there is plenty.
You don't need to say the literal words to mean something. By adhering to the Western narrative and highlighting a very specific and not so big of a history event (compared to for example the bombing of Laos, the most bombed country on Earth by the US government), you are actively contributing to the image of the US and its lapdogs as good guys, and the Global South as some kind of sub-humans who commit atrocities, while the reality is that countries that struggle due to first world imperialism will always end up in bad situations.
Enjoy my "shitposting" then. I won't be engaging with someone that refuses to actually address the points that I raise. Again, this is not a post stating "yesterday was the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre" so your claim this time that "if the world would start shit posting every day would be memorial day to remember atrocities committed by your own government on your own people, and there is plenty." makes no sense.
"You don’t need to say the literal words to mean something." - By criticizing the CCP I am not in any way implying that America is good. It's true that you CAN imply things without actually saying them, but it is disingenuous at best to assume that me criticizing the CCP is the same as me "actively contributing to the image of the US and its lapdogs as good guys". I am very much able to hold the belief that the CCP is in the wrong and that USA isn't perfect at the same time.
Then it is even more futile and unrelated, if this is about the thing they are doing now, it would make no sense as something the world should care about. Imagine if I were to post "Police in Ecuador is blocking the way to some tourist place".
It's CPC, not CCP. I love how you say, they are wrong, but the US isn't perfect, like, China is worse, yet in the last hundred years I could literally create a wiki only about US atrocities and China has an all in all pacific history, but they are the ones that need to be converted and purified by liberal bourgeois democracy, and the US just needs to do a tiny bit better.
I’m not saying there can’t be news about China, what I’m saying, and I’ve seen this a multitude of times, is that there is something that Usonians and Europeans do a lot, is that they post news about their countries as if they would be the world. In my book “World News” means something the entire world should care about, not just the Anglosphere and Europe, the description seems just a silly thing to put as a placeholder, at least that’s how it has always worked in this community, news that the entire world cares about. It is a good rule that something global would involve at least 2 countries, or some event that it is really worth mentioning, like a natural disaster in some country, etc.
times, is that there is something that Usonians and Europeans do a lot, is that they post news about their countries as if they would be the world. In my book “World News” means something the entire world should care about, not just the Anglosphere and Europe, the description seems just a silly thing to put as a placeholder, at least that’s how it has always worked in this community, news that the entire world cares about. It is a good rule that something global would involve at least 2 countries, or some event that it is really worth mentioning, like a natural disaster in some country, etc.
A simple glance at the news articles being posted here is a direct contradiction to all of this, where are you in those those threads?
You are the same redditor who loves r/worldnews and reddit frontpage chock filled with USA news 24/7/365. You are so used to living in your privileged echo chamber, that you cannot believe people outside of USA are not obsessed with koolaid culture, let alone talking critically and positively about non-USA/Europe countries.
So clearly- if I go to Washington DC and start protesting in the street on behalf of these people (who I'd agree are being persecuted unjustly, despite one of them being Australian), I'll be taken away and jailed within minutes, right?
I mean literally standing near the White House, with a large sign condemning the administration for not dropping its case against Assange, or Edward Snowden, BLM protestors, or whatever other situation I'm unhappy about.
Is there an expectation that I'm going to be carted off and sentenced with subversion, 'endangerment of national security', or whatever other nonsense you're guaranteed to find in an actual totalitarian system like the PRC's?
If one person stands with a sign in any place on Earth you will probably not be detained. I literally gave you links done by Western media mouthpiece about how the US detained in recent years more than 10.000 BLM protesters, one even stating that they detained more people during the BLM protests than during the Capitol Riot (a right wing propelled movement). Here they detained 32. I did the math, so the US would be the equivalent to 312.5 "actual totalitarian systems" if we just go by just with this event.
There's a crucial difference: the PRC just jailed 32 people for very-knowingly risking life sentences to voice their discontent around June 4 and (more broadly) the National Security Law that has openly erased Hong Kongers' right to free speech and free assembly.
If you're a Chinese citizen standing in the street next to Zhongnanhai to criticize the unelected ruler Xi Jinping, you are 100% going to be hauled off in an unmarked van and locked away indefinitely. By all means, mount some very justified critiques of the USA's treatment of BLM protestors, or its horrible track record around race relations, or policing, warmongering and overthrowing Latin American democracies- just be aware that 'the USA being bad' is not enough, when the goal is to justify authoritarianism (bordering on fascism) in China.
No, there's no crucial difference, there's just you excusing your lords over commiting worse crimes and not recognising that what China is doing is nothing compared to what the US does to its own citizens in one year. The difference is that the US is not bordering on fascism, the US picked up the baton and continued what Nazi Germany left off, they are literally a fascist regime.
Having been a life long socialist myself, it's a bit mystifying to me how anyone can believe that the atrocities commited by the US somehow makes the PRC or Russia in any way deserving of praise.
For sure I'd like more people to call out the American genocide of its natives, or honor the heroes that fought for their emancipation during the time of chattel slavery.
But I'll be damned if any of those atrocities will make me defend the human suffering caused by the Chinese or Russian regimes. To me, being a socialist means standing up for the little guy, judging a society by how we care for those who have the least. The only us vs them struggle there is, is the one between the working and the ruling class - not the one between east and west. Idolising Zedong only puts another Emperor on a pedestal. I say fuck them all, western or eastern rulers and billionaires, they're the real enemies of a social and equal world.
There's a propaganda push in the west to demonize China, with the obvious goal of creating consent for a potential war. Even the Trotskyists of wsws.org (which have no favorable view of China) usually defend China from fake or misleading shit. Repeating US propaganda uncritically, or even criticizing China for good reason without proper context, is helping the US propaganda machine bring us to the brink of annihilation.
It's important to be truthful and fair, and not encourage sinophobia and war propaganda, so be careful when criticizing China.
Whether it's China or really anything, I'd agree to being critical of any claims made without proper context, yet the context here is the massacre and subsequent cover-up perpetrated by the Chinese government following peaceful protests on the Tiananmen square.
Meeting that with whataboutisms and vague excuses is disrespectful towards the victims full stop.
Being a socialist should be easy, because truth is on our side. It should be easy to point to Tiananmen square and say "this is what happens when the ruling class feels threatened", just like you can say the same thing when the US government busts their unions or murders their black citizens. Being an unquestioning supporter of either of these regimes is not what socialism is to me, and it never was. I just don't understand how anyone can reconcile these opposing views in their heads.
Do not try to pretend and grift too much, you will slip and fall on your face. Enlightened centrism with a sprinkle of leftism does not work very well.
Imagine there's this guy at your work, who every day brings up some crime or another, but somehow the perpetrator is always black. So you tell him "Can you talk about something else?", to which they get defensive and say "Why don't you want to talk about this? Can't we all agree that this is bad?". If you let this situation go on for too long, you'll soon find your workplace taken over by open racism, and everybody who's uncomfortable with this is going to quit, reinforcing this trend.
This is what's happening on almost all western social media, and society in general, regarding China. Open sinophobia, hate speech, and calls for violence.
That does explain the issue in a much more understandable way to me, and I thank you for not assuming I'm here just to argue.
I guess my slice of the social media "bubble" has always been more left leaning so I tend to see much more criticism of NATO and the US and haven't really thought much about criticism of China since to me at least it has seemed fairly balanced or at least not too imbalanced.
Why, also, do you conflate violence against workers or minorities with violence against liberals (and people mislead and cynically used by said liberals). These are not the same thing, and no socialist I know is opposed to political violence in principle. And neither, by the way, are liberals. One of these things is clearly always wrong, the other is or is not, depending on the circumstances.
Most I know are generally opposed to violence, with some exceptions allowed for any revolution or class struggle.
When it comes to countries like the US or China, using violence in the form of the military or police against your own population is such a big difference in power that any violence ought to be as minimal as possible.
Using tanks and rifles against a group of civilians is so far beyond that, that it's not within what I think any of the IRL socialists I know would deem appropriate or acceptable.
Yes, understandable. But a bunch of lib students who think they deserve better careers and want to do full on shock therapy probably shouldn't be put in the same category as marginalized groups that do not want to eat shit constantly.
This has two interesting issues right in the first sentence.
Most I know are generally opposed to violence, with some exceptions allowed for . . .
The idea of violence being a categorical bad with "exceptions" where it is permissible due to some carveout is deontological reasoning that has no place in a materialist assessment. Violence has severe downsides that mean that it should be minimized, but the degree to which it can be minimized without some greater downside (particularly violence from another party) coming about or continuing is something that varies situation to situation. Sometimes violence isn't useful, so its introduction only has downsides. Sometimes it is one of several options that are all reasonably arguable. Sometimes it is clearly the only option to prevent a much greater violence.
with some exceptions allowed for any revolution or class struggle.
[Setting aside the word "any" there] What do you think these words, "revolution" and "class struggle," mean?
Do you think a revolution -- or whatever makes it worthwhile, since that surely is not revolution for its own sake -- is something that is achieved eternally after fighting for a few years, or something that must be continuously protected from forces trying to sabotage you from all angles?
Do you think that "class struggle" is something where you hang a few capitalists, wash your hands of the blood, and then kick back and relax? Or is it a continuous process of trying to resolve the contradictions in society on a basis that follows the broad democratic consensus of the working class? There are going to be workers who are bought off by capital, or radicalized by cults it supports, or any number of other things, and these workers will then seek to destroy your socialist state while Trotskyists in the North Atlantic cheer them on. Do you let this small group -- typically representing foreign powers or the most monstrous of infections you have let fester in your own society -- dictate the destruction of the socialist state even as the majority wishes for it to be preserved?
I am reminded of a quote from Michael Parenti in one of his lectures:
Mercenary armies, destruction of the productive facilities of the society, more invasion, more sabotage, economic boycott, economic embargo, monetary embargo, technological embargo. These have distorting effects upon a society…
When the Sandinistas came to power in Nicaragua ten years ago, filled with ideals and hopes for their nation and their people, they discovered a very awful thing, and it wasn’t about themselves, even though they had to do it to themselves. It was about that capitalist encirclement. They discovered that they needed a secret police. They discovered that they needed a security police because all around them, coming in from two borders and within their own society, were acts of sabotage, espionage, attack, mercenary invasion and the like, and they understood that if the revolution was going to survive, it would have to build up instruments of state power, instruments of coercion even, and these instruments, by the way, can make mistakes, and these instruments can not only make mistakes. They can commit some serious crimes, although in Nicaragua the impressive record is how few crimes there were, given the utterly dire conditions they were under.
(It's worth noting that "secret police," as far as I can tell, is what you call the "intelligence agency" of a country hostile to the US)
This is all glossing over the fact that the violence by the CPC was not directed at the civilian students -- who it gave plenty of warning to evacuate -- but to the militants who had already immolated and lynched unarmed soldiers who were supervising the protests.
Unfortunately for the CPC, there was also a group of students (a tiny subset of the larger movement) being lead by people who were either religious zealots (Christians, in this case) or bought off and were consciously making the group stand its ground in hopes that they would be caught in the crossfire, which happened in some cases. We know this in part because one of those leaders very helpfully told us as much in an interview. She did escape and had a fruitful career in the US working with various Republican think tanks and the like. I assume that the recruitment vector was her being Christian, but I don't know.
Anyway, that's just a very basic overview because I thought I shouldn't leave your actual claims uncontested, but I mostly wrote this comment for the first couple of paragraphs.
The idea of violence being a categorical bad with “exceptions” where it is permissible due to some carveout is deontological reasoning that has no place in a materialist assessment.
I am pointing out what I have perceived as the general consensus among socialists that I interact with, not trying to make any assessment, immaterial or otherwise in the above comment.
In so far as exactly when violence is justified, I believe that it is highly contextual, and ought to be justifiable so as not to allow abuse of power.
This last point is also where I believe we disagree, because were it factually correct that the various violence-monopolies that you refer to always meted out justifiable violence in perfectly proportional portions in order to protect the proletariat or some other noble cause, I would perhaps consider it a fair point. However I don't think having an "intelligence agency" with little to no oversight with a license to kill and abuse their own citizens results in the best end result for the citizenry, and frequently it seems that the most vulnerable citizens receive the hardest end of the stick.
This isn't to say that I can't agree with it in principle, only that whatever the Tiananmen square massacre was, it was a far cry from a being the proportional and justifiable response to an outside threat.
This is all glossing over the fact that the violence by the CPC was not directed at the civilian students – who it gave plenty of warning to evacuate – but to the militants who had already immolated and lynched unarmed soldiers who were supervising the protests.
If you already have your conclusion ready, finding evidence to support your position is not only very easy, it is inevitable. Just ask any flat-earther or holocaust-denier. While it's most likely true that a lot of soldiers were killed, and that some were indeed lynched by civilians, it is an outright lie to claim that the troops were the peaceful victims of an enraged mob:
I fell as I ran, together with the students, for our lives. The troops always came up, chased and beat us; dispersed and hit with baton viciously the students who came before them, falling, crawling and running in panic. We didn't dare to stay, being dealt blows while running. As I fell again, the troops came up and hit me twice. Luckily I was not injured, but it still hurt. They hit with all their might, with no sympathy. Many students are pushed down, hit to the point that their heads bled and the blood spilt onto me.
~ Hui, W. (2019). Ten Questions about June-4th
Furthermore, in the book Hui also mentions 5 protestors that were shot dead within the first phase of the Tiananmen square dispersal, all supported by evidence from verified sources. While 5 people dead is not a massacre (that happened later), it does show that the PLA were not simply some "unarmed soldiers supervising the protests".
It's difficult to understand the chaos and pandemonium of that event, where several elements of the army ended up fighting each other as well as protestors. u/SickHobbit on r/askhistorians sums up quite thoroughly here in this excellent response: Why were the 27th Army Group killing other Army Groups/Police at Tiananmen Square?
If you are interested in some actual academic sources on the topic, I would recommend these:
Béja, Jean-Philippe. The impact of China's 1989 Tiananmen massacre. 2010.
Brook, Timothy. Quelling the people: The military suppression of the Beijing democracy movement. 1998.
Lim, Louisa. The people's republic of amnesia: Tiananmen revisited. 2014
This is disappointing, you seemed more interested in actual conversation before.
If you already have your conclusion ready, finding evidence to support your position is not only very easy, it is inevitable.
When you stay in the realm of aphorism, it is much easier to support this thesis. When trying to apply this in the concrete it falls apart here. I am talking about photos and videos, typically from western journalists, of the events leading up to June 4th. They didn't come from a parallel world, nor were they synthesized from thin air because someone wanted to believe in them.
While it’s most likely true that a lot of soldiers were killed, and that some were indeed lynched by civilians, it is an outright lie to claim that the troops were the peaceful victims of an enraged mob:
You are failing to follow the simple timeline I explained before, which makes your attempt at refutation worthless even if we supposed you were correct. Your quote is from the dispersal, when I referred to unarmed soldiers supervising the protest, I was there talking about the period prior to the dispersal, and the lynching was immediate prior to it. Obviously during the dispersal itself, people were struck if they were not already outside of the square, but I don't think anyone was shot since it's plainly the case that no one died. Let's make this as easy as possible:
Here you can see linked a number of western sources which a) show that the 10,000 dead estimate is hysterical and recanted by the person that said it (despite some people in this very fucking thread asserting it!) and b) that no one died in the square itself. Hundreds did obviously die in the ensuing violence around the square, but anyone claiming that, for example, five people in the square itself were immediately shot should be regarded as unreliable.
I'm curious how you believe the lynching took place during or after the dispersal. Being technical, I think the two soldiers in question here were killed by other means and then strung up after (along with being stripped and immolated), but if the military was already on the offensive at that point, how would this be accomplished? It seems like an absurd ritual to engage in while rifles and tanks are coming for you, and we do have photographs of these corpses and their onlookers. I've avoided linking them because they are graphic photos and that also makes them a nuisance to find, but I can dig them up if this is a real sticking point for you.
In order to have an actual conversation, I believe having a common understanding of the facts is a premise, agreed?
Firstly, the number of people who died has a 200-10 000 range.
Timothy Brook (referenced above) makes a good argument for 2 600, which matches the number the Chinese Red Cross gave multiple journalists at the time and so that is what I am most inclined to believe. The baseline is in any case higher than 200, because Beijing hospital records show 500 dead, which does not include any killings carried out on the street since they presumably did not die at the hospitals. It is also probably lower than 10 000, as you mentioned.
Secondly, the case of the 5 murdered people in the square itself. Wu Renhua, author/historian and Choi Shufen (who is the one quoted above by Hui) name these:
Huang Xinhua (I could not find a link, possibly spelled)
** Wu R. 天安門血腥清場內幕 and 六四事件中的戒嚴部隊, both available on amazon*
You are failing to follow the simple timeline
This is not intentional, any simple timeline is hard to follow since the events happened over an extended period of time, and there were presumably many interactions between goverment forces and protestors leading up to the events that happened on June 3-4. So far what I have read on the subject suggests that violence directed towards PLA may have been e.g. pelting by stones or similar in the week before June 4, however I have not seen good sources claiming civilians were actually killing and lynching soldiers at any time prior to when the massacre actually began. If you do have such sources, I am open to changing my mind, although I do not think Twitter threads or Youtube videos should be seen as good sources, and are not likely to change my mind.
This is disappointing, you seemed more interested in actual conversation before.
Comments like this are uncouth and unproductive. I don't appreciate being talked down to, and I will do my best to return the favour if you can do the same for me.
Comments like this are uncouth and unproductive. I don’t appreciate being talked down to, and I will do my best to return the favour if you can do the same for me.
I should have been more specific that a "conversation" to me is a little different from the formal exercise of a "debate" or what have you, and that formal exercise, especially when it's littered with tacit assumptions that are much easier to drop in than to unpack and refute, such as:
However I don’t think having an “intelligence agency” with little to no oversight with a license to kill and abuse their own citizens results in the best end result for the citizenry
It's just not very engaging to me, you know? But that's fine, if anything you'll benefit from me not going on for too long because I'm excited by ideas I'm discussing, we can just have a simple exercise in looking at evidence and I'll be more mindful of my tone. I apologize for letting myself come off so rudely.
That having been said:
If you do have such sources, I am open to changing my mind, although I do not think Twitter threads or Youtube videos should be seen as good sources, and are not likely to change my mind.
I don't plan on using those sources, but I would like to point out that you either are expressing yourself poorly or have a mistaken idea here.
Either you mean to say that "Someone on the internet saying 'Just trust me bro'" is not a good source
Or you are concerned with platforms being "academic" in a way that is tied up in silly formalism.
[I was going to include for option one that "Having the task of argument be exported to a video essay is kind of obnoxious," but on the other hand having it exported to a book is arguably much more obnoxious, so I think the main issue is sourcing]
Obviously I agree with the first version, but then it's good to talk about sourcing more plainly. In the second case, well, I think you drastically underestimate the pablum that gets published in academic journals. You can find people saying any old thing so long as it's a thesis that is friendly to the publisher or the publisher's audience. I did a research paper on Michael Parenti not too long ago and let me tell you, the "literature" attacking him in peer-reviewed journals is dog shit, plain and simple. Just the most insipid and unsubstantiated arguments you've ever seen. There was one that could have been a good critique if the author had a limited enough scope for the length of what they were writing to not leave their thesis completely hanging, but that review was a shining city on a hill compared to the others.
But if you want something a little more relevant, I'll mention that people do indeed lie in books, and there are multiple cottage industries dedicated to producing stories with no concern for if they are lies or not so long as they support a certain range of theses [example]. If we were talking about the DPRK (let's not), it would not be a good idea to crack open Yeonmi Park's memoir and quote from it as believable witness testimony.
Anyway, back to the main subject:
In order to have an actual conversation, I believe having a common understanding of the facts is a premise, agreed?
Agreed
Firstly, the number of people who died has a 200-10 000 range.
Even the journo who said 10k recanted! His high-end estimate was like 3.5k or something, which is still way higher than others but way less than what he said before.
Well, whatever, that part isn't important at the moment.
I keep finding tangents, but you generally also agree that the HRIC isn't a great source and are just providing those links for convenience, right? Since whatever might be said of the authors you mention, the website doesn't list so much as a witness of the killings on any of the four profiles. Mind you, several students did die (I think the lowest estimate is 30-something, along with ~200 other fatalities) and I am not contesting that these were real people who were killed by the PLA in that area at around that time (though June 3rd is listed for one and that seems early), merely that these accounts are not compelling for the argument that people died in the square. The US by this point is infamous for laundering its foreign policy goals through NGOs like the NED.
We also have this article citing both a Reuters reporter and a Chinese dissident who support that there was no death in the square. It should be noted that, if I am reading both accounts correctly, the reporter would have been in very close proximity to where one of the students you listed was said to have died ("beneath the national flag"). While the image is full of pathos, it doesn't seem to hold up. Perhaps I am misunderstanding something.
In any case, it's no wonder that monsters like Chai Ling, the student leader who infamously gave the interview before the fact about trying to drive her flock into gunfire, would later give sensational reports of slaughter when they themselves weren't even present at the time said slaughter supposedly happened. I hope Youtube is acceptable when it's for archival footage of a documentary and a news broadcast. I hadn't personally seen the clips after the first interview with Chai Ling until looking it up just now. I've gotta say, though I obviously am politically against him, Hou Dejian seems admirable.
Regarding the lynching [and let me correct myself again that it might have been an immolated corpse that was strung up by its neck, i.e. the hanging was not the cause of death, though burning an unarmed person to death sure qualifies by the informal definition of "lynching], I guess step one is to dig up those photos . . . You would not believe how annoying it is, but it makes sense that the photos would be constantly taken down.
[Massive CW for extreme violence and some nudity] Found it, scroll down to just shy of halfway and you will see the graphic images. I think even from the pictures alone, the timeline is self-evident, since civilians would not be left in such close proximity to corpses (or torched tanks) after the violence concluded. It's plain that some "protestors" (a tiny number within the larger movement) committed murder and desecrated the corpses before the government retaliated. It was probably a slightly larger number who were involved in messing with the vehicles, since that appeals to a basic hooliganism (see the people still standing on top of one).
I'm less interested in tallying the specific death toll than the more definable and finite issues like "Were soldiers killed beforehand?" and "Did anyone die in the square itself?" Of course, those aren't the only questions and we can do the tallying thing if you insist, but I wanted to start by focusing on the more clear-cut topics.
Regarding tone, it may just be because it's very difficult to convey over text (and I am just misinterpreting), but also that my short stint here has led me to believe that while I in theory share political views with socialists here, these so called "tankies" are also very confrontational and polemic for no apparent reason (apparent to me at least). Said differences interest me though, so I am trying to grasp just what it all boils down to and what if anything I can learn from it.
if anything you’ll benefit from me not going on for too long because I’m excited by ideas I’m discussing
Actually, I don't really mind long winded tangents as long as they are interesting, funny or preferably both!
Either you mean to say that “Someone on the internet saying ‘Just trust me bro’” is not a good source
Pretty much this. "bro" science, lessons from the "school of hard knocks", insane 4 hr yt videos with absolutely no source references and Twitter threads with wild statements corroborated by screenshots from some obscure source... I could go on but it seems you understand what I mean.
Even the journo who said 10k recanted!
Yes, 10k is inaccurate. At the same time though, you have the mayor of Beijing claiming 200, the Ministry of Public Security claiming 563, while hospital records show about 500 as a minimum baseline, so I guess as far as official sources go we can't really trust them either. 2 600 seems like the best estimate based on what I have found, which is still a huge number if you ask me when compared to other protests of similar size in western countries, consider e.g. the frequently quite violent protests in Paris and how the police there doesn't murder a few thousands just because the government doesn't agree with the protests (apologies for the digression).
(you) agree that the HRIC isn’t a great source and are just providing those links for convenience, right?
Not familiar with HRIC, it was just the search results that came up and they seem to be based on the information provided by the first hand witnesses I mentioned.
While the image is full of pathos, it doesn’t seem to hold up. Perhaps I am misunderstanding something.
It's quite possible that one person saw something another did not, or that they were not there at the same time. Just based on my experience in crowded places like concerts, having complete situational awareness is impossible, and I am sure that with just 5 deaths in a huge square filled with thousands of people at night time you would have a substantial number that did not see anything. Their deaths are still quite likely though, as there are multiple sources that back this up - see the ones I have referenced above if you have any doubt.
It's also worth noting that the various armies called in acted quite differently from one another, since some were more or less local to the city and others were pulled from far away places, with no local attachments and with varying levels of sympathetic commanders - so it's quite possible that some groups of soldiers would have acted compassionately while others would have been more keen to shoot first and ask questions later. This is also supported by the fighting and killing between the different armies, and could (in part) explain the differences between the eye witness reports.
I hope Youtube is acceptable when it’s for archival footage of a documentary and a news broadcast
It's fine, I am not watching 3 hours of unsubstantiated claims but 6 minutes is alright.
It’s plain that some “protestors” (a tiny number within the larger movement) committed murder and desecrated the corpses before the government retaliated.
I don't think it's that plain. As mentioned, you have several elements all killing each other at various points:
Violent elements among protestors
Elements of the PLA sympathetic to protestors
Elements of the PLA with a "strong political" sense, loyal to the regime
Within that, you have soldiers being suddenly surrounded and encouraged by protestors to rise up against their perceived tyrants, you have civilians witnessing the murder of their friends and you have soldiers fearing for their lives - soldiers I might add that might have had no freaking idea what is happening because up until that point they were happily living their lives as illiterate farmers and now suddenly there's chaos and their commander is telling them to defend themselves and now everyone without a uniform starts looking like a threat.
So you see, I don't think I can attribute a lot of confidence to reports claiming that the protestors started lynching soldiers which in turn made them open fire. I think it'a an order of magnitude more likely that things got out of hand after the first phase of the dispersal, people were then hurt and things escalated from there up until the point where you have civilians stringing up burnt corpses in the street, soldiers summarily executing protestors and tanks running over people.
Regardless, a command was centrally issued and the consequence was a slaughter. Responsibility for the murders falls on the government of the PRC in my opinion, mens rea and actus reus.
Regarding tone, it may just be because it’s very difficult to convey over text (and I am just misinterpreting), but also that my short stint here has led me to believe that while I in theory share political views with socialists here, these so called “tankies” are also very confrontational and polemic for no apparent reason (apparent to me at least). Said differences interest me though, so I am trying to grasp just what it all boils down to and what if anything I can learn from it.
Here's a place where perhaps I can be helpful, since I feel like I won't be much use elsewhere. Pay close attention to the way that the anticommunists here talk about their opposition and imagine being the subject of that talk by a substantial portion of this userbase and basically the entire mainstream of other websites like Reddit (of which it borders on being a carbon copy). It's easy to see Marxists referred to as "red fascists," "genocide deniers," sometimes flat-out "Nazis," along with being accused of being a "shill," a "bot," a "troll," a foreign agent (you can see people complaining about "how many Russians" are on this site, but they don't actually have reason to believe many Russians are here). All of that sits behind the sneering accusation of "tankie."
Now, it's kind of whatever to me when it's online -- and this sort of "anti-tankie" framework almost always is -- but some people take that sort of thing as a serious insult because equating someone to Nazis is a pretty serious insult. All this while the people making the accusation bandy about things like the 10k figure we discussed, which is just ridiculous but you are treated as a holocaust denier for trying to interrogate its dogma. Even you, when trying to be amicable with me, still use terms like "regime," which essentially means "government I don't like" with the way it gets used.
So, I don't encourage people to get needlessly combative, but I can slip into it myself and I struggle to fault others who do so as well (though I encourage them to take things dispassionately!). I hope that that explains a little bit of it, because personal insult just saturates the environment in some places.
Regarding the rest of this, let me know if the organization of information is too hectic and I'll rewrite it.
It’s quite possible that one person saw something another did not, or that they were not there at the same time. Just based on my experience in crowded places like concerts, having complete situational awareness is impossible, and I am sure that with just 5 deaths in a huge square filled with thousands of people at night time you would have a substantial number that did not see anything. Their deaths are still quite likely though, as there are multiple sources that back this up - see the ones I have referenced above if you have any doubt.
I do not doubt that these are real people who are dead, let me repeat that again. That said, these 5 are singled out because they supposedly died in the square.
I've presented you with witness testimony from multiple sources saying that people were not, in fact, killed in the square and the crowd was dispersed pretty uneventfully (though I think to actually reach the square in the first place people were beat back with batons to make way). Most of the people were already gone before the dispersal because most of the protestors listened to the warnings and the deadline.
Quoting the photo article:
“Once agreement was reached for the students to withdraw,” said Lilley in his cable, “the students left the square through the southeast corner. Essentially everyone, including Gallo, left. The few that attempted to remain behind were beaten and driven to join the end of the departing procession.”
The square was mostly cleared peacefully and those who refused were beaten with batons to drive them out. They weren't just wantonly shot.
There's no reason that the student leader who said he stayed until 6:30 AM wouldn't have seen this victim, since the victim was shot "early in the morning on June 4th" and the leader witnessed the square being cleared, just as many others did. Perhaps if you have other information that complicates the case, that will be worth considering, but it seems like the simplest answer is that he was somewhere else at the time he was shot. Perhaps he was at the flag, then cleared the square, got caught up in the ensuing fighting elsewhere, and was shot then, with his body only properly discovered and identified by people who knew him after the shooting occurred. The story you linked to doesn't give any indication that he was, for example, with friends who saw him get killed.
Perhaps his friends were with him, but then it raises the question of why they were not also shot and how they were able to arrange transportation to get him to the hospital where he succumbed, which the article might prefer to gloss over.
Which reminds me:
Not familiar with HRIC, it was just the search results that came up and they seem to be based on the information provided by the first hand witnesses I mentioned.
This is exactly what I mean about how you don't need to censor a story, just make your version much more accessible, because we keep getting these reactions along the lines of "well, I don't endorse the source here, it's just the first one I saw". Just something to think about.
If those books provide any more details that could be pertinent to the evaluation of this guy's case, I invite you to share them with me, but I hope you can understand that I'm not going to go and buy a book so I can evaluate you claims unless there's some extraordinary circumstance involved.
You can take more time to look over the information I gave you, since there were a few things made clear that I think you missed. Chief among them is that this isn't a Boston Massacre situation, despite the obvious parallels. Unlike the redcoats, the PLA who were outside of vehicles and present and supervising the protest were unarmed. I never even insinuated that the protestors threw an incendiary at a soldier and then the others started blasting -- they couldn't even if they wanted to! That segment had no guns! Though it seems that the soldiers who were in military vehicles were armed, and the victims were inside military vehicles.
What I am saying is that the severity of the crackdown and the ensuing violence were in part brought on by the harsh escalation of these militants hiding among the more mundane protestors committing murder against an unarmed soldier and then hanging up his corpse like a declaration of war! Well, they killed a couple, but one or two were just hung against a wreck while another was actually suspended in the air (I believe under a bridge). This was all well before the night of the crackdown, though I don't know exactly when.
I've been using a framework loosely based on how crimes are sometimes argued, by establishing witnesses and timelines and looking for inconsistencies or other possible explanations. What could possibly have happened to produce this situation otherwise, with a soldier's corpse strung up in broad daylight with people able to just stand around and gawk at it? It only makes sense as being before the crackdown, when civilians could just stand around and gawk in broad daylight (rather than, at the gentlest, be pushed away by troops securing the area, possibly shot if they resisted) and the body is still strung up rather than taken down (as it would be after the crackdown ended and people could return to the area). There's no way that these pictures were taken during the fighting, no one is behaving like there is gunfire going off nearby.
Drawing again from the article with the photo, since we actually don't need to speculate just with the photo:
The Chinese government also asserted that unarmed soldiers who had entered Tienanmen Square in the two days prior to June 4 were set on fire and lynched with their corpses hung from buses. Other soldiers were incinerated when army vehicles were torched with soldiers unable to evacuate and many others were badly beaten by violent mob attacks.
Unless the soldiers were sleeping on-site or taking 70-hour shifts, that means the murders probably took place the night of June 2 - 3 or thereabout, since they surely would have had another chance to report back otherwise. The article likewise says that the corpses were seemingly from vehicles getting petrol bombed, extracted from the vehicle, and strung up on the night of the 2nd to 3rd.
It's worth noting that there's a huge difference in how you approach a situation between "There's an unruly group of protestors we need to remove" vs "There's a pretty amicable group of protestors that also has militant splinters that have killed other soldiers via incendiaries -- possibly provided by the US -- and strung the corpse up. Oh, and they stole some guns too". Suddenly, people carrying such weapons -- which you are now looking for among every bag and bottle -- are established to not only be quite capable of killing you but seemingly out for blood, considering the display they made of the corpse.
Thank you, I really appreciate your thoughts on this matter.
Even you, when trying to be amicable with me, still use terms like “regime,” which essentially means “government I don’t like” with the way it gets used.
Not that it makes it alright, but English is my third language so sometimes I am not as careful when using loaded words. I assure you it's unintentional, but as you say it may be a result of bias (bias is a weird thing in that it's easy to spot in someone else).
I think I will need to think a bit further on the subject, so I will definitely have a look at it again with fresh eyes, but I thank you for challenging my assumptions and providing me with sources I had not previously seen. Even though I can't say that I have changed my mind, at least you have made me reconsider it.
What's bothering me a bit here, is that the official sources are demonstrably not telling the truth - and are actively opposing inquiries so that whatever truth may be gleaned is hard won. It's perhaps not evidence in itself, but when a government it willfully hiding and obscuring something, that is highly suspect and doesn't encourage confidence in what they do reveal.
Not that it makes it alright, but English is my third language so sometimes I am not as careful when using loaded words. I assure you it’s unintentional, but as you say it may be a result of bias (bias is a weird thing in that it’s easy to spot in someone else).
Ah, well, no worry in any case.
What’s bothering me a bit here, is that the official sources are demonstrably not telling the truth - and are actively opposing inquiries so that whatever truth may be gleaned is hard won. It’s perhaps not evidence in itself, but when a government it willfully hiding and obscuring something, that is highly suspect and doesn’t encourage confidence in what they do reveal.
As I said before, I was avoiding the issue of death toll estimates because that's something very complicated to establish even in situation without hostile media pushing disinformation. In my opinion I pretty solidly established that on the topics we did discuss -- the violence of the militants among the protestors (a drastic minority but impossible to ignore), the five people you mentioned, the clearing of the square -- the CPC told the truth.
Your talking about thousands of protestors dying refers back to books but I haven't seen specific sources. I have seen the claim of ~500 dead in nearby hospitals and I'm not sure what to make of it. Between the confidentiality of patient records, such a huge proportion of the protestors not being locals,* the decentralized nature of the violence, it mostly happening at night, and there being a relative dearth of footage of the actual violence, I think it's very difficult to establish what the most plausible explanation is. As far as I can tell from the interview I posted before, that one student leader was skeptical of even 200 people dying because he just didn't see that kind of violence where he was (in the square), though of course 200 is the minimum possible.
Irritatingly, the source Wikipedia gives for that number is page 161 of "Brook, Timothy (1998). Quelling the People: The Military Suppression of the Beijing Democracy Movement. Stanford: Stanford University Press," which makes it a nuisance to check because it doesn't seem to be easily available online. With something as little as a set of names it should be possible to use public records to get a better idea of who these people are. 500 is still a very finite number, we're not dealing with a genocide with millions of victims, even one person could go through 500 people and determine what their involvement was -- if any, since Beijing had a population of 9.9 million people in 1988 and 10.8 million in 1990, so it's quite plausible that a number of these deaths are simply people who died unrelated to the event. For reference, prior to Covid, in New York City around 145 people died every day, and that's a smaller and much more advanced city than Beijing in 1989.
In terms of victims who have been identified, let's look again at Wikipedia:
The Tiananmen Mothers, a victims' advocacy group co-founded by Ding Zilin and Zhang Xianling, whose children were killed by the government during the crackdown, have identified 202 victims as of August 2011. In the face of government interference, the group has worked painstakingly to locate victims' families and collect information about the victims. Their tally had grown from 155 in 1999 to 202 in 2011. The list includes four individuals who committed suicide on or after 4 June for reasons related to their involvement in the demonstrations.[citation needed][g]
Former protester Wu Renhua of the Chinese Alliance for Democracy, an overseas group agitating for democratic reform in China, said that he was only able to identify and verify 15 military deaths. Wu asserts that if deaths from events unrelated to demonstrators were removed from the count, only seven deaths among military personnel might be counted as from being "killed in action" by rioters.
As a note, I think that the claim that 8 soldiers died by means other than being "killed in action" by militants/rioters is correct. I remember a story about an APC getting in an accident and the people in the back being burned alive (no, they wouldn't be the only soldiers who burned alive, there were some who were hit by petrol bombs), but that only accounts for 6. A seventh was reportedly hit by friendly fire and the eighth (afaik) died of complications a month later, which pedantically isn't being killed "in action," though I think that makes the wording obfuscatory. It doesn't matter in the scheme of things, but I wanted to mention it since it was a finite list.
More to the point: I really struggle to imagine how it could possibly be 500 people, let alone thousands, if this group that is single-mindedly dedicated to the purpose of establishing a certain depiction of the event could only managed to identify ~200 people killed, and that's taking their claim at face value. Even if you want to be really pessimistic about how transparent it is, if 2000 people died, can really only 10% be identified after decades? I'm not saying they should have every name -- Tank Man hasn't been identified either, though he also wasn't killed -- but starting from an age cohort and having an very specific date of death should narrow things down drastically.
Anyway, I still don't have much to say about the tallying business because it's honestly not a process that I really understand, that could all be totally wrong-headed, I just wanted to offer some thoughts based on accessible evidence since it was something that you wanted to talk about (and that's fair enough on your part).
*which, let me be clear, isn't some "outside agitators" thing. Traveling to the capitol to protest is totally legitimate, it just makes it much harder to track down who was there.
Anyway, it was a positive experience talking to you and it got me to do some more research, so thanks!
Also, maybe read this thread on Twitter and also follow the sources there, as you seem to be under the false impression that the protests were entirely peaceful.
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