• Rev@lemmygrad.ml
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        I was honestly so surprised myself when I realized that the supposed most famous picture of the massacre didn’t show a single dead body. Just makes you think about how easily can falsehood be used for propaganda.

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          One of the first casualties of the whole protest was an unarmed PLA officer that was tied to a bus by the protestors and burnt alive. Then mocked and photographed. They never share that photo around though.

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            Westerners refuse to believe that about half the fatalities were PLA members because in their countries, the police would never be unarmed, never abandon their equipment, never hesitate to kill in retaliation.

            Westerners also don’t pity the murdered PLA officers because they view them the same as their own police: violent people that eagerly abuse their power.

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              Imagine if BLM protestors had tied an unarmed, out of uniform, cop to a bus and burnt them alive what the libs would be screaming for. They would want outright slaughter.

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              I think that’s the most eye-opening thing about this “massacre”

              if this had happened in the US, the streets would have run with rivers of blood. It would’ve been utterly brutal. And the US would be the one rewriting history to try and pretend it never happened. It’s always projection.

              • Water Bowl Slime@lemmygrad.ml
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                Yeah so much western propaganda is essentially just accusing this or that country of being like the USA. I genuinely don’t understand why it’s so effective

                • DamarcusArt@lemmygrad.ml
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                  Because the other half of the propaganda is convincing people that the USA isn’t like the USA. No idea how that one works so well either thought.

                • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  It works because America’s propaganda regime is so hegemonic and overwhelming that the vast majority of Americans assume everywhere else is just like america - All cops are violent, all soldiers are used for foreign wars of aggression, all politicians are corrupt and believe in nothing. The idea of a political leader who acts from firmly held convictions, wants to help people, and is uninterested in using their position for wealth and power simply isn’t something that exists in the average American’s conceptual framework of reality. They readily believe so much propaganda because in many ways the propaganda simply tells them that other places are just like the US they experience every day.

              • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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                Everyone here knows that there’s a threshold where the US will explode in to armed conflict. There are 800,000 cops in this country and every one of them is a psychopathic fascist champing for a chance to spill innocent blood.

                It’s harrowing trying to do street marches with Libs who are too ignorant and foolish to understand how dangerous the cops are. Trying to save them from themselves is not fun.

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                In authoritarian America, citizens aren’t taught the history of the New York Draft Riots and anyone who googles 紐約徵兵暴動 gets disappeared by their secret police! 😱😱

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              Word. Kent state? Armed National Guard goons in full battle rattle with bayonets fixed fired 7.62mm rifles point blank in to students. Tianemen? The majority of the PLA soldiers in the square didn’t have any weapons of any kind what so ever. They didn’t have batons. They didn’t have helmets. They were just wearing their uniforms and basically standing there. It was a show of force, certainly, but unlike anything I can think of in Western political history.

          • Comrade_Vig@lemmygrad.ml
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            Not true, they do … And they claim that it’s another instance of SeePeePee violence …

            Let me see if I can find the libbed up reddit thread where I saw it:

            Not as upvoted as I remember, the post is a Midjourney selfie from tank man.

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            I don’t think it’s fair to group the insurgents who attacked the PLA in with the protestors. The vast, vast majority of the protestors were peaceful throughout and never had any interest or intent of instigating a violent conflict with the CPC. The insurgents who ambushed the PLA were a very small group of people who did not reflect the interests of the greater protest movement.

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            i distinctly remember being ‘informed’ that “right after this photo, he was disappeared by the secret police and never seen or heard from again!

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                Western media loves to talk about disappearances because you can say anyone has “disappeared” if they’ve just been out of the public eye for a bit. The audience is led to believe the implication that they were killed or imprisoned at some black site, but since the source never actually said that they technically didn’t say anything false, even if they were perfectly fine the whole time.

                Anybody remember that tennis player, Peng Shuai? I had a lib I know irl hit me with it as evidence that China was disappearing dissidents. I mentioned the above to him, and then, sure enough, she got Juche necromancy-ed.

                • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  Meanwhile, in America, where the cops kick your door down at 3am and your family doesn’t have any idea where you’ve gone or what happened to you…

                  Not to mention the literally millions of undocumented people who get kidnapped and shipped somewhere. Even the government admits it doesn’t know what happens to some of them.

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                  “whenever tank man isn’t on screen, all the other characters should be asking, ‘where’s tank man?’” but genuinely

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              Yeah, a bunch of people grabbed him and were like “Dude there is literally shooting a few blocks from here get out of the way of the tanks and get to cover”. But they were just people, not evil SEE SEE PEE death spies.

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                ummm nice try tankie scum but i’ve seen video footage of the evil dick sucking dungeons of the orient, i know what you communist monsters did to that poor hero angery

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            I remember being sat in my classroom as a primary school kid with my teacher showing us that photo on the newspaper days after the event and him telling us to think about what happened to that poor brave man.

            • ComradeChairmanKGB@lemmygrad.ml
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              what happened to that poor brave man.

              He probably went home to clean up, and later hooked up with some PLA Chad for a romantic dinner. When he climbed on the tank for a chat he was actually exchanging numbers.

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                My theory, based on the fact that he had a shopping bag, was that the dude in the tank was his son:

                “Hey, didn’t I tell you grandma and grandpa are coming over tonight?”

                “Uh, yeah dad, could we talk about this later?”

                “No. And do you remember how I specifically asked you to pick up some lettuce and tomatoes on the way to work?”

                “Uh, dad, we’re kind of holding up traffic here… WHAT THE HELL, DAD PLEASE GET OFF THE TANK, PLEASE, YOU’RE EMBARASSING ME”

                Tank Man was later given a medal for Most Epic Dad Moment

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                Aww, that would be so romantic

                Guy buying groceries seeks Lt. tank commander for romantic candlelit dinner to discuss merits of Deng’s reforms in light of the student protest movement

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        Let’s supposed it was done: (I don’t know if anyone did or didn’t)

        Who would have broadcasted or platformed it?

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        Oh it has been. Libs simply don’t care. They have a religious conviction that communism bad and they’ll interpret any information to support that conviction, and dismiss anything that contradicts it. Parenti’s “Non-falsifiable orthodoxy” is a great term for how they think.

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      You don’t get it! Deng flattened all the people with his fat cheeks, then inflated everyone back up, then cleaned up the blood and viscera but not the bodies!

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        You joke but there is a BBC article that literally claims that someone saw dead bodies of the protestors beinng churned and sent down the gutter or something like that.

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          I remember that and it was that they ran tanks over hundreds of bodies for hours turning the remains into pulp so they could wash them down the gutters. It was years ago before I knew better and actually believed that shit. Imagine thinking that they were able to sneak out all these other photos but not any of the events they SAY happened? lol.

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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      I believe there’s actually video footage of tank man climbing up on the tank, conversing with the tank commander, and then getting down and walking away.

      I’m told that many people were lying prone because there was machine gun fire from the battle between the PLA and the insurgents several blocks away.

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    The only reason whitey even gives a shit about these dead chinese people is that they hate china so much. After all, half of them are still secretly jerking themselves off at the thought of millions of chinese farmers dying due to the Three Gorges Dam going broke.

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      Same can be applied to Xinjiang propaganda. “Oh, the State Department now cares about Muslim lives?”

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      Yea lol, i don’t think i’ve ever heard a liberal even mention the student massacre in Mexico in the late 60s. They don’t give a shit, they just use it as a justification for their hatred.

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      Muricans; TIANAMEN SEESEEPEE 10,000 dead tank jelly gutters!

      Also Muricans: What do you mean Indonesia slaughtered half a million innocent people with the knowledge and support of the US government? What do you means the US and Saudi conspired to kill hundreds of thousands of Yemenis in a campaign of naked and uncomplicated genocide? What do you mean the South Korean forces murdered tens of thousands of innocent people using a pretense of communism? That’s all bullshit I would have heard about that and anyway they weren’t white so I don’t care.

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    I like that we have/need new books to re-report information that was widely known decades ago because of how easy it is to sell propaganda to the west. We have actual documentaries, made by the west at the time of Tiananmen, that completely contradicts the massacre narrative that was invented years later. lol. Libs really will believe anything as long as it comes from the mouth of some oligarch backed talking head.

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmygrad.mlOP
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      The key reason this kind of lazy propaganda works is because people want to believe it. It leverages the latent racism and capitalist realism people have internalized living in decaying western societies. The idea that a country that doesn’t follow liberal ideology could be more successful is a complete anathema to these people.

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        Indeed. “The west is the best” is the prevailing thought in the zeitgeist of the west. So as bad as things can be in the west, at least they are still “the best.” But if other nations actually practice “freedom and liberty” better than they do, despite not screaming about how “free” they are all the time, it calls the whole western narrative into question. And causes a lot of cognitive dissonance. And people in the west are not given the tools they need to deal with that, so they just lash out and get angry, or find an easy excuse to ignore it.

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      Have you seen that chart that tracks how Americans went from credditing the USSR for making the greatest sacrifice in WWII and contributing the most to victory in 1946, to completely removing the Soviet contribution from the picture by the 80s? It’s really sad. The Red Army deserves better.

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      I’m interested in the documentaries, if you could cite them. Not trying to be snarky and say “Sauce?”, just genuinely curious and I’d like to watch a documentary on the topic, anyway.

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    Thread I wrote about Tiananmen: https://twitter.com/prolewiki/status/1666492127730098208 (Thread reader link due to Musk fuckery on twitter)

    CIA-funded leader Chai Ling crying crocodile tears hoping students will be shot while she herself deadpan says she’ll be out of the country: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5__ESiklA1A. She was later extradited by the CIA during Operation Yellowbird and now lives in the USA.

      • Kool_Newt@lemm.ee
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        Aww my kitty was named Tinyman (pronounced like a Jewish surname). I’ve never seen that word outside of reference to my kitty.

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      I’m probably replying to some anti-lib community, but it’s really weird coming from “/c/all” that nearly every comment has some sort of jab at “libs” for a topic that I would never associate with a political spectrum.

      Fyi I’m not affiliated with any political “side” and I’m not American, so it just seems weird to be.

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        We are an a communist instance. American liberals (which includes both of their major political parties) are very imperialist and love to push propaganda about their enemies. It’s why public opinion for China took a nose dive in the last 10 years. Why Iran is so evil, but nobody thinks about Kuwait. Why Tiananmen square gets so much attention but the white terror receives none. China’s the enemy, and “Taiwan” is an innocent friend that needs protecting.

        Being communist, we are anti-imperialist, and hate the war mongering propaganda that the liberals seem to lap up. They see this as being conspiracy theorists or contrarian. Hence the conflict about things like this.

        • lazynooblet@lazysoci.al
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          Okay, I understand the narative, and agree that western culture has cemented certain opinions on history. But where does the liberal part come in? Maybe I’m misunderstanding that bit. On US social media there is this whole lib vs republican thing going on. In this case does lib just mean “not communism”?

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            In this case does lib just mean “not communism”?

            Liberalism is the ideology of capitalism. Thus “liberal” is everyone who support capitalism, that is basically starting at socialdemocracy and everything right of them - which in western countries mean literally entire political mainstream.

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              Yeah, this is definitely better than my reply. I’m tired after arguing with the liberals all damn day. I need some cigars and brandy.

          • WhatWouldKarlDo@lemmygrad.ml
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            They only have two political parties, and it can be hard to tell the difference between them a lot of the time. They’re both still going to push for more military spending, treat social programs with extreme suspicion, and probably go out and attack another country. The Wikipedia definition of neoliberal is this:

            Neoliberalism is contemporarily used to refer to market-oriented reform policies such as “eliminating price controls, deregulating capital markets, lowering trade barriers” and reducing, especially through privatization and austerity, state influence in the economy.

            Which describes both parties pretty well. Americans have a bit of a twisted view of liberal Vs conservative. Both their parties are pretty right wing in comparison to most of the rest of the world, so they often come down to performative acts. For instance, I’m trans. Neither party really cares about me, but the republican base hates me. So they each put on a big show of doing something about me. But they are both primarily interested in the same overall goals in governance, which is in line with neoliberal ideology.

            So we just call them all liberals (although I think the republican party is becoming fascist, which is arguably not the same thing). Regardless, an average liberal’s ideology is more compatible with fascism than with us.

          • Beat_da_Rich@lemmygrad.ml
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            To Republicans, “liberal” means communist/vegan/trans/Black/Millenial/baby killers/etc.

            To Self-described Liberals, “liberal” means Non-authoritarian socialist/centrist/real patriots/pro-science/pragmatic/etc.

            Basically, don’t go on US social media to see political terms being used with any significant amount of accuracy. Most Americans are so politically ignorant, even many of those that describe themselves as politically-minded, that these labels have essentially lost all concrete meaning.

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          They see this as being conspiracy theorists

          I personally see tankies as conspiracy oriented because they are, just like all the MAGA people, tribal apologists blind to the bad acts of their team/leaders. Do you really think Xi has the best interests of the people of China in mind? Come on. I’m not dumb enough to think Biden has my best interests in mind.

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            We understand the material conditions and how that drives not only ideas, but change as a whole. For example by carefully looking at the material world around me, I can safely confirm that Xi and Biden are two different people.

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            Bit of a late reply, but why is it so hard for you to imagine any leader caring about their people? (This sounded more accusatory than I meant, that’s not my goal, it’s more of a “why is it so hard to imagine a caring leader?” not a personal attack.)

            Most of us in the west have never actually had a leader who wants to help anyone other than the stockholders of big companies. So the concept of leadership that actually cares about people is entirely alien to us.

            To look at it another way: Do you consider yourself a good person? And if you were in a leadership position somewhere, would you try to do the best to help out the people under you? Good people do exist in the world. Not necessarily saying Xi is one of them, just that it is possible for a leader to care about people. Power doesn’t corrupt, corrupt people are attracted to power. But they aren’t always the ones who get it.

  • Kool_Newt@lemm.ee
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    I’m bowing out y’all, it was fun. Definitely will be looking into this event and checking some references people pointed me to.

  • jackmarxist [any]@hexbear.net
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    It was not fabricated, it was exaggerated. Clashes occurred around Beijing and bloodshed was real. Most of them were Maoists clashing with pro market reform government.

    • WhatWouldKarlDo@lemmygrad.ml
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      Nobody is denying bloodshed. There absolutely were violent protests outside the square. The claim in question is that the military gunned down thousands of peaceful protesters in the square, which so far as I know is a claim that’s exclusively made by people who were not there.

      • WayeeCool [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        Even that is giving too much credit to the US government narrative.

        There literally are all the US mainstream news outlets like CBS News who actually had reporters there at the time: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/there-was-no-tiananmen-square-massacre/

        Also from classified US communications with assets on the ground: https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/89BEIJING18828_a.html

        Funniest thing is that “tank man” photo idiots spam on Reddit all the time. Most people in the west don’t realize there is video of it, that the guy didn’t get run over. Furthermore they assume he was blocking tanks heading towards the square, infact those tanks were at the time headed away from the square to avoid engaging with armed agitators (people with guns and grenades that had killed police) in a crowded environment. Dude was trying to make them go back.

        The deaths that day were people who got gunned down by the “protestors” or the police who were killed when the “protestors” threw grenades (military ordnance) into police vehicles. People that were armed by the CIA as part of a color revolution operation, one that failed because it didn’t actually have any support and more importantly because the PLA commander on the scene ordered his units to leave the area rather than responding in kind. The only actual protestors that day were communists having labor protests happening nearby and not the dancing libertine youth acting as the face of the US color revolution operation involving armed groups trying unsuccessfully to provoke the PLA soliders into responding to deadly attacks with deadly force in a crowded urban environment.

        • WhatWouldKarlDo@lemmygrad.ml
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          My personal opinion on the matter isn’t that much different from yours (the biggest reason being that the media blitz about the massacre seemed preplanned… It just didn’t go according to plan). The problem is that I can’t prove anything, so it’s all conjecture. So I typically leave that out. It’s already a sensitive enough subject.

        • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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          My understanding is that after the initial ambush of unarmed PLA soldiers armed PLA units were eventually able to get to the area and engage the insurgents in combat, and that the deaths were a mix of PLA soldiers and insurgents, with probably some innocent bystanders because war is hell no matter how you try to prevent civilian casualties.

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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        I don’t think violent protests is an appropriate description. From what I understand armed insurgents ambushed and killed unarmed PLA soldiers and there was a running street battle as armed PLA units tried to get to the area to combat them.

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        On balance, it would be fair to say that while thousands of protestors were most likely not gunned down in the square itself, hundreds were being gunned down around it. So there was a massacre by the PLA, it just didn’t happen in the square itself.

        http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8057762.stm

        https://archive.is/20191208232045/https://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/13/world/turmoil-china-tiananmen-crackdown-student-s-account-questioned-major-points.html

        https://earnshaw.com/writings/memoirs/tiananmen-story

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          If they were just protestors, why were they gunned down while the ones in the square could all be cleared out with no fatalities? Did the people who incinerated soldiers and strung up their burnt corpses leave peacefully beforehand?

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            Because the PLA forced themselves through several blockades before they were able to reach the square. It was at these blockades that the strongest resistance was met, and where the majority of the killing occurred.

            We don’t know for sure, but the order seems to be that [the PLA] have to get [to the square] by midnight. So by 10:00 p.m. they’re getting desperate. They cannot fight their way through thousands of people with riot shields and billy clubs, so each of these columns coming into the city starts radioing into headquarters, asking for permission to go ahead at any cost. Finally that permission starts coming down sometime between 10:30 p.m. and 11:00 p.m.

            The first rounds of fire catch everybody by surprise. The people in the streets don’t expect this to happen. There are a couple of hospitals right near Muxidi, and the casualties start showing up within 10 or 15 minutes of the first round of gunfire. The casualties run very high because people didn’t expect to be shot at with live ammunition. When they start firing, people say, “Oh, it’s rubber bullets.” Even after it becomes clear, even after they realize that the army is going to go ahead at any cost, people still pour into the streets. This is the amazing thing: People were just so angry, so furious at what was happening in their city that they were not going to step back and let the army do what it was doing. This is why the casualties from Muxidi on east towards Tiananmen Square were so high. This is the major military confrontation of the evening.

            Source

            • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              1 year ago

              That account as-presented leaves out the immolating of unarmed soldiers via petrol bombs, which seems necessarily to distort their evaluations of why people behaved how they did. iirc some “protestors” also took the liberty of seizing weapons from an APC that had a catastrophic failure and killed the soldiers inside, and this was still before the crackdown. Remember, a number of soldiers also died, they had to have been killed somehow (though one was killed by friendly fire and like 6 or 7 by the accident I mentioned).

              • AOCapitulator [they/them, she/her]@hexbear.net
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                1 year ago

                if new yorkers burned some nypd officers to death and then a bunch of people were killed I’d be on the people’s side

                not taking a grand stand on the events I don’t know shit about fuck and don’t rightly care honestly

                • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  1 year ago

                  The NYPD are a bunch of jackbooted thugs of a white supremacist administration under the thinnest veneer of “justice”. Equivocating between them and the PLA is absurd.

                • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  1 year ago

                  Remember that picture of 50,000 uniformed fascists taking over part of the city in a show of force allegedly for a funeral because some pig got got?

                  That said, my understanding is that relations between the PLA soldiers and the students were positive throughout. Almost all the PLA soldiers in the square had no weapons, including no batons or riot helmets. I believe there were some riot units present but they were a small number relative to the overall PLA presence. There are stories of the PLA soldiers and students singing songs and sharing food. It’s important to remember that most of the students in the square were advocating for a return to Communist economics from the Dengist market liberalization. From what I understand the CPC didn’t really know what to do with them because they didn’t want to start a confrontation with people demanding more communism, and that’s largely why the event was almost entirely peaceful.

            • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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              1 year ago

              Thousands of completely unarmed PLA troops had already been in the square for days. This is nonsense. There’s pictures of them chilling with the students.

        • JucheBot1988@lemmygrad.ml
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          1 year ago

          So there was a massacre by the PLA, it just didn’t happen in the square itself.

          Current research by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation suggests that the massacre occured in the same place Sadaam Hussein would later store his nonexistant WMDs.

    • geikei [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      most of them by the time the actual violent clashes happened certainly werent maoists. Yeah there was a significant % of the protestors that were coming from the left of the CPC but you have to remember that the unrest span month(s) and many cities. In Tainanmen by that point in the movement and leading to that the make up of those that stayed and engaged in lynchings and clashes with the PLA and police was solidly “pro-democracy/free-s[peech/liberalism” youth. Also western intelligence focus and assets had already zeroed in in Beijing and those elements after smelling blood from the more organic initial country wide unrest.

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        My understanding is that that is not the case at all, and that the CIA backed “liberal democracy” gang was a very small number of people who bullied their way in to control of the PA system and never had much support from the students. My understanding is that when the PLA finally made an ultimatum to leave almost all the students joined hands and walked out of the square peacefully. I believe there was some confrontation between PLA soldiers in riot gear and students, but it was relatively minor and confined to small areas of the square. It’s hared to overstate that what happened bears no relationship at all to the western narrative.

  • Addfwyn@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    Shouldn’t even take a book to come to that conclusion, honestly. Frankly, I doubt anyone who is entrenteched in the propaganda around the event would change their mind no matter how much evidence you show them. For them, China is bad, so everything else must follow from that.

    Even western media, at the time of the event, said that basically nothing happened in the square. It wasn’t until they realised that didn’t line up with the US position that they changed their line, but you can find old articles (including first hand accounts from diplomats in the area) that say there wasn’t much.

    I don’t think anyone denies that some violence occured in the city as a whole, though it was very often levied the opposite way of popular portrayal. Especially because a lot of the PLA that were initially deployed were not even armed.

  • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    The whole Tiananmen thing is so ridiculous. Chinese government’s official estimate? ~300 deaths. People who were in the square? No one died in the square, good mood between soldiers and students, soldiers asked students to leave when dickass CIA plant started trying to start a riot, students left with no problems, ~300 people were killed (including PLA soldiers, many of whom were unarmed!) in fighting several blocks from the square. Every credible source that wasn’t just making up unhinged bullshit - About 300 people died.

    It’s so damn frustrating, it’s just pure, utter bullshit but libs believe it with nigh-religious ferver and certainty.