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.
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.
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.
I gave reputable sources for my information. Please enlighten me 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Don’t get ahead of yourself. Most people ‘vastly’ overestimate their ability to spot propaganda.
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.
Is china not part of the world? lmao
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?
??? Give examples, I’ve recently reported various posts for similar issues and some have been removed.
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.
Interesting since this post is about china not the USA but you are the ones butt hurt that it exists here
https://prospect.org/politics/congress-proposes-500-million-for-negative-news-coverage-of-china/
Wow, must be a coincidence!
I gave reputable sources for my information. Please enlighten me 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.
https://www.liberationnews.org/tiananmen-the-massacre-that-wasnt/ https://leohezhao.medium.com/notes-for-30th-anniversary-of-tiananmen-incident-f098ef6efbc2 https://peds-ansichten.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/1989-07-12_Lilley_Gallo_Tiananmen_WikiLeaks.pdf https://vimeo.com/448970787 http://www.fightbacknews.org/2019/6/4/reflections-tiananmen-square-and-attempt-end-chinese-socialism https://frso.org/main-documents/looking-back-at-tiananmen-square-the-defeat-of-counter-revolution-in-china/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vu3zmbFGwQA https://old.reddit.com/r/AskAChinese/comments/grdaqv/thoughts_on_tiananmen_square_massacre/g45hnv0/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6RT_s1T050 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqPI8xlnrwg
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.
Goodbye.
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.
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/chinese-communist-party
CCP stands for Chinese Communist Party
Why does it always seem when I read those sources that they act as a justification of violence more than a refutation of that it happened
https://vimeo.com/448618990
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.
… I don’t expect Chinese state media to show a bunch of killed people
Please be mindful of your username, @pleasemakesense.
I feel attacked I’m calling the police
Non-chinese reporters were there too and they show the same…
You must have seen something else in the link than I did, since it’s an excerpt from a chinese news program
Why not post about the atrocities committed by the USA and their allies on their anniversaries then?
Might get exhausting posting every day.
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.
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.
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.
Threads on Twitter are usually not a very compelling source, I am not against changing my opinion if the evidence is compelling, but that was not it.
See for example how the question is answered over on r/askhistorians:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/140daad/how_many_people_died_during_the_tiananmen_square/jmw0ns0/
Well sourced with actual recent publications and honest as to what the uncertainties are.
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.
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.
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.
[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:
(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.
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.
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:
~ 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:
You boys seem to have that handled.
Not sure I’ve seen many reports of the USA jailing or disappearing its own citizens when they dare speak up about said atrocities.
Yeah, like Julian Assange? Who’s that guy? No idea. Oh, maybe you meant Chelsea Manning, ah, no, also don’t know who’s that one.
Dont forget snowden!
Inb4 libs call him a Russian spy.
You wouldn’t believe how many times I got called a ‘Putin’ shill on r/geopolitics and elsewhere.
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?
Only if you’re not white.
Do you mean like this?
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/20/politics/blm-protesters-analysis/index.html https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2022/02/22/fact-check-thousands-black-lives-matter-protesters-arrested-2020/6816074001/ https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/08/us/dc-police-arrests-blm-capitol-insurrection-invs/index.html https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/08/george-floyd-killing-police-arrest-non-violent-protesters
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.
To be fair, Julian is not USA’s “own citizen”.
USA pretends to be CEO of freedom and free press when it is the CEO of genocide and oppression.
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Project Censored has entered the chat.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/06/atlanta-georgia-cop-city-protest
https://www.npr.org/2020/07/17/892277592/federal-officers-use-unmarked-vehicles-to-grab-protesters-in-portland