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)
Decent countries. What a slippery slope for supremacist thoughts.
Ah yes.
Being against China’s racist genocide is racist.
China, the imperialist ethno-state, is clearly innocent.
Lol. Thinking some countries have better governments than others is supremacist? Whatever, dude.
By the way. If there are any countries with decent governments, I don’t know of them. But like. If there were decent countries, they wouldn’t behave like China.
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.
Eyeroll. Literally said in the first message that I don’t support the US, but yes, clearly it’s us (countries I don’t support) vs. them (countries I also don’t support). The only possible reason one could think China is an oppressive hellhole is racism, I guess. Never mind that I also think Western countries are oppressive hellholes. But clearly thinking two things are bad at once means you actually like one of them. Christ, you’re like the bizarro world version of conservatives who think that hating America means you support China. Tankies really are just libs who simp for different countries.
Educating the beasts in third-world countries? I don’t have time for that. I’m too busy trying to fix my own shithole country. Are a lot of people in third-world countries wrong about shit? Yeah, obviously. But I think most people in the world are wrong about shit, because most of them aren’t libsocs. Me disagreeing with you doesn’t make you special. If thinking a specific group has it wrong means you’re prejudiced against them, apparently I’m prejudiced against 99.7% of the world. And I’m pretty sure most people in third-world countries aren’t state capitalists, so I guess you must be prejudiced against them too for disagreeing with them.
Why is it that you tankies always ignore that anarchists, libsocs, and other non-tankie leftists spend much more time fighting libs and fascists than we do fighting you? We make fun of you online. We argue with you when you say dumb shit. We don’t march against you in the streets, except in countries where you rule over us. The effort we dedicate to you is really minuscule compared to how we fight and die trying to change the right-wing status quo. And yet, somehow that counts for nothing when you need to claim that our disagreements with you are rooted in bigotry.
decent countries don’t have to violently suppress their populations and then lie about it
Yeah, “decent” (read: western) countries can just do it and not talk about it because liberals will gladly work on their behalf and deny that it ever happens or deflect to repost lies about global south countries like they do with China.
A Wikileaks cable from the US Embassy in Beijing (sent in July 1989) also reveals the eyewitness accounts of a Latin American diplomat and his wife: “They were able to enter and leave the [Tiananmen] square several times and were not harassed by troops. Remaining with students … until the final withdrawal, the diplomat said there were no mass shootings in the square or the monument.”
https://worldaffairs.blog/2019/06/02/tiananmen-square-massacre-facts-fiction-and-propaganda/
https://www.workers.org/2022/06/64607/
https://videos.files.wordpress.com/mPSOWUUU/tank-man-2_dvd.mp4
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/89BEIJING18828_a.html
Here’s an interesting video that I hope will make you question if Marxist-Leninists are really the ones you should be calling “tankies”: https://files.catbox.moe/rpzgus.webm
All states are fundamentally violent, what are you imagining to be a “decent” country where there is no violence by the state?
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.
In a Marxist sense, any class society has a state, but that’s a little beside the point.
Well, to each his own. I’m not a Marxist.
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.
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.
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.
Really? West have been blatantly manufacturing atrocity and you say China created “hostile atmosphere”?
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.
… responds to people just making their voices heard with cannons and guns…
And that’s where the difficulty lies.
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 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.
Your instance doesn’t federate with the “tankies” so you won’t even see my comment. Who is suppressing who?
false equivalence much?
Disgusting Anglo supremacists, I can count on you 11/10 times.
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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.
My uncle’ works at Nintendo, you have no idea what’s coming your way!!!
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?
he’s not justifying it, he’s refuting it.
Shows both of those guys, including the “I have no desire to explain, trust me bro” one, never even read that.
Don’t ever let anyone forget or brush under the rug the horrible acts that occurred in Tiananmen Square on June 4th, 1989.
https://www.history.com/topics/asian-history/tiananmen-square
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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.
We do also block the nazis
Unless they’re anti-american of course
Wrong
Why? Weird line to draw if you are fine supporting the Taliban
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.
These people really want their echo chamber, not a good look for Lemmy imo
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.
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.
echo chamber? youre the one echoing western corporate media narrative.
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
I’m sorry let me clarify. By ‘you’ I mean the influx of users with a predominantly western liberal mindset.
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
Nah, eventually they will be outnumbered an dislike to go beyond lemmygrad because they get endlessly shit on
I think that tankies, arguably, are hardly leftists at all.
Looking at the community, all I see is Red-Draped Reactionaries.
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.
I did not know other people could not shut down BS that gets spouted by ignoramuses or malicious state propagandists.
Wow. There’s a lot of CCP folks working the federated space.
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.
Can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen?
I’ve already done the same, can recommend it
Could just block it, that way you don’t have to see it, and don’t have to start a new account.
Sure, though I like the idea of more explicitly supporting instances with better quality control.
Seems like there’s also no way around blocking individual users who openly support fascists.
Wow a post on lemmy denouncing the CCPs actions instead of denying them or even trying to justify them? Thats rare
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.
Also this is not world news, this is a China news,
Is china not part of the world? lmao
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?
??? 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
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.
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
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
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:
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.
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?
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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an unknown number of deaths… yet calls it a massacre
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.
