Western audiences care when a lie costs a lot of tax money and soldier’s lives. Under those circumstances the lie eventually hits the headlines. Otherwise people tend not to look into it and the bullshit goes unchallenged, especially when questioning it means denying an atrocity. That’s the whole point of atrocity propaganda. It works especially well on leftists because leftists are goodhearted people who care about atrocities.
For example, saying “Although people died in violent clashes on Chang’an Avenue and elsewhere in Beijing, no one died in Tiananmen Square” is a bad look. Your reaction to it isn’t curiosity, your reaction is “how dare you erase the lives of those thousands of brave students who were crushed into a paste under the treads of tanks in Tiananmen Square!” And I fucking commend that reaction, it proves you have a heart.
and yet
Wikileaks published diplomatic cables acknowledging that no one died in the square [1].
Multiple established western journalists who were present at Tiananmen have said that no one died in the square [2][3][4][5][6]. These journalists are all otherwise critics of the Chinese government.
Multiple organizers of the protests have said that no one died in the square [7]. Hou Dejian, who was there all night, called out the false narrative in an interview: “Are we going to use lies against an enemy who lies?”[8]
A Spanish film crew was in in the square all night and filmed students leaving peacefully at dawn, singing the Internationale. Here it is on Youtube: [9]. This aired on Hong Kong news but never in the west — I wonder why?
But even if these sources managed to convince you, you’re not gonna go around telling other people, because “The Tiananmen Square massacre never happened” sounds absurd and makes you look like some kind of holocaust denier — except the holocaust is supported by overwhelming evidence and the Tiananmen Square massacre is not.
So now you’re aware of two lies.
Turns out there’s a third lie, and a fourth lie, and…
You could write a post like this on North Korea, and people have [10].
You could write a post like this on Xinjiang, and people have [11].
I’m running out of bookmarks now — I don’t make a habit of writing posts like this — but I hope I have at least gotten the point across that tankies have their reasons, and in a media landscape as distorted as the one we live in I think it is absurd to write them off as easily as people do.
There aren’t and I never said there were. I was responding specifically to a comment about WMDs in Iraq
Although people died in violent clashes on Chang’an Avenue and elsewhere in Beijing, no one died in Tiananmen Square
This, however, is directly a lie. While it is true that nearly all confirmed deaths were at Muxidi and Chang’an Avenue, there were definitely deaths within the square itself. The only reason there weren’t more is because the students were committed to nonviolent protest, even as a full military force with weapons banned by the Geneva Conventions pulled up on them. (Guess what, the Geneva Conventions don’t apply if you don’t declare war! The US and CCP both love that tidbit).
Wikileaks published diplomatic cables acknowledging that no one died in the square
The first source you linked states clearly that gunfire was heard in the Square, as do almost every other source I could find. And no, it’s not just referring to the gunfire that was used to destroy the loudspeakers. Your second source tries to pretend like Muxidi was just a few people killed under very different circumstances, and also pretends as though everyone thinks Tiananmen was simply a massacre of students and nothing more. Maybe I’m in the minority, but the fact that the protestors in the square were university students was never more than a footnote of the story. It doesn’t really change it, and I was also aware that students were not the only participants in the protest.
Your third source is from someone who heard the gunfire but could not see the square, and was driven through the square forty minutes later. He says he didn’t see any evidence of mass shootings there, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t any. Forty minutes is a long time to clean things up, especially when some reported that they ran over the dead in order to hose them down the drains in the square for efficient cleaning. 12 Most likely what happened in the square itself is that some protestors were killed by gunfire, whether randomly or intentionally, and from being crushed by tanks (which your fourth source confirms by the way) while most were escorted out later. This of course does not change the fact that an unknown number likely in the thousands were killed trying to keep the army from getting to the square, and killed trying to enter the square after the army already arrived there.
Hou Dejian, who was there all night, called out the false narrative in an interview: “Are we going to use lies against an enemy who lies?”
Hou Dejian also made an unknown agreement with CCP officials after secretly meeting with them. He later admitted that this meeting occurred, but we still don’t know what it was about or why. Using him as a source for anything is suspect at best.
A Spanish film crew was in in the square all night and filmed students leaving peacefully at dawn, singing the Internationale. Here it is on Youtube: [9]. This aired on Hong Kong news but never in the west — I wonder why?
I can’t speak to if this ever appeared on the news, but nearly every source I read about this, as well as the Wikipedia page for the massacre, mentions this. Anyone who wants to learn about this event knows that some of the students were able to leave the square peacefully.
Tiananmen Square massacre is not.
This is at best misleading semantics, but in reality a boldfaced lie. Enough people died in the square for it to be called a massacre. Even some of the articles you sourced said that in no uncertain terms. But even if that wasn’t the case, more than enough people died across Beijing and across a half-dozen other cities in China who also held protests in solidarity with the protestors at Tiananmen. To say there is no evidence of a massacre at Tiananmen is to say there is no evidence that I shit in a toilet.
I have things to do tonight, so I’ll have to come back to your posts about NK and Xinjiang later. What comes after this is a mix of personal anecdotes, interviews with current and former Chinese citizens, and my own conclusions. It will all be unsourced but if anyone’s curious I can clarify where things came from later.
China still says Tiananmen was a student riot that was quieted mostly without casualties by the military police, and that those who died were killed in self-defense. This is an outright falsehood. They switched from rubber bullets to live rounds before they even reached the square, hence the confirmed deaths at Muxidi, Chang’an, and other places in the city. The people were shocked at the usage of live rounds. The event is still something that Chinese people do not talk about. In the modern day, everyone knows about it thanks mostly to Wikipedia. It’s somehow not blocked by the Great Firewall and a lot of data about the event is written on there. But even back when it happened, most people knew what really happened even though the government suppressed news and lied in their official releases. Some people still bought the lies that it was a necessary evil, even though they knew that the government had lied about how bad the event really was.
Beyond any of that, I notice you don’t have anything to say about the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution, despite those being arguably much more harmful events in the history the CCP. But even more importantly, the fact that you feel the need to defend the CCP at all makes zero sense, since it has never resembled communism. If your goal truly is to advance communism, you should want to distance yourself from China as much as possible, because they are not and have never been communist. Since the days of Deng Xiaoping China has been an authoritarian oligarchy pretending to be capitalist, and before that it was an authoritarian oligarchy pretending to be communist. The party has never sought to work for the people.
And please stop taking pages from the fascist’s playbook by saying a bunch of dumb bullshit and forcing people like me to break down, step-by-step, why you couldn’t possibly be more wrong. This comment did not need to be a 5 minute read. The last paragraph is really the only one that says anything new at all, but some people might read your shit-flinging comment and actually agree with you if they didn’t know any better. It’s ironic that you are spreading misinformation while pleading for people to stop spreading misinformation.
and at the end of the day, you’re arguing with someone supporting the massacre at Tienanmen Square. THAT is why we need to kick the tankies out. Defederate the Lemmy.ml instances and Lemmy and the fediverse will be better for it
What I was doing wasn’t arguing, although it may have looked like that. I was correcting. His comment, although it’s now deleted, was quite convincing to the untrained eye. He used several tools from the fascist’s playbook (Innuendo Studios calls it alt-right but I think fascist is more accurate), unknowingly or not, which made it very easy to sway susceptible minds with less knowledge on the topic. Correcting these people when they pop up is important, even though it’s ridiculously tedious and you will never sway the mind of the person who wrote the comment. Because that correction will stay there for the people who are still uneducated on why they’re so wrong.
Thanks! For some sick twisted reason I actually enjoy doing stuff like this, maybe because my teachers always hated my essays in school and I need validation that my writing style isn’t complete garbage. I’m glad to know some people are getting value out of the work I put into it.
Why would there be only one lie?
Western audiences care when a lie costs a lot of tax money and soldier’s lives. Under those circumstances the lie eventually hits the headlines. Otherwise people tend not to look into it and the bullshit goes unchallenged, especially when questioning it means denying an atrocity. That’s the whole point of atrocity propaganda. It works especially well on leftists because leftists are goodhearted people who care about atrocities.
For example, saying “Although people died in violent clashes on Chang’an Avenue and elsewhere in Beijing, no one died in Tiananmen Square” is a bad look. Your reaction to it isn’t curiosity, your reaction is “how dare you erase the lives of those thousands of brave students who were crushed into a paste under the treads of tanks in Tiananmen Square!” And I fucking commend that reaction, it proves you have a heart.
and yet
Wikileaks published diplomatic cables acknowledging that no one died in the square [1].
Multiple established western journalists who were present at Tiananmen have said that no one died in the square [2][3][4][5][6]. These journalists are all otherwise critics of the Chinese government.
Multiple organizers of the protests have said that no one died in the square [7]. Hou Dejian, who was there all night, called out the false narrative in an interview: “Are we going to use lies against an enemy who lies?”[8]
A Spanish film crew was in in the square all night and filmed students leaving peacefully at dawn, singing the Internationale. Here it is on Youtube: [9]. This aired on Hong Kong news but never in the west — I wonder why?
But even if these sources managed to convince you, you’re not gonna go around telling other people, because “The Tiananmen Square massacre never happened” sounds absurd and makes you look like some kind of holocaust denier — except the holocaust is supported by overwhelming evidence and the Tiananmen Square massacre is not.
So now you’re aware of two lies.
Turns out there’s a third lie, and a fourth lie, and…
You could write a post like this on North Korea, and people have [10].
You could write a post like this on Xinjiang, and people have [11].
I’m running out of bookmarks now — I don’t make a habit of writing posts like this — but I hope I have at least gotten the point across that tankies have their reasons, and in a media landscape as distorted as the one we live in I think it is absurd to write them off as easily as people do.
There aren’t and I never said there were. I was responding specifically to a comment about WMDs in Iraq
This, however, is directly a lie. While it is true that nearly all confirmed deaths were at Muxidi and Chang’an Avenue, there were definitely deaths within the square itself. The only reason there weren’t more is because the students were committed to nonviolent protest, even as a full military force with weapons banned by the Geneva Conventions pulled up on them. (Guess what, the Geneva Conventions don’t apply if you don’t declare war! The US and CCP both love that tidbit).
The first source you linked states clearly that gunfire was heard in the Square, as do almost every other source I could find. And no, it’s not just referring to the gunfire that was used to destroy the loudspeakers. Your second source tries to pretend like Muxidi was just a few people killed under very different circumstances, and also pretends as though everyone thinks Tiananmen was simply a massacre of students and nothing more. Maybe I’m in the minority, but the fact that the protestors in the square were university students was never more than a footnote of the story. It doesn’t really change it, and I was also aware that students were not the only participants in the protest.
Your third source is from someone who heard the gunfire but could not see the square, and was driven through the square forty minutes later. He says he didn’t see any evidence of mass shootings there, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t any. Forty minutes is a long time to clean things up, especially when some reported that they ran over the dead in order to hose them down the drains in the square for efficient cleaning. 1 2 Most likely what happened in the square itself is that some protestors were killed by gunfire, whether randomly or intentionally, and from being crushed by tanks (which your fourth source confirms by the way) while most were escorted out later. This of course does not change the fact that an unknown number likely in the thousands were killed trying to keep the army from getting to the square, and killed trying to enter the square after the army already arrived there.
Hou Dejian also made an unknown agreement with CCP officials after secretly meeting with them. He later admitted that this meeting occurred, but we still don’t know what it was about or why. Using him as a source for anything is suspect at best.
I can’t speak to if this ever appeared on the news, but nearly every source I read about this, as well as the Wikipedia page for the massacre, mentions this. Anyone who wants to learn about this event knows that some of the students were able to leave the square peacefully.
This is at best misleading semantics, but in reality a boldfaced lie. Enough people died in the square for it to be called a massacre. Even some of the articles you sourced said that in no uncertain terms. But even if that wasn’t the case, more than enough people died across Beijing and across a half-dozen other cities in China who also held protests in solidarity with the protestors at Tiananmen. To say there is no evidence of a massacre at Tiananmen is to say there is no evidence that I shit in a toilet.
I have things to do tonight, so I’ll have to come back to your posts about NK and Xinjiang later. What comes after this is a mix of personal anecdotes, interviews with current and former Chinese citizens, and my own conclusions. It will all be unsourced but if anyone’s curious I can clarify where things came from later.
China still says Tiananmen was a student riot that was quieted mostly without casualties by the military police, and that those who died were killed in self-defense. This is an outright falsehood. They switched from rubber bullets to live rounds before they even reached the square, hence the confirmed deaths at Muxidi, Chang’an, and other places in the city. The people were shocked at the usage of live rounds. The event is still something that Chinese people do not talk about. In the modern day, everyone knows about it thanks mostly to Wikipedia. It’s somehow not blocked by the Great Firewall and a lot of data about the event is written on there. But even back when it happened, most people knew what really happened even though the government suppressed news and lied in their official releases. Some people still bought the lies that it was a necessary evil, even though they knew that the government had lied about how bad the event really was.
Beyond any of that, I notice you don’t have anything to say about the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution, despite those being arguably much more harmful events in the history the CCP. But even more importantly, the fact that you feel the need to defend the CCP at all makes zero sense, since it has never resembled communism. If your goal truly is to advance communism, you should want to distance yourself from China as much as possible, because they are not and have never been communist. Since the days of Deng Xiaoping China has been an authoritarian oligarchy pretending to be capitalist, and before that it was an authoritarian oligarchy pretending to be communist. The party has never sought to work for the people.
And please stop taking pages from the fascist’s playbook by saying a bunch of dumb bullshit and forcing people like me to break down, step-by-step, why you couldn’t possibly be more wrong. This comment did not need to be a 5 minute read. The last paragraph is really the only one that says anything new at all, but some people might read your shit-flinging comment and actually agree with you if they didn’t know any better. It’s ironic that you are spreading misinformation while pleading for people to stop spreading misinformation.
and at the end of the day, you’re arguing with someone supporting the massacre at Tienanmen Square. THAT is why we need to kick the tankies out. Defederate the Lemmy.ml instances and Lemmy and the fediverse will be better for it
We shouldn’t debate with tankies, just like we shouldn’t debate with nazis. Banning them on sight is the right thing to do.
Hear hear!
I do feel the need to clarify a little bit
What I was doing wasn’t arguing, although it may have looked like that. I was correcting. His comment, although it’s now deleted, was quite convincing to the untrained eye. He used several tools from the fascist’s playbook (Innuendo Studios calls it alt-right but I think fascist is more accurate), unknowingly or not, which made it very easy to sway susceptible minds with less knowledge on the topic. Correcting these people when they pop up is important, even though it’s ridiculously tedious and you will never sway the mind of the person who wrote the comment. Because that correction will stay there for the people who are still uneducated on why they’re so wrong.
Nah, not everyone on lemmy.ml knows it’s run by tankies
All the more reason to defederate
I just wanted to say I really appreciate the time and effort you put into this comment. Very interesting read
Thanks! For some sick twisted reason I actually enjoy doing stuff like this, maybe because my teachers always hated my essays in school and I need validation that my writing style isn’t complete garbage. I’m glad to know some people are getting value out of the work I put into it.