- cross-posted to:
- worldnews@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- worldnews@lemmy.ml
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Basic image analysis like this should have been done ages ago, but libs don’t care about the truth just blind propagandizing
I was honestly so surprised myself when I realized that the supposed most famous picture of the massacre didn’t show a single dead body. Just makes you think about how easily can falsehood be used for propaganda.
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i distinctly remember being ‘informed’ that “right after this photo, he was disappeared by the secret police and never seen or heard from again!”
Yea that was the version I was “taught”, that no one knows who is is or what happened to him and obviously that means the communist party disappeared him
One of the first casualties of the whole protest was an unarmed PLA officer that was tied to a bus by the protestors and burnt alive. Then mocked and photographed. They never share that photo around though.
Not true, they do … And they claim that it’s another instance of SeePeePee violence …
Let me see if I can find the libbed up reddit thread where I saw it:
Not as upvoted as I remember, the post is a Midjourney selfie from tank man.
Westerners refuse to believe that about half the fatalities were PLA members because in their countries, the police would never be unarmed, never abandon their equipment, never hesitate to kill in retaliation.
Westerners also don’t pity the murdered PLA officers because they view them the same as their own police: violent people that eagerly abuse their power.
I think that’s the most eye-opening thing about this “massacre”
if this had happened in the US, the streets would have run with rivers of blood. It would’ve been utterly brutal. And the US would be the one rewriting history to try and pretend it never happened. It’s always projection.
Yeah so much western propaganda is essentially just accusing this or that country of being like the USA. I genuinely don’t understand why it’s so effective
Because the other half of the propaganda is convincing people that the USA isn’t like the USA. No idea how that one works so well either thought.
The same reason why slave-ocrats said that enslaved people liked to be enslaved, but were in constant fear of revolts. They live in fear of being treated like they’ve treated others.
Imagine if BLM protestors had tied an unarmed, out of uniform, cop to a bus and burnt them alive what the libs would be screaming for. They would want outright slaughter.
Word. Kent state? Armed National Guard goons in full battle rattle with bayonets fixed fired 7.62mm rifles point blank in to students. Tianemen? The majority of the PLA soldiers in the square didn’t have any weapons of any kind what so ever. They didn’t have batons. They didn’t have helmets. They were just wearing their uniforms and basically standing there. It was a show of force, certainly, but unlike anything I can think of in Western political history.
During the New York Draft Riots, the New York Times machine gunned protestors.
In authoritarian America, citizens aren’t taught the history of the New York Draft Riots and anyone who googles 紐約徵兵暴動 gets disappeared by their secret police! 😱😱
I asked an American about the New York Draft Riots once, and he gave me a clearly uncomfortable look. That said it all.
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AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
the Tiananmen Square Bicycle Massacre
I believe there’s actually video footage of tank man climbing up on the tank, conversing with the tank commander, and then getting down and walking away.
I’m told that many people were lying prone because there was machine gun fire from the battle between the PLA and the insurgents several blocks away.
You don’t get it! Deng flattened all the people with his fat cheeks, then inflated everyone back up, then cleaned up the blood and viscera but not the bodies!
You joke but there is a BBC article that literally claims that someone saw dead bodies of the protestors beinng churned and sent down the gutter or something like that.
~let me put this here real quick~
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That’s dope. The one thing I always find frustrating when bickering over politics is people not even caring to read or learn more. I have a lot more respect for my friends when they do, even if all it does is give more nuance to their takes.
Hell if I never decided to read more shit I’d still be a right winger with the rest of the nutcase family.
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There’s a difference from racist screeds and someone telling you to read the leaked diplomatic cables about tianenmen.
We can be critical of past and existing socialist projects, but we can’t ultimately forget that they must be supported and given grace in the face of the primary contradiction that is Global North imperialism. As long as our societies are influenced by class relations, states are going to exist for the foreseeable future. To think a socialist state shuld be abolished immediately in the context of being surrounded by imperialist predators is an irrational expectation…
Because of this, we are skeptical of the messaging coming from imperialist states. We support the countries that are attempting to progress humanity past capitalism, which is destroying us. For those of us in the imperial core, we understand that any criticisms we have of other socialist revolutions can’t ultimately be trusted. Those criticisms – whatever they may be – have zero relevance to the nations that are battling for survival in spite of the empire we live in.
We should cautiously inspect the propaganda we consume from all states, socialist or not. But we omly continue to amass reasons to be downright cynical of anything coming out of Western governments.
Agreed! Criticism of the 20th century, both it’s failures and it’s successes, is vital to moving forward! We can’t treat our past comrades as saints, nor ignore them, and they wouldn’t want us to! Imagine knowing that those who came after you refused to learn from the mistakes you made! I can’t imagine anything more horrible for someone who devoted their life to a scientific understanding of economy than people refusing to learn from observation.
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Thanks for engaging but I still really don’t think you’ve fully grasp what Marxism-Leninism is. You’ve continued to mischaracterize and create strawmen out of what M-L movements aspire to do (forcing peace at the barrel of a gun??).
Yes, historically, Marxism-Leninist revolutions have relied on centralized vanguard parties, but ultimately each country where a revolution takes place, socialism will be built according to that country’s material conditions. There’s no reason why our strategies and tactics can’t adapt based on our particular situations, but we still take lessons from past attempts at building socialism. Marxism is not a dogma (although there are still those that treat it that way).
When we say a state is inevitible, it’s the recognition that a state will naturally arise as long as there are still class relations. To not acknowledge that is to ignore material reality. After a revolution, there will still be a bourgeoisie and they will still be needed to contribute to building the socialist project. People will still have cultural tendencies from the prior bourgeois dictatorship. Money will still be a thing. Imperialism will still exist. How do you secure the ground the working class has won through revolution (which is still what you’re talking about, whether you want to call it a “revolution” or not)? As long as the bourgeoisie exist, their interests will ultimately be opposed to the interests of the proletariat. How do you prevent a bourgeois dictatorship from seizing power again? You’re going to need to repress them by some means. You’re going to have to exclude them from decision-making bodies. What do you call that other than a state?
And class struggle doesn’t just end when socialists seize power. It continues. And it’s up to the masses to keep the new regime honest about it’s ideals. Of course there is always the chance a socialist government can become overrun with corruption. That is the entire lesson we’ve learned from the violent dissolution of the USSR. But that doesn’t mean we abandon the communist struggle. We learn, we recognize the internal and external forces at play, and we try to build on pre-existing theory so that we can better put it into practice.
I’ll read but am doubtful something will be able to convince me to trust in government or someone with power.
I know you said you’re bowing out in another comment but I just want to say that states are bad, all states. States do bad things in pursuit of maintaining themselves. This is true of the capitalist state. This is true of the socialist state. What matters here is who they do their bad shit in service of, what class are they serving, the proletariat or the bourgeoisie.
We are communists. We want a stateless society. We want this because we know states are bad.
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I would strongly suggest reading State and Revolution to understand the reasoning on the function of the DotP. It is fundamentally oriented towards the tendencies of power and people following self-interested motivations in aggregate over time. No one is talking about “giving up” anything. The proletariat is to oppress the bourgeoisie by means of more genuinely democratic governance (that obstructs the power of capital that is exerted in liberal democracies) and erode the bourgeois class over time until it no longer exists. No power is surrendered at any point in that process, but the people who need to be oppressed are decided on class lines that cease to exist by the very same process as the class is oppressed.
You can find both text and audiobook versions online pretty easily, and hopefully the most famous work of the founder of the first Marxist state is not on the same level as QAnon manifestos to you.
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Why?
is there a tldr on exactly what happened then? there were undeniably a lot of tanks present, which is not a good sign.
this is a pretty good summary https://redsails.org/another-view-of-tiananmen/
I did a deep-ish dive on primary and secondary evidence for the time. Still have it in a google doc that could turn out an article.
I think the tl;dr is that the popular narrative (especially in Australia, where I live) is that the CPC bulldozed 10,000 protesters at Tiananmen Square with tanks in 1989 because they were protesting against the communist party. Guts squishing out of treads. The narrative obviously paints Australia’s largest export partner as hideously evil (and by association every socialist project. Whether or not you accept this, a lot of Australians do).
My own research (sorry, I hate this term, conspiracy theorists ruined it) has uncovered a few things that are publicly available that throw shade on this narrative:
- Most of the journalists that were actually present (I focused on Australian ones, because that’s where I live) agree that no massacre happened at the square that night. They claim to have been amongst the last to leave after the order to disperse.
- The source for 10,000 comes from two places: A journalist at a nearby hospital who estimates that 10k people could have been rushed in as casualties. More significantly, the main source for the 10k figure was an intelligence asset at the Australian Embassy IIRC who said that an internal member of the CPC had told them the 10k figure. Notably, this happened quite early in the night. This was then repeated by the Prime Minister the next day (totally to the surprise of the intelligence asset and the embassy).
- The source for tanks grinding up protesters bodies into paste come from one place, a person that the above journalists say was not present at Tiananmen Square and was in a position to flee the country a couple of hours later. Not impossible, but strains credibility. The source’s claims later influenced people’s memories of “Tank Man”, a video of a person interacting with a column of tanks for a bit before leaving. Ballsy, for sure, but he was not being ground up into paste and neither did the tank crews seem willing to do that.
- There were separate protests going on on the highway leading up to the Square. China is a big place with a lot of people, and at the time Deng was introducing market reforms. A significant number of protesters were in both events were protesting against the market reforms that Deng was introducing (allowing more free flow of Capital to the rest of China). The majority of the deaths (that did happen, I wouldn’t claim otherwise) happened on this approach. For this reason, the most senior journalist of the Australian cohort at the time regrets calling it the Tiananman square massacre as he feels it gives the CPC ammunition to discredit everything about it. He’s still alive, I have an email I need to send him, or go bother him in person next time I’m in Melbourne.
- The massacre (the references to the event that did happen) was more like a roving street battle. The first casualties were Chinese soldiers, some of which were burned alive while chained to buses and APCs. There were also many protester casualties. The CPC claims a little under 300 fatalities of the entire event, including their own troops. I find this largely plausible, or at least that it’s lower than the commonly believed 10k figure in my country by at least an order of magnitude.
- The biggest promoters of the various claims are people closely associated with the NED’s office in Beijing. I don’t know what that means to you.
Anyway, after doing this “research” I kinda figured that most people in my social circles don’t want to hear it, even though the information is very publicly available. So why bother bringing it up in normal conversation? The best you’re doing is probably excluding yourself from any conversation.
I still have the names of the journos, parties etc. in question if you want, as well as various links. I am just a little drunk and haven’t opened up the document.
I am approaching this in as good faith as possible.
thank you. you should share the document here because sources are important.
Thread I wrote about Tiananmen: https://twitter.com/prolewiki/status/1666492127730098208 (Thread reader link due to Musk fuckery on twitter)
CIA-funded leader Chai Ling crying crocodile tears hoping students will be shot while she herself deadpan says she’ll be out of the country: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5__ESiklA1A. She was later extradited by the CIA during Operation Yellowbird and now lives in the USA.
I always enjoy re-watching the full “Tank Man” video, with the “brutal Chinese tanks” awkwardly trying to bypass the protestor and patiently waiting him out. I think libs just see that single frame and fill the gaps with their own experiences in their countries in thinking that the guy got ran over or something. If you try that with a secret service car they might do just that.
If you try that with a secret service car they might do just that.
There’s videos of NYPD just plowing BLM protesters. Amerikkkans think other places are as awful as theirs is.
The whole Tiananmen thing is so ridiculous. Chinese government’s official estimate? ~300 deaths. People who were in the square? No one died in the square, good mood between soldiers and students, soldiers asked students to leave when dickass CIA plant started trying to start a riot, students left with no problems, ~300 people were killed (including PLA soldiers, many of whom were unarmed!) in fighting several blocks from the square. Every credible source that wasn’t just making up unhinged bullshit - About 300 people died.
It’s so damn frustrating, it’s just pure, utter bullshit but libs believe it with nigh-religious ferver and certainty.
The only reason whitey even gives a shit about these dead chinese people is that they hate china so much. After all, half of them are still secretly jerking themselves off at the thought of millions of chinese farmers dying due to the Three Gorges Dam going broke.
Muricans; TIANAMEN SEESEEPEE 10,000 dead tank jelly gutters!
Also Muricans: What do you mean Indonesia slaughtered half a million innocent people with the knowledge and support of the US government? What do you means the US and Saudi conspired to kill hundreds of thousands of Yemenis in a campaign of naked and uncomplicated genocide? What do you mean the South Korean forces murdered tens of thousands of innocent people using a pretense of communism? That’s all bullshit I would have heard about that and anyway they weren’t white so I don’t care.
Same can be applied to Xinjiang propaganda. “Oh, the State Department now cares about Muslim lives?”
The US led war on terror killed more Muslims than exist in Xinjiang
Libs will probably lose their minds if they can’t make jokes about Tiananmen Square.
I’m probably replying to some anti-lib community, but it’s really weird coming from “/c/all” that nearly every comment has some sort of jab at “libs” for a topic that I would never associate with a political spectrum.
Fyi I’m not affiliated with any political “side” and I’m not American, so it just seems weird to be.
We are an a communist instance. American liberals (which includes both of their major political parties) are very imperialist and love to push propaganda about their enemies. It’s why public opinion for China took a nose dive in the last 10 years. Why Iran is so evil, but nobody thinks about Kuwait. Why Tiananmen square gets so much attention but the white terror receives none. China’s the enemy, and “Taiwan” is an innocent friend that needs protecting.
Being communist, we are anti-imperialist, and hate the war mongering propaganda that the liberals seem to lap up. They see this as being conspiracy theorists or contrarian. Hence the conflict about things like this.
Okay, I understand the narative, and agree that western culture has cemented certain opinions on history. But where does the liberal part come in? Maybe I’m misunderstanding that bit. On US social media there is this whole lib vs republican thing going on. In this case does lib just mean “not communism”?
In this case does lib just mean “not communism”?
Liberalism is the ideology of capitalism. Thus “liberal” is everyone who support capitalism, that is basically starting at socialdemocracy and everything right of them - which in western countries mean literally entire political mainstream.
Yeah, this is definitely better than my reply. I’m tired after arguing with the liberals all damn day. I need some cigars and brandy.
To Republicans, “liberal” means communist/vegan/trans/Black/Millenial/baby killers/etc.
To Self-described Liberals, “liberal” means Non-authoritarian socialist/centrist/real patriots/pro-science/pragmatic/etc.
Basically, don’t go on US social media to see political terms being used with any significant amount of accuracy. Most Americans are so politically ignorant that, even to many of those that describe themselves as politically-minded, these labels have essentially lost all concrete meaning.
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We understand the material conditions and how that drives not only ideas, but change as a whole. For example by carefully looking at the material world around me, I can safely confirm that Xi and Biden are two different people.
Must be nice on the holodeck.
Bit of a late reply, but why is it so hard for you to imagine any leader caring about their people? (This sounded more accusatory than I meant, that’s not my goal, it’s more of a “why is it so hard to imagine a caring leader?” not a personal attack.)
Most of us in the west have never actually had a leader who wants to help anyone other than the stockholders of big companies. So the concept of leadership that actually cares about people is entirely alien to us.
To look at it another way: Do you consider yourself a good person? And if you were in a leadership position somewhere, would you try to do the best to help out the people under you? Good people do exist in the world. Not necessarily saying Xi is one of them, just that it is possible for a leader to care about people. Power doesn’t corrupt, corrupt people are attracted to power. But they aren’t always the ones who get it.
It was not fabricated, it was exaggerated. Clashes occurred around Beijing and bloodshed was real. Most of them were Maoists clashing with pro market reform government.
Nobody is denying bloodshed. There absolutely were violent protests outside the square. The claim in question is that the military gunned down thousands of peaceful protesters in the square, which so far as I know is a claim that’s exclusively made by people who were not there.
Even that is giving too much credit to the US government narrative.
There literally are all the US mainstream news outlets like CBS News who actually had reporters there at the time: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/there-was-no-tiananmen-square-massacre/
Also from classified US communications with assets on the ground: https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/89BEIJING18828_a.html
Funniest thing is that “tank man” photo idiots spam on Reddit all the time. Most people in the west don’t realize there is video of it, that the guy didn’t get run over. Furthermore they assume he was blocking tanks heading towards the square, infact those tanks were at the time headed away from the square to avoid engaging with armed agitators (people with guns and grenades that had killed police) in a crowded environment. Dude was trying to make them go back.
The deaths that day were people who got gunned down by the “protestors” or the police who were killed when the “protestors” threw grenades (military ordnance) into police vehicles. People that were armed by the CIA as part of a color revolution operation, one that failed because it didn’t actually have any support and more importantly because the PLA commander on the scene ordered his units to leave the area rather than responding in kind. The only actual protestors that day were communists having labor protests happening nearby and not the dancing libertine youth acting as the face of the US color revolution operation involving armed groups trying unsuccessfully to provoke the PLA soliders into responding to deadly attacks with deadly force in a crowded urban environment.
My personal opinion on the matter isn’t that much different from yours (the biggest reason being that the media blitz about the massacre seemed preplanned… It just didn’t go according to plan). The problem is that I can’t prove anything, so it’s all conjecture. So I typically leave that out. It’s already a sensitive enough subject.
On balance, it would be fair to say that while thousands of protestors were most likely not gunned down in the square itself, hundreds were being gunned down around it. So there was a massacre by the PLA, it just didn’t happen in the square itself.
If they were just protestors, why were they gunned down while the ones in the square could all be cleared out with no fatalities? Did the people who incinerated soldiers and strung up their burnt corpses leave peacefully beforehand?
So there was a massacre by the PLA, it just didn’t happen in the square itself.
Current research by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation suggests that the massacre occured in the same place Sadaam Hussein would later store his nonexistant WMDs.
most of them by the time the actual violent clashes happened certainly werent maoists. Yeah there was a significant % of the protestors that were coming from the left of the CPC but you have to remember that the unrest span month(s) and many cities. In Tainanmen by that point in the movement and leading to that the make up of those that stayed and engaged in lynchings and clashes with the PLA and police was solidly “pro-democracy/free-s[peech/liberalism” youth. Also western intelligence focus and assets had already zeroed in in Beijing and those elements after smelling blood from the more organic initial country wide unrest.
I like that we have/need new books to re-report information that was widely known decades ago because of how easy it is to sell propaganda to the west. We have actual documentaries, made by the west at the time of Tiananmen, that completely contradicts the massacre narrative that was invented years later. lol. Libs really will believe anything as long as it comes from the mouth of some oligarch backed talking head.
The key reason this kind of lazy propaganda works is because people want to believe it. It leverages the latent racism and capitalist realism people have internalized living in decaying western societies. The idea that a country that doesn’t follow liberal ideology could be more successful is a complete anathema to these people.
Indeed. “The west is the best” is the prevailing thought in the zeitgeist of the west. So as bad as things can be in the west, at least they are still “the best.” But if other nations actually practice “freedom and liberty” better than they do, despite not screaming about how “free” they are all the time, it calls the whole western narrative into question. And causes a lot of cognitive dissonance. And people in the west are not given the tools they need to deal with that, so they just lash out and get angry, or find an easy excuse to ignore it.
Have you seen that chart that tracks how Americans went from credditing the USSR for making the greatest sacrifice in WWII and contributing the most to victory in 1946, to completely removing the Soviet contribution from the picture by the 80s? It’s really sad. The Red Army deserves better.
Wow, straight-up propaganda. Seek the Truth, people. That event has been covered by multiple reputable journalists, from all around the world…
liberals reading
That’s funny.
This is what tankies actually believe
Tankies, historians, the CIA
The Chinese government suckering you to do your PR work for them, them too
Do you on principle recoil from all evidence when the truth is convenient to someone you hate? Is it the same to believe the truth and to be ‘doing PR work’ for them?
Lol tankie says what?
Khrushchev was right to put down the rebellion in Hungary. It would have been proof to the West they could chop away the USSR with color revolutions and it prevented a second holocaust in Eastern Europe.
They don’t know anything that you’re talking about
When a baby accidentally says a real word it’s good for their development to respond
Dipshits: Uhhh actualkly tankies are bad because the USSR should have just let the fascists who had all been soldiers for the Reich ten years prior and had murdered a half a million Jewish Hungarians as well as god knows how many others re-take power and re-install the Arrow Cross party!
The one objectively correct thing Khrushchev did
most literate anticommunist
those damn tankies at checks notes… cbs news?
It’s true we do!
Facts and logic don’t care about your ideology!
If by tankies you mean people who have any historical literacy at all then yeah.
Shouldn’t even take a book to come to that conclusion, honestly. Frankly, I doubt anyone who is entrenteched in the propaganda around the event would change their mind no matter how much evidence you show them. For them, China is bad, so everything else must follow from that.
Even western media, at the time of the event, said that basically nothing happened in the square. It wasn’t until they realised that didn’t line up with the US position that they changed their line, but you can find old articles (including first hand accounts from diplomats in the area) that say there wasn’t much.
I don’t think anyone denies that some violence occured in the city as a whole, though it was very often levied the opposite way of popular portrayal. Especially because a lot of the PLA that were initially deployed were not even armed.
Westies are just really sour that their color revolution failed in China.
