• KarlBarqs [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        My favourite bit about the video is that the tank column is leaving Tiananmen when this guy stops them, and I always get the impression he’s essentially asking the tankers to go back to the Square.

        Naturally the lib framing is that he’s blocking them from entering the Square

      • AcidSmiley [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Look it’s important that Western countries don’t show the full vid, otherwise their citizens would think they can do the same to cops in the US, can you imagine what they’d do to a guy walking around on one of their armored vehicles?

        • I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          So that’s why China allows open conversation about the incident right? If it’s all just a big misunderstanding, they should be happy to allow their citizens to share the facts. Certainly they wouldn’t take steps to ban all mention of the incident as if there was something terrible there they wanted to hide.

          • AcidSmiley [she/her]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            So that’s why China allows open conversation about the incident right?

            This actually gets discussed in Chinese state media. The idea that people get -500 social credit score when they barely mention Tiananmen Square is mostly Western propaganda. Maybe somebody else will link you articles about this from China, i’m not gonna bother because they’ve already been linked ITT and you liberals don’t read them anyway. But of course they’re around.

            Your post also shows a vast ignorance about how propaganda even works in the first place, whether we’re talking China or the USA or any other country. That’s because you get your ideas about politics from idiots like the antisemitic snitch and cousin r*pist George Orwell and then you think dictatorships work like 1984 and completely miss that you’re living in a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Propaganda is not about hiding things from the public, that simply doesn’t work well enough. You can downplay the truth, but you’ll never get rid of it entirely. We’re one example of that, existing and driving you nuts in spite of the largest propaganda and surveilance apparatus in the world working against us. And the same applies for the smaller, less overarching, less well funded Chinese “intelligence community”, as you’d call their spies and snitches and secret police if they were Western spies and snitches and secret police. For example, anybody in China can install a VPN and look at Western news sources if they care, and a lot of younger people actually do that, just as you can come here and get exposed to facts that counter Western narratives.This is why propaganda works by emphasizing what you want the people to hear to the point were the noise drowns out what you do not want them to hear. By establishing counter-narratives to the truth. For example, you get flooded with the still image of the guy standing in front of the tank instead of the full video. You get fed the story about China somehow wafflestomping 10.000 corpses down the sewer drains by rolling over them with tanks until they’re mush, as if that could even work, even though the only source for this is something 1 (in words: ONE) British diplomat has allegedly heard from somebody in Beijing. But because people like you never actually check their sources, you think there’s hundreds of accounts of that incident just because there’s hundreds of articles citing that one unnamed British diplomat or each other, and that’s all over reddit, that site that has not only ruined your sense of humor and your ability to ever have a good faith discussion with another human being again, but that has also turned you into a mindless drone lashing out at anybody questioning the racist, national chauvinist narratives that have been blared into your ears until you came here 3 months because the pedophile spez threatened to take away the apps that allowed you to more conveniently doomscroll that hellsite on your mobile phone.

            What you usually do not get to see in Western media are the Chinese cop strung up on a lamppost and set on fire by the protesters, or that many of the counterrevolutionaries where, what a surprise, reactionaries that earlier the same year took part in riots against African exchange students at Chinese universities.

            Anyway, it was fun yelling at you, have a nice day.

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

          https://www.liberationnews.org/tiananmen-the-massacre-that-wasnt-2/

          Edit: the other source I was looking for

          https://archives.cjr.org/behind_the_news/the_myth_of_tiananmen.php

          The thing to get is that there was no massacre on the square, and in fact there’s no verifiable evidence that anybody died there at all that day. Many people did die elsewhere, in street clashes with soldiers, after demonstrators killed and burned a few of them.

          I would like to note also that bringing up events like Tiananmen Square, especially heavily propagandized and warped versions of them, without an understanding of the complex political context which led up to them, is not a gotcha, it’s just ignorant. Not saying you’re doing that or that you would do that, but it’s something others do frequently when they invoke it round here.

          • sanpedropeddler@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            With no actual evidence, it just seems like China’s word against the US’s. Neither are sources I trust, and both have motives to lie. I’m just going to assume nothing.

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

              I said there was no evidence that a massacre took place in Tiananmen Square. What actually took place there is well evidenced by eyewitness testimony, a fair bit of which is contained in the two sources I linked.

              Edit: I also take issue with the assertion that both the US and China are equally untrustworthy, particularly when the Chinese government freely admits that violent clashes between civilians and PLA personnel took place that day, something they would certainly have incentive to lie about if they were as untrustworthy as all that.

              • sanpedropeddler@sh.itjust.works
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                1 year ago

                I recall seeing eyewitness testimony supporting both sides. Although, its possible the testimonies I saw were about the clashes that China admits to, and were simply framed as being about a massacre. They didn’t seem very specific or definitive.

                Even though the Chinese government admits to those violent clashes, its still very plausible they would lie about a massacre. Its much easier to justify that than it would be an actual massacre, especially when the civilians act violently. Its also possible that admitting some aspect of it would benefit them more than complete denial.

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

                  You’d have a point there, if there wasn’t ample photographic evidence which also suggests that no concerted massacre took place, in the square or elsewhere. All available photographic evidence that I’ve seen supports the Chinese government’s version of events: scattered street clashes which unfortunately featured some quite heavy duty violence, but no mass formation of tanks coming in and deliberately schwacking everybody in sight.

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

    Question to American comrades: How are the genocides of native Americans and Lebensraum manifest destiny being taught in American schools? What does the average American know?

    • ComradeKhoumrag@infosec.pub
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      1 year ago

      I learned Christopher Columbus would chop the hands off of indians that didn’t follow orders, and we wiped out 95% plus of their population

      But I went to school in California. Unfortunately, other states can teach their version of history

  • senoro@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I thought the indians did teach colonists how to grow crops like corn and often shared food with them. But then large amounts of Indians would die from a plague every time the colonists visited (disease moment), and then they became suspicious that they were purposefully killing them. And then the colonists grew suspicious that the Indians were planning on killing them and then they all killed each other. Except the colonists had guns and so they won.