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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.
Yeah, that was one of the more fucked up sections of the video I posted, is her crying into a camera. The way she starts crying because the students kept trying to have a peaceful resolution with the government instead of getting themselves massacred… Their entire goal was go try and get as many of their fellow students killed as possible to have as propaganda footage. Like who watches that and then sympathizes with her? Who sees someone crying, because the people under her were trying to be reasonable and not provoke a needless massacre, and thinks “Oh that poor girl. Having to deal with these people that don’t want to get killed for the CIA.” ?"
I mean,
Anti communists are weird, perverse freaks and many of them would happily murder the entire human population if they thought it would keep people from helping each other and making the world better.
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.
I think it’s something Statesians get taught in schools. In Europe we’d always heard he stopped the tanks and then went on his way but “was never seen again”, not that the tanks rolled him over or anything.
God she is such a toolbag. “You need to all go get yourselves killed even though none of you wanted a violent confrontation and many wanted market liberalization to stop and for communist economics to be re-instated! Others just wanted a loosening of socially conservative norms so they could hold hands with their partners without getting dirty looks in public. But what you need to do is start a violent conflict with your PLA comrades for no clear reason. I won’t do it of course, because I am too important to die for the cause that literally only me and like seven other people here care about!”
Sorry for the shitpost reply, but, lol no shit.
Edit: just wait till you find out about what Gaddafi actually did and how the USG used him as a virtual supervillain to fund our adventures in the Levant. The USG and their mouthpieces always lie.
I mean Gaddafi was by many political and social measures somewhat reactionary, due to some aspects of his nationalism, religious orientation (traditional Islam is reactionary; he was resolutely anti-communist and anti-Marxist because of its perceived atheism), as well as traditionalist views of women, despite being more progressive in this respect that that conservative Islamic figures or Islamists. There was an immense concentration of wealth around Gaddafi, although there was also undoubtedly a massive restribution of wealth and improvement in quality of life, I don’t think it amounted to a genuinely socialist society. In any case, the meaning of his use of the term ‘socialism’ was not what Marxist mean, although there were some properties in common.
Ofc you are correct that this becomes irrelevantly weaponized by Western imperialism. The reason Gaddafi was removed was because he was promoting an alterative international monetary system to the dollar, presumably underwritten by Libyan (and allied countries’) oil. More generally the anti-imperialist geopolitical policy of the Libyan state clearly played a key role, having targeted foreign capital the moment he came to power. There was probably also a central role being played by the French regime’s special forces and intelligence under Sarkozy, as the latter had confirmed links with Gaddafi. A lot of investigative reporting has indicated that Gaddafi was threatening Sarkozy to go public with the fact Gaddafi has brided him. If seems that French intelligence located Gaddafi and likely organized the manpower who actually merked him.
Yeah, thanks for getting my main point, I didn’t mean to imply he was an actual communist, just that he was a useful boogeyman for the West, until he wasn’t useful anymore.
yeh the clarification was more just for other potential viewers or lurkers so that was clear. No suggestion you thought he was an actual filthy commie
religious orientation (traditional Islam is reactionary
iirc correctly he had a pretty weird conception of Islam that was a deviation from most of the traditional schools of jurisprudence, but admittedly i don’t know many details.
iirc a bunch of European and American special forces spookys who absolutely were not supposed to be there got caught in Libya during the insurrection.
Good post.
yeh he beefed continuously with the more traditionalist religious establishment who were admitedly far less down than him for recognizing women as actual autonomous human beings because every school of traditional Islamic jurisprudence or theology is, by any material or abstractly ideological/theoretical estimation, deeply reactionary. His view as not very coherent imo but it was still based on elements of traditional Islam. It was not Islamist as he did not actual allow the full islamisation of the institutions of the state in a way that Islamists would want. Tbh I think it was a mix of genuine belief on his part that it was holding back the development of society, of a populist political maneuver, and the fact that he was ideologically a weird guy.
Islam is weird because it’s gone in so many different ways over the centuries. I check in on the various Islamic feminisms from time to time because the way they approach feminist issues is often very different from Western feminisms, and it’s interesting and challenging to see how other ideologies confront similar problems.
Sure. From a materialist perspective my first question is first and foremost whether actually existing movements are relatively progressive in their context, although this in no way should blind us to their problematic aspects that remain regardless. Otherwise the perspective is moralist in the pejorative sense.
Like for instance from an outside - and apparently normally from an inside - perspective it certainly looks like traditional schools of Islam leave very little leeway, theoretically speaking, for politically progressive views on questions of gender, sex and sexuality. Indeed the Qur’an itself is pretty clearly not a progressive text on these matters. By-the-bye I’m never going to be fond of any body of thought which does not seem to find slavery in and of itself repulsive (in fact allows it), especially if it claims to have on hand the ad-verbatim word of God, in which the main prophet (and ultimate moral standard) married (according to what is traditionally considered the most reliable of the Hadiths) an underage girl, and in which if anyone does not believe the revelation when presented to them then they will spend an eternity being tortured in hell (which might also happen for other at-first-glance minor offenses). Especially when the actual arguments given in the text for theistic belief are extremely weak, if there at all. Telling that to children (especially girls) in particular is child abuse imo, having been told similar things myself. For me it is clear that the regressive policies in many Islamic countries with respect to these questions are not simply reducible to the effects of, say, Western colonialism and imperialism, as I’ve sometimes heard people suggest. Of course at the end of the day I think these are mainly issues for the peoples of these societies, though I guess some people on this site might disagree, having seen their support for example for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Saying this ofc has nothing to do with the immense richness of the many cultures where the people who make them up are predominantly (though not entirely) Islamic. Islamic philosophy for example is still very interesting in many ways, although much of it has relevance beyond the confines of Islam.
And of course women - feminists and otherwise, whether Muslim or not - in Islamic countries have their own distinct ways of politically organizing and attempting to deal with their problematic gender relations (whether or not it is expressed that way). I agree that it’s very important to take this into account, not least to avoid the classic liberal and conservative patronizing attitude of many Westerners in which they see Muslims as barbarians, despite (in the case of conservatives) perhaps having many similar views as traditionalist Salafists or Islamists, or despite their views being equally reactionary in general (liberal culture is, I’ll admit, far more emotionally and spiritually barren than Muslim spiritual culture).
The CIA also helped transfer weapons from Libya to Syria and, well that’s where ISIS got their guns from.
Damn this post is a warzone 😂
There wasn’t a massacre on June 4th 1989, but there is in this comment section.
I love it, it feels like cth again. Some great dunks, no hogs unfortunately.
This is more of your traditional “wall of text” leftist community.
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AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
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.
Let’s supposed it was done: (I don’t know if anyone did or didn’t)
Who would have broadcasted or platformed it?
the Tiananmen Square Bicycle Massacre
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.
Yes, it was the British Ambassador IIRC and the Australian prime minister caused a minor drama by reading out the cable like the next day.
Incidentally that Australian Labor Prime Minister was informing to the US for decades prior and led the US-proposed agreement between unions, corporates and the government which ended up collapsing the union movement and bringing in a wave of austerity a decade later.
I remember that and it was that they ran tanks over hundreds of bodies for hours turning the remains into pulp so they could wash them down the gutters. It was years ago before I knew better and actually believed that shit. Imagine thinking that they were able to sneak out all these other photos but not any of the events they SAY happened? lol.
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.
I’m bowing out y’all, it was fun. Definitely will be looking into this event and checking some references people pointed me to.
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.
Right, learning is always good. The thing is, every fringe group, whether it’s MAGA, anarchists, or ML or whatever, everyone wants you to read their docs.
And while I’m willing to check some stuff out, I’ve come to conclusions based on arm-chair reasoning such as “no government can ever be trusted”, “humans are fallible, and putting some of them above others is inherently problematic regardless of the system”. I’ll read but am doubtful something will be able to convince me to trust in government or someone with power.
There’s a difference from racist screeds and someone telling you to read the leaked diplomatic cables about tianenmen.
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.
I think the only real difference in our views is the classic one. I simply don’t see the dictatorship of the proletariat as not having the same tendencies toward corruption as every other. I can’t imagine an organization powerful enough to defeat capitalism willfully giving up it’s own power after it’s job is done.
It will attract psychopaths like flies to shit like every other power structure.
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.
Idk, sounds like a Q drop
Why?
It’s not about it giving up its power. It doesn’t do that.
It redistributes resources to things that it needs. This is where understanding WHAT the state is and WHY it exists in the first place. The state exists as a tool of the ruling class to maintain their position of power and exploit the other classes. In a bourgeoise-state this is the bourgeoisie exploiting the other classes. In a proletarian state this is the proletariat exploiting the other classes. But once we abolish all classes and only have a single class the obvious outcome is that the resources dedicated to oppressing the other classes will be redistributed to new things. Much like the capitalist state winds down resource spending on cops and other shit when it doesn’t require it, and ramps it up in a time of high class war. The proletarian-state will wind down the resources spent on oppressive organisations, prisons, cops, military, etc, because these all exist for a purpose - if that purpose is gone, people will use those resources for different things.
It’s very longterm though. We’re talking about something that will absolutely only happen when all capitalist states are gone and all socialist states enter a stage of unity. Once that’s achieved military is going to be the first thing to disappear. Cops won’t go until crime does and that’s going to take achieving abundance first, as well as targeting more and more specific causes.
The marxist understanding of “the state” does not include systems of administration. Things like the decision bodies, councils etc are not “the state”. It is expected that systems of administration will still exist under communism, councils of people deciding upon things and the like, this isn’t exactly at odds with anarchist theory either though as anarchists don’t exactly shun councils or deciding things between people.
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.
Thx for your reply
. As long as our societies are influenced by class relations, states are going to exist for the foreseeable future.
IMO there’s a false dichotomy here that nearly everyone I’ve talked to falls into, that there are only two ways to move into the future, the “tankie” way (is there a non-offensive word that means what “tankie” means and isn’t specific to a tendency like “ML”?) and the anarchist way.
The tankie way is basically to unite the people, start a revolution to beat down capitalism, and form into a new authoritarian govt. but this time of the people. Somehow this new government is not going to become corrupted? And eventually no longer be needed and vanish?
The anarchist way is to unite the people, start a revolution to beat down capitalsm, and then… ???
I see fatal flaws in both of these paths that look obvious to me. To the tankies, a government not becoming corrupt? Talk about high fantasy. For the anarchists, what happens after? How to prevent warlords, or surviving capitalists from taking over again? It’s an incomplete plan at best.
My personal position is that cultural progress must come first. To tankies, you can’t force peace and harmony on hundreds of millions of people at once at the barrel of a gun. And to other anarchist, if you give millions of people who only know capitalism and exploitation sudden complete freedom as anarchist want would lead to chaos and destruction. Any attempts at revolution before the culture is ready for it will lead to protracted war, famine, etc.
So, why wait for a revolution to start building out of the ashes (which to be clear, a revolution of this scale would kill millions of people and cause massive permanent ecological damage, assuming a revolution like that could even happen in 2023 in the U.S., just the question of how to handle nuclear materials alone is daunting), we can work now to build the future from where we are now.
We can use any and all not-quite full on revolutionary tactics to weaken and destroy capitalism. (I’m not a pacifist btw, and not against all violence, I just think full-on revolution won’t work)
- The fediverse will help us make much progress, being able to talk away from corporate censorship will have an effect I’m pretty sure.
- Being a good example and helping people - so people start to see who is on their side
- Teaching people, I’m working on starting local groups to teach people how to move away from Microsoft and how to join the fediverse.
- Starting co-ops, free shops
- Garage bars with free drinks/byob, weekly block parties with free food for anyone around
- Organized community backyard farming
- Sabotage MSM
- Tons of other things
–> We need to get people to start not looking to the government for solutions and start looking to their communities by providing superior solutions. If our communist way is better, let’s demonstrate it.
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.
Hey good on you for doing the reading and I hope the other people on our instance weren’t too mean to you <3
But yeah, most of us started in the same place of being fucked over by capitalism or reactionaries in some way and searched for an alternative and ended up as communists.
personal story of how I became a communist, mention of bigoted alcoholic father
I myself had a pretty materially comfortable upbringing but my dad was and still is an incredibly right wing homophobic, transphobic and antisemitic alcoholic who literally volunteered for ukip, the Tories and the Brexit party at various different points. Like to give you an idea of the type of guy he is he got me a copy of 1984 when I was 8 and sat me down and lectured me on the evils of socialism (and also kind of said that it was simultaneously antisemitic while implying that it was also a Jewish conspiracy). Which kinda made growing up and realising I was queer but having to hide it quite polarising against his beliefs for me, so like i started discussing it online and searching like left wing queer friendly communities and like starting to gel with the idea of socialism (actually just kinda tentatively supporting Corbyn at that point - because like he seemed a bit too radical to me at the time for me to uncritically support)
Anyway fast forward a year or two and I was calling myself a socialist or even a communist sometimes because I found the most acceptance in what were in retrospect, pretty milquetoast “”“socialist”“” spaces and then I found hexbear and ngl it was so nice, like I didn’t really agree with them about everything but from the very beginning the mods showed that they were extremely willing to go hard to protect the queer users of the site from queerphobic abuse and so I stuck around and they gradually got me to read theory and read up about history in my own time. Anyway, now 3 years since I joined hexbear I consider myself an ML because I see it as the most effective path forward for decolonisation and I very much admire the progressive history of (most) marxist-lenininist nations and also I pretty frequently end up discussing theory with the various trans communists from this site who are in my dms. Right now I’m sandwiched between reading 10 Days in Harlem by Simon Hall and Settlers: the Myth of the White Proletariat by J. Sakai
I hope the other people on our instance weren’t too mean to you <3
People are passionate about these topics, I get it. I wouldn’t posted if I wasn’t ready to take from a bunch of “tankies” lol. I had a good time, I’ll be back arguing with y’all about something else soon :)
That being said, I started calling myself (anarcho-)communist when I realized the term for what I had essentially always felt.
Thx for the personal story!
Yeah, hope to see you soon. But yeah in general I’m a lot less, idk, gung ho with supporting China than most of the users of this site, but when its like come to major struggle sessions with outside users we kind of close ranks and keep to the hexbear line (excluding the hundred comment struggle session about kruschev that hexbear users had with each other in an unrelated worldnews thread on lemmy.ml when we first federated)
I think things will calm down after a week or so after all the hexbears get bored of arguing with libs and return to normal posting. after all the last time we had this many outsiders coming into our home turf and trying to start shit was like 3 years ago when some /pol/ users tried to raid hexbear and doxx some of the users and got bullied so hard they never came back
Anyway, hope you stay well <3
Lurker here: this was a really cool conversation to read. Much respect to you, hope you stick around the instance. Telling people to post hog is fun and all but seeing a genuine good faith conversation about some super polarizing political opinions is what makes me most glad we federated.
Excellent!
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One more, because I don’t think anyone else posted it, is Qiao Collective’s reading list on the e event. It’s a lot of reading but the sources are pretty good: https://www.qiaocollective.com/education/tiananmenreadinglist
Glad to hear the change of heart. I thought you were a lost cause.
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.
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.
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 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.
Libs will probably lose their minds if they can’t make jokes about Tiananmen Square.
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.
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.
I’ll share the bits when I get home tonight. Being drunk and fat tonight
Also worth mentioning, the leaders of the student protests fled China and many work on Wall St now.
I think this is misleading. The people who were encouraging violence were not leaders of the student movement. From what I understand there were a number of different groups with different goals in the square, but the majority were young people who wanted an end to market reforms that were causing strife and a return to a more communist economy. My understanding is that there were also a substantial number of people who were advocating for more relaxed, permissive social norms and who believed that the social conservativism around things like public affection, dating, casual relationships, dress, and music were not in keeping with communist values.
The group of CIA backed students who attempted to initiate a violent confrontation was very small, and from what I understand they basically bullied their way to the PA equipment and took it over. They were not popular and many people were confused by them, but apparently the students were unsure what to do with them. At any rate they had little if any influence and their attempt to start a color revolution failed miserably. Shortly after they tucked tail and fled to the USA as part of a CIA operation.
Thanks for the context. I’m going off who Western journalists deemed the “leaders” but it would only make sense that they’d give them undue spotlight.
Some additions - The majority of PLA soldiers in the area were unarmed, and from what I understand relations between the students and the PLA were positive throughout. There are a lot of stories of them all singing songs together and sharing food. The vast majority of the PLA soldiers had no weapons at all, not even riot control gear or helmets. They were just there in their uniforms. When the students were finally told to leave they did so in good order. I think there may have been some use of riot batons, but if there was it was very minor and the vast, vast majority of the students left peacefully.
The fighting was apparently between relatively small numbers of insurgents and PLA soldiers. As the PLA in the area were initially unarmed the first deaths were PLA soldiers who were ambushed in their trucks and APCs by insurgents with molotovs and burned alive. It took a while for armed PLA units to arrive and engage the insurgents. The ~300 deaths number is agreed on by the Chinese government as well as a number of western observers and researchers.
No one denies the huge volume of soldiers and many tanks, APCs, etc there, or even that there was military conflict down the road, but there are many fantastical stories about tanks mulching corpses and soldiers firing into crowds with abandon that are unfounded.
From what I understand hundreds of thousands of PLA troops were moved in to Beijing from other regions, but throughout the demonstration the PLA and students had good relations with each other, singing songs and sharing food. At any rate, the PLA soldiers were mostly unarmed, especially the ones in the square, and there was very little violence between the PLA and the student protestors.
It’s worth keeping in mind that many of the PLA soldiers and students were likely of similar ages, came from similar backgrounds, and were both experiencing the new hardships caused by Dengist changes in economic policy.
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Jesus there has been so much posted here from WESTERN SOURCES that debunks this. Literally people who were there on the ground who say this wasn’t true.
Most libs have more of a religious faith than any interest in actual facts. Liberalism is neither scientific nor materialist, after all.
Thousands really?
wiggers, Tibetan singing bowls, social security score, et cetera et cetera
