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  • "Was there a massacre in Tiananmen Square?"

    —"No."

    "Were people killed elsewhere in Beijing?"

    —"...Ermh..."

    "Ahem. I am asking you if people were killed in the area immediately surrounding Tiananmen Square, even if nobody was killed in the square itself."

    —"The protesters in Tiananmen Square left after negotiations with the PLA. There was no bloodshed in Tiananmen Square."

    "I understand that, but were people killed elsewhere in Beijing?"

    —"Nowhere in Beijing were student protestors specifically targeted."

    "Well, were non-students targeted, and were any students injured or killed without being targeted?"

    —"Hey did you know that the Three Gorges Dam is the world's largest—"

    "Gongchandang, my friend, I am begging you."

    —"...Force may have been used when provoked by attacks."

    "May force have also been used unprovoked? Could it have been that the protesters felt like they were provoked first, because you were sending tanks past the barricades that they'd put up?"

    —"I mean... you know... uhh..."

    "Gongchandang. Were you scared that the occupation of Beijing and the potential of a workers' revolt would threaten the survival of socialism in China, by presenting a still-socialist alternative to your rule, because societal division particularly among the less politically literate could be (and was) exploited by outside forces?"

    —"OUR YOUTH ARE VULNERABLE TO IMPERIALIST PROPAGANDA, OK‽ ALSO, TANK MAN DIDN'T GET RUN OVER. SEE. HE WAS PULLED AWAY BY A PASSERBY. NOT RUN OVER."

  • How a person reacts to being asked about the version of these things most close to them is telling. If they get defensive and deny the event happened, I would hesitate to trust their opinion on other things. Clearly that person bases their opinions on what they want to be true rather than reality. That's the kind of person whose ideology would likely lead to another event to be ashamed of. If, on the other hand, they admit it was a horrible thing and agree that people should be educated on it and that steps should be taken to prevent it from ever happening again, then I'm more likely to take their opinion seriously and believe that they can be part of the conversations we need to happen to create a better world.

  • 6 out of 7 ain’t bad.

    • 1989 Tian'anmen Square riots

      The 1989 Tian'anmen Square riots (天安门事件) were a CIA-backed attempt at a color revolution against the People's Republic of China in 1989. Reservations over Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening up policies sparked peaceful protests, which the CPC negotiated with, but soon a foreign-funded faction of students joined the protests and, due to their promotion by Western media, took over the protests and took them in an entirely different direction than what was originally envisioned.

      […]

      As the protests were winding down and many protestors went home, the Chinese government sent unarmed PLA troops the clear the square of remaining protestors as the Beijing police was overwhelmed due to their sheer numbers throughout the city. On June 2, rioters burned and lynched unarmed soldiers trying to enter the square. The troops were initially unarmed, but were given weapons on June 3 after the students took some soldiers hostage. They were blocked from entering the square by crowds armed with petrol bombs, iron clubs, and Molotov cocktails. The rioters destroyed over 400 vehicles and destroyed a convoy of over 100 vehicles in western Beijing.

      […]

      The riots in Beijing resulted in approximately 300 total deaths, including 36 students, 10 PLA soldiers, and 13 police officers. All of the deaths occurred outside of the square itself.

      • Honestly, I read the above article a few months ago, and I think it is a genuinely good article that I would recommend others read. It was written nine years after Tiananmen by Jay Mathews of the Washington Post, who was in Beijing during the protests; and the Columbia Journalism Review is a respected publication written by and for professional journalists. So the article is basically just trying to disspell the dumbing down and memeifying and misremembering and making-into-propaganda that happened with Tiananmen, and which honestly tends to happen with any major loss of life. No conspiracy theories, no denialism or claiming that "they had it coming", just dispelling misconceptions. It's good stuff.

        I can't speak for Davel's other comment citing Prolewiki, though — I'm pretty skeptical to any website that tries to be Wikipedia but for X ideology.

        In any case, this "butthurt report" feels pretty unfair, although I honestly did kinda roll my eyes at how Davel's comment said "6 out of 7 ain't bad", that was kinda cringe... But basically, what I'm trying to say is that I wouldn't fault someone for commenting under a "9/11 NEVER FORGET" post about the extent to which mismanagement and confusion contributed to the death toll of that, and likewise I wouldn't fault someone for commenting under a Tiananmen Square post with more nuance about that event.

      • My fellow American, no u.

  • Man, women really don't like to be asked about their age don't they?

  • Not to be pedantic about a meme but I would consider the US repeatedly detonating nuclear weapons on the Marshall Islands and then doing jack shit to clean up the mess to be worse than any coup.

    67 of them to be exact. 70 years later, the Marshallese are still the ones paying the price of that incredibly bad decision.

    • It’s just weird that nuclear bombs came to your mind, but somehow the nuclear annihilation of two civilian cities was less salient to you than uninhabited islands.

      • "MEN OTEMJEJ REJ ILO BEIN ANIJ" — "ALL IS IN THE HANDS OF GOD" — were the words uttered by Juda, leader of the Bikinians, to Commodore Wyatt when asked to exile his own people for the "good of mankind". It is said that Juda's words were intended to imply, "It would literally take divine intervention for me to agree to this.". Nevertheless, the Bikinians would be taken from their homes, and as the ships sailed away, the Bikinians got to watch their many-generations' houses and boats get burned down by the American soldiers. Many of the Bikinians wouldn't eat after witnessing that, and they would live in poverty in their new homes.

        It's no wonder, then, that the Bikinian flag looks like a desecrated American flag.

        This isn't to say that Bikini was a more inhumane act than Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hearing any recollection by survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or seeing any of the artwork that they created to process their experiences, makes that much obvious. But you hear about Hiroshima and Nagasaki: it has a place in the popular imagination, even if it is a heavily sanitized version that portrays the annihilation as "necessary".

        In contrast, when's the last time you met someone who knew of "Bikini" as anything other than swimwear?

      • Fair that the cities were worse, but the islands were not uninhabited. The people there were evacuated (they were told temporarily) and the place they were evacuated to was still within the fallout zone. A lot of people died pretty much immediately and they're still dealing with increased cancer and birth defects today.

        This was when these weapons were fairly new, and what little information we had about them was not given to the people of these people before they were pressured into allowing their islands to be testing grounds.

      • The two uses of nuclear weapons in Japan were horrible. It's been long debated whether or not that choice vs. the invasion planned was the better of two. I won't get into that.

        What is more horrible is that instead of staying shocked at the potential of nuclear war, humans in every nation that could tried to make more and bigger ones...for defense, of course. And the islands weren't originally uninhabited, that's a nice story of forced relocation for the humans. The wildlife, not so much. That was the point of the post, the history of nuclear arms post-Japan is far worse than the first two bombs used.

  • Canada, about residential schools, WW2 Japanese internment camps and missing and murdered indigenous women and children

    Most of us are nice, but our government has gotta get it together to address a lot of stuff still.

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