this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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GenZedong
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Gold star for you! This is significantly better than the usual nonsense that's pushed. But after having claimed a massacre for so long, this still seems like damage control to me.
Do these photos look like the aftermath of a massacre to you? Or do you think that the CPC account of the situation might be closer to reality? They claim that after the protest was broken up, some violent instigators began attacking the military in the area around the square. And yes, hundreds died, and many of them were soldiers.
Yes, they do. The term "massacre" doesn't necessarily imply that the protestors didn't fight back after the PLA started killing them.
I might suggest you read this then. It's by a reporter for the Washington Post, who was in the city reporting on it at the time.
Again, the reporter's point is not that "there was no massacre"; it just didn't happen in the square.
Yep. Even after being forced to admit that he made it up, he's still reporting about things he admits he never saw. Which I have to admit, is a pretty bold move.
So you initially linked it as a source and now you've realized what it actually says, it's unreliable and worthless?
Seems par for the course around here, tbh.
I'm really confused by this one. He admitted he lied, and so did many of his colleagues. But you believe that he's still telling the truth about the massacre?
Look, we don't know exactly what happened there that night. But it's clear that the west lied through their teeth about the entire thing, and the lies are self perpetuating at this point. China's story seems to check out. You HAVE to see that.
Furthermore, why is this event of a couple hundred casualties pushed so hard by the media as proof of China's evilness, when Mai Lai or the 228 incident are barely talked about? This is 100% pure propaganda, and it's mostly, perhaps entirely untrue.
It's hard to know exactly what happened, of course, but the facts of the matter are that even the CCP themselves acknowledged the fact that hundreds died and all the Western journalists who were there confirmed that the PLA shot and killed hundreds of protestors.
Also, while it's true that Western journalists may have been biased, it's also certainly true that China's authoritarian and notoriously opaque government cannot be trusted to tell the truth either, especially if they were responsible for the deaths of many civilians.
While the extent of the massacre in Beijing may be contested, it seems incontrovertible that it did occur.
Asides from the fact that this is classic whataboutism, you are categorically wrong to suggest that the My Lai massacre is portrayed in Western media today as anything other than a horrific attack upon civilians.
It is perfectly possible to deplore both massacres, in Beijing and in Mai Lai. This is not a simple zero sum contest between China and the US where one must be the good guy and the other the bad guy.
It's not portrayed at all. Every year you'll see articles about Tiananmen Square in corporate media -- My Lai (or any of a dozen similar U.S. atrocities) are left to history classes.
Where it is convienently left out that the only extraodinary thing about My Lai was that it got out. The US armed forces are animals.
That's the thing, I've lived in the US my whole life, and the My Lai Massacre isn't portrayed at all. Like our genocides in Korea and Indonesia, we simply don't talk about it. I was already a socialist when I learned that America invaded Russia in 1918, even joining forces with Imperial Japan to do so. Every subsequent piece of our history I've learned, every incomprehensibly vast crime, has served more and more to put our programmed greivances against the PRC in perspective: clashes are bad, people dying is bad, but to claim that it's somehow a vast and unprecedented sin is a sick joke coming from the country that did the Tuskegee experiments and the Iraq War.
This is not to say "China is infallible and perfect", because it's still a state, and all states operate at least a little bit in the realm of Bad Shit. What I am saying is that the US is incapable of not lying through it's bloodstained teeth, and the 20th century alone shows that it is not to be trusted with anything whatsoever.
It's incredible how much becoming a communist is filling in the missing gaps of history that liberal society just conveniently left out.
I'm about done discussing this with you, as you already seem to have a reasonable amount of facts.
But your insistence that China fired upon peaceful protests based on "China’s authoritarian and notoriously opaque government cannot be trusted to tell the truth " is absolutely insane and not at all fact based. There's zero evidence to support that. The PLA must really be bad at massacres if they allowed that many of their vehicles and personnel to be killed by unarmed civilians.
I have done nothing of the sort. I've addressed every topic. I'm inquiring further about why this one particular event is of such importance in showing how evil China is, while things like this are just one of those things. The fact that this keeps popping up every single year and actual American massacres are barely mentioned should indicate to you that the people running the propaganda machine really want you to hate China.
They've shown themselves very willing to twist the truth, but you still insist that the core claim is true, no matter what. The clear use of this as propaganda should lead you to question it.
But I doubt that any further conversation will be productive. You have the basic facts correct, which is better than most. Many people did die that night. Many of them soldiers. The fighting happened in many separate locations away from the square. Those are the facts. If you extrapolate a massacre out of that, there's no facts I can draw upon to argue with you, other than repeating that the burden of proof is on the accuser.
Also, for reference, here are photos from a massacre that actually did happen.
Never noticed that the upper estimate is almost twice the body count of the June 4th incident.
And the only military casualty was friendly fire.