GarbageShootAlt2

There’s a pretty good excuse. He was told a piece of information by a source

Oh, "a source" gave him information that was completely incongruous with any observation made by people on the ground? It sure seems like using "a source" to launder absolute bullshit would be effective if it can merely be brushed off after the fact, so it's a good thing western rags don't do that constantly.

I brought that specific one up because I found it first, but walked it back when I found out it was unreliable

That's the lovely thing about anglosphere propaganda, you don't need to censor the truth (well, mostly) so long as you make your version of a story a thousand times more accessible than the other versions of that story.

But more broadly, I’m looking at hundreds of citizens being killed by their own government.

Remember the death total there includes soldiers, and we are talking about militants who killed unarmed soldiers clashing with the PLA, with students being deliberately driven into the crossfire by student leaders.

In the US, the closest to that was race riots against Black people that ended a hundred years ago.

If we mean "against their own citizens" then, uh, sure, I acknowledge that the types of conflict the US is involved in is very different from what China does. China fights off color revolutionaries domestically while the US kills millions abroad, an unknowable number of migrants, and is in a constant process of lynching black people and occasionally protestors to those lynchings.

We’re not censoring discussion of them

Are you kidding? There've been ongoing efforts for the country's history to censor discussions even just of chattel slavery in schools, to say nothing about how talking about the summary executions otherwise referred to as "officer-involved shootings" are basically considered satanic CRT material and any attempt to call the no-note-"suicide"-by-hanging of BLM organizers a lynching when the cops say otherwise makes you a conspiracy theorist.

Can you imagine if this happened just once in China? An ethnic minority pretty much ritually murdered in the form of historic violence against that ethnicity, written off as "suicide" and brushed under the rug with no further contest, despite of protests from the victims' parents that the thesis makes no sense.

and there are efforts to reconcile with the nation’s past

The current head of state, the leader of the so-called left wing party, is an unrepentant segregationist who justified his actions with a "states' rights" argument as recently as, like, 2019 (and he just hasn't been challenged on it since). Do you think the dashiki stunt helped us towards reconciliation? There is no effort to "reconcile" with shit. There's an allowance for more black drone pilots, but reparations or even just basic restitution for the destruction and theft wrought on black communities is a pipe dream.

China teaches about the June 4th incident in its schools, it's a matter of public knowledge, and claims to the contrary are made by ignorant redditors who read 1984 and just kind of imagine what China's domestic policy is based on vibes.

Citation: Other stories as-covered by western media. The CPC has censorship laws, but when they actually publish official statistics on something, those are pretty accurate. Their estimate on Tiananmen fatalities is much more like the statistics published by most journalists than the 10k number or even that hack's revised 2k - 3k count, and their accounting of events is much more like the ones that have held up over time among western journalists (the square was cleared without killings, there weren't machine guns on rooftops, most protestors left peacefully, there was no mulching of corpses, etc.)

There were many estimates from western press at the time that were in the realm of reason, those claiming it was a few hundred dead. There's no excuse for the 10k guy unless you want to argue he suffers from hallucinations.

You're essentially relying on cultural osmosis from the same culture that uncritically parrots the 10k figure and other such nonsense that you see spouted on Reddit. If you keep digging, eventually you will find that just about every story holding up that Ba Sing Se vibe is a fabrication.

This is disappointing, you seemed more interested in actual conversation before.

If you already have your conclusion ready, finding evidence to support your position is not only very easy, it is inevitable.

When you stay in the realm of aphorism, it is much easier to support this thesis. When trying to apply this in the concrete it falls apart here. I am talking about photos and videos, typically from western journalists, of the events leading up to June 4th. They didn't come from a parallel world, nor were they synthesized from thin air because someone wanted to believe in them.

While it’s most likely true that a lot of soldiers were killed, and that some were indeed lynched by civilians, it is an outright lie to claim that the troops were the peaceful victims of an enraged mob:

You are failing to follow the simple timeline I explained before, which makes your attempt at refutation worthless even if we supposed you were correct. Your quote is from the dispersal, when I referred to unarmed soldiers supervising the protest, I was there talking about the period prior to the dispersal, and the lynching was immediate prior to it. Obviously during the dispersal itself, people were struck if they were not already outside of the square, but I don't think anyone was shot since it's plainly the case that no one died. Let's make this as easy as possible:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests_and_massacre#Other_estimates

Here you can see linked a number of western sources which a) show that the 10,000 dead estimate is hysterical and recanted by the person that said it (despite some people in this very fucking thread asserting it!) and b) that no one died in the square itself. Hundreds did obviously die in the ensuing violence around the square, but anyone claiming that, for example, five people in the square itself were immediately shot should be regarded as unreliable.

I'm curious how you believe the lynching took place during or after the dispersal. Being technical, I think the two soldiers in question here were killed by other means and then strung up after (along with being stripped and immolated), but if the military was already on the offensive at that point, how would this be accomplished? It seems like an absurd ritual to engage in while rifles and tanks are coming for you, and we do have photographs of these corpses and their onlookers. I've avoided linking them because they are graphic photos and that also makes them a nuisance to find, but I can dig them up if this is a real sticking point for you.

Edit: Nothing on Tank Man?

That does get mentioned in the replies that were cut off, but I think it's slightly beside the point

See, this is a sort of epistemic nihilism that is used for question-begging the western narrative. I give you a counterproposition and you say "Well the CPC is so untrustworthy that we just can't know that that's true!"

Which part do you doubt? That the protest had been going on for many weeks? We have contemporaneous reports. That the CPC wasn't very hostile to the protestors for most of that period? We have footage of the protestors and unarmed soldiers coexisting -- sometimes even having something of a fun time together, each group singing songs!

We have photographs of the lynched corpses, with the protestors idly looking on (because what else could they do?). We have contemporaneous reporting on the CPC setting a deadline for the square to be fled. We have footage of one of the more radical student leaders, Chai Ling, saying that she will deliberately direct her clique to stay (even as she flees) so that they will shed blood.

We have a smaller amount of footage of the night itself, but that tells us many things. For example, there was a protestor (not a student) who was on a high-profile hunger strike. He negotiated the peaceful evacuation of a group of students who didn't quite realize what they were signing up for by staying. We also have some distant footage of the fighting in the surrounding area (because the square itself didn't see violence, as even western journalists confirmed).

The 1984 narrative Reddit spoonfeeds people is incredibly flimsy, even if all you do is look at reporting from Brits, Americans, and Germans.

Speaking of, have you ever watched the full Tank Man video? You can find it on Youtube quite easily. If you haven't seen it, please do me a favor and predict what happens and write it down for yourself -- no need to show anyone else, myself included. Then, watch what happens and compare that to your guess. I think you will find it to be an interesting exercise.

I just love when leftists nominally disavow the US and then take statements from the Ukrainian military and US mouthpieces at face value.

Do you really believe Russia would kneecap itself like this? Do you believe Assad also gassed his own troops right after they took over a town from enemy terrorists?

This has two interesting issues right in the first sentence.

Most I know are generally opposed to violence, with some exceptions allowed for . . .

The idea of violence being a categorical bad with "exceptions" where it is permissible due to some carveout is deontological reasoning that has no place in a materialist assessment. Violence has severe downsides that mean that it should be minimized, but the degree to which it can be minimized without some greater downside (particularly violence from another party) coming about or continuing is something that varies situation to situation. Sometimes violence isn't useful, so its introduction only has downsides. Sometimes it is one of several options that are all reasonably arguable. Sometimes it is clearly the only option to prevent a much greater violence.

with some exceptions allowed for any revolution or class struggle.

[Setting aside the word "any" there] What do you think these words, "revolution" and "class struggle," mean?

Do you think a revolution -- or whatever makes it worthwhile, since that surely is not revolution for its own sake -- is something that is achieved eternally after fighting for a few years, or something that must be continuously protected from forces trying to sabotage you from all angles?

Do you think that "class struggle" is something where you hang a few capitalists, wash your hands of the blood, and then kick back and relax? Or is it a continuous process of trying to resolve the contradictions in society on a basis that follows the broad democratic consensus of the working class? There are going to be workers who are bought off by capital, or radicalized by cults it supports, or any number of other things, and these workers will then seek to destroy your socialist state while Trotskyists in the North Atlantic cheer them on. Do you let this small group -- typically representing foreign powers or the most monstrous of infections you have let fester in your own society -- dictate the destruction of the socialist state even as the majority wishes for it to be preserved?

I am reminded of a quote from Michael Parenti in one of his lectures:

Mercenary armies, destruction of the productive facilities of the society, more invasion, more sabotage, economic boycott, economic embargo, monetary embargo, technological embargo. These have distorting effects upon a society…

When the Sandinistas came to power in Nicaragua ten years ago, filled with ideals and hopes for their nation and their people, they discovered a very awful thing, and it wasn’t about themselves, even though they had to do it to themselves. It was about that capitalist encirclement. They discovered that they needed a secret police. They discovered that they needed a security police because all around them, coming in from two borders and within their own society, were acts of sabotage, espionage, attack, mercenary invasion and the like, and they understood that if the revolution was going to survive, it would have to build up instruments of state power, instruments of coercion even, and these instruments, by the way, can make mistakes, and these instruments can not only make mistakes. They can commit some serious crimes, although in Nicaragua the impressive record is how few crimes there were, given the utterly dire conditions they were under.

(It's worth noting that "secret police," as far as I can tell, is what you call the "intelligence agency" of a country hostile to the US)

This is all glossing over the fact that the violence by the CPC was not directed at the civilian students -- who it gave plenty of warning to evacuate -- but to the militants who had already immolated and lynched unarmed soldiers who were supervising the protests.

Unfortunately for the CPC, there was also a group of students (a tiny subset of the larger movement) being lead by people who were either religious zealots (Christians, in this case) or bought off and were consciously making the group stand its ground in hopes that they would be caught in the crossfire, which happened in some cases. We know this in part because one of those leaders very helpfully told us as much in an interview. She did escape and had a fruitful career in the US working with various Republican think tanks and the like. I assume that the recruitment vector was her being Christian, but I don't know.

Anyway, that's just a very basic overview because I thought I shouldn't leave your actual claims uncontested, but I mostly wrote this comment for the first couple of paragraphs.

Doesn't that make you more seriously consider that the CPC's position on this issue has been misrepresented?

The crackdown wasn't against the peaceful protestors who they let just kind of do their thing under supervision for somewhere around 6 weeks despite it basically being the equivalent of the section of Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House. The CPC became less friendly as it became aware of NED bullshit and, critically, unarmed soldiers being immolated and lynched by militants who were using naive protestors as cover. The CPC nonetheless gave everyone some time to clear out (I forget the time table but I think it was 24 - 72 hours) and even once it was over the deadline they didn't just start blasting.

10,000 is absurd and it's a disgrace that the absolute bullshit reporting that some hack journos gave at the time is still treated credibly. Do you think there were machine guns on roofs and tanks deliberately pulping bodies, too?