Date of 4 June remains one of China’s strictest taboos, with government using increasingly sophisticated tools to censor its discussion
There is no official death toll but activists believe hundreds, possibly thousands, were killed by China’s People’s Liberation Army in the streets around Tiananmen Square, Beijing’s central plaza, on 4 June 1989.
The date of 4 June remains one of China’s strictest taboos, and the Chinese government employs extensive and increasingly sophisticated resources to censor any discussion or acknowledgment of it inside China. Internet censors scrub even the most obscure references to the date from online spaces, and activists in China are often put under increased surveillance or sent on enforced “holidays” away from Beijing.
New research from human rights workers has found that the sensitive date also sees heightened transnational repression of Chinese government critics overseas by the government and its proxies.
Let’s not forget Faris Odeh
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faris_Odeh
A picture of Odeh standing alone in front of a tank, with a stone in his hand and arm bent back to throw it, was taken by a photojournalist from the Associated Press on 29 October 2000. Ten days later, on 8 November, Odeh was again throwing stones at Karni when he was shot in the neck by an Israeli soldier.
Why would any kid throw stones at armed soldiers? Where were his parents?
Killed by Israeli.
Actually if you read the article, you would see that this is in fact false, but that won’t stop you from spreading misinformation
Well u did not pay attention to story and see how powerful the picture is. So to make u read the wiki, I had to fill some disinformation about his parents. U fell for it. Lol
“Where are his parents”. Where are your buddy
Murdered by Israelis one would assume.
And your assumption is wrong. If you read the article, you’ll see that his parents were alive and well at the time, and so were his 8 other siblings. Apparently this kid developed a habit of doing dangerous stunts like this, and father used to severely beat him many times as a way to deter him from doing more stunts in the future. Shockingly, physical abuse didn’t work, and he ended up being killed by doing another dangerous stunt in the future.
So why did you ask a question you know the answer to?
It was a rhetorical question
careful, that doesn’t fit the narrative
As an American I think it’s helpful to put this into some sort of perspective.
Things the US won’t forget:
- Tiananmen Square (thousands dead)
Things the US will forget:
-
Korean War (3mil civilian dead)
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Vietnam War (2mil civilian dead)
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Iraqi War (1mil civilian dead)
-
Violent overthrow of East Timor (widely considered a genocide)
-
Violent overthrow of Afghanistan (twice, over 1 mil dead)
-
Violent overthrow of Nicaragua
-
Violent overthrow of Grenada
-
Violent overthrow of Panama
-
Violent overthrow of Libya
-
Coup d’etat of Guatemala
-
Coup d’etat of Iran
-
Failed Coup d’etat of Syria
-
Failed Coup d’etat of Indonesia
-
Many failed Coup d’etat attempts on Cuba
-
Coup d’etat of Congo
-
Coup d’etat of Laos
-
Coup d’etat of the Dominican Republic
-
Coup d’etat of Iraq
-
Coup d’etat of Brazil
-
Successful Coup d’etat of Indonesia (1 mil dead)
-
Coup d’etat of Chile
-
Multiple Coup d’etat of Bolivia
-
Coup d’etat of Haiti
-
Multiple Coup d’etat attempts on Venezuela
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Coup d’etat of Palestine
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Mass civilian casualties, destabilization of many governments, people subject to a lifetime of torture without a trial, all under the War on Terror
This list could be so much longer, but I gotta get to work.
Things the US will forget:
Korean War (3mil civilian dead)
Vietnam War (2mil civilian dead)
Iraqi War (1mil civilian dead)
Imagine thinking that the US has forgotten any of these when they’re a constantly pressure on the cultural zeitgeist even literal decades later. Or, for that matter, that the Korean War is in any way comparable.
Violent overthrow of Afghanistan (twice, over 1 mil dead)
Twice? Christ, tell me you aren’t talking about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Not to mention that the ‘overthrow’ of ‘Afghanistan’ the second time would rely on recognizing the Taliban, and not the democratically-oriented Northern Alliance which was fighting them at the time, as the legitimate government of Afghanistan.
Not trying to be confrontational or pedantic (there’s enough bickering in here) but it’s important to state that the Korean War is quite literally called “The Forgotten War”. In fact, it’s more important to point out that it wasn’t even a War, but considered a “police action” that claimed the lives of up to 3 million civilians (link).
Truman acted without seeking congressional authorization either in advance or in retrospect. He instead justified his decision on his authority as commander in chief. The move dramatically expanded presidential power at the expense of Congress, which eagerly cooperated in the sacrifice of its constitutional prerogatives.
Robert A. Taft of Ohio, one of the leading Republicans on Capitol Hill at the time, took to the Senate floor on June 28 to argue that “there is no legal authority for what he [Truman] has done.” Nor could Truman argue that the Korean conflict didn’t constitute war in a constitutional sense, even if he did downplay the significance of his decision. (At a press conference on June 29, Truman denied the country was at war, prompting a journalist to ask, “would it be correct…to call this a police action?” Truman answered simply, “Yes.”
Truman in the end acted because he believed, contrary to what the framers envisioned and the historical record showed, that as commander-in-chief he had the authority to order U.S. troops into combat… Truman was able to establish the precedent that presidents can take the country to war, though, because members of Congress were unwilling, Taft’s complaints notwithstanding, to defend their constitutional power from executive encroachment.
You can’t look at those statements and not make parallels to what’s going on in America today with the executive branch trying to sequester even more power. Ironically just recently saw a pretty decent video on the war by Mr. Beat
The War Americans Forgot About
edit: forgot an S
Is it better to be drowned out than forgotten?
and not the democratically-oriented Northern Alliance which was fighting them at the time, as the legitimate government of Afghanistan.
You’re joking right
Please tell me this is sarcasm bruh
And we know the extent of US involvement in these coups and conflicts because the US declassified the info, becauase all info becomes declassified eventually.
When is the Dictatorship of China going to admit that this happened, when will they declassify the internal documents about this atrocity they were responsible for?
That’s the problem people have with the Chinese government. They can’t even acknowledge reality because they seek to eventually change the records of what really happened to pretend they did no wrong.
And we know the extent of US involvement in these coups and conflicts because the US declassified the info, becauase all info becomes declassified eventually.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_hangout
According to Victor Marchetti, a former special assistant to the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a limited hangout is “spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.”
US declassification falls squarely into this domain. What gets released into the public record is enshrined as “The Truth” and what gets omitted is reserved to the domain of “Conspiracy Theory”. Thus a guy like Allen Dulles can sit on the committee that investigates the assassination of the President and author the copy that the CIA was in no way at fault or otherwise involved in the actions of a disgruntled former agent’s actions against the Chief Executive who personally fired Dulles three years earlier.
That’s the problem people have with the Chinese government. They can’t even acknowledge reality
The Chinese Communist Party has its own version of Limited Hangout and goes to some length to assert that the riots in Tienanmen were the result of outside agitation, the civilian death toll was minimal, and the reforms that followed succeeded in restoring trust in the national government.
Westerners choose to ignore the official party line and rely on the equally unreliable narrations of participants who were fully opposed to the party, heavily invested in an insurgent opposition, and outspoken in their desire to abolish the CCP and have its leadership executed.
So you end up with a bunch of smug liberals denouncing Chinese state media as controlled, while regurgitating talking points that came straight out of the John Birch Society and the Falun Gong.
It’s propaganda all the way down. Nobody is giving you a complete and accurate picture of events. Any serious scholar must reconstruct events by bits and pieces, sifting through the enormous amounts of FUD. And when their work is completed… good luck finding it, because vanishingly few media moguls have an interest in promoting something that is insufficiently sensational.
This makes perfect sense, it’s one thing for Taiwanese and Chinese people to remember it but its absolute hypocrisy for the west to comment. Especially as they fund the genocide in Gaza and Western Liberals make excuses for it.
No, it doesn’t. Only people who are full shit use and defend this fallacy. People who have principles call out shitty behaviors and actions whenever they see them, that’s because principles are universal. If you selectively choose when to apply them, then you don’t believe in them.
If you acturally call out genocide and shitty practices wherever you see it than its being principled. If you only call it out when a “bad” country does its hypocrisy, and tbh I have seen people do the later far more often while claiming the former.
Tell me, when Western Europe plunders the global south to subsidize their social programs do you complain? Or when the Zionist Occupation slowly takes more land away from the natives? What about the western funded dictators committing genocide across the third world and selling their nations for scraps?
Do you acturally call for freedom, an end to the exploitation, or do you demand a compromise? Do you demand native Palestinians give up half their land to the occupation? Africans half their resources to Europeans? And dictators to kill half as many minorities?
When somebody supports said “bad” countries, they’ll view any instance of these countries being called out for any shitty actions as hypocrisy. What this actually shows is that these people are in fact hypocrites themselves. If they were principled, then they would’ve acknowledged the shitty actions of whatever country is pointed out and moved on. Instead, they go on they go on the brainless rants that are filled with fallacies to distract from the original issue and dismiss criticism, misinformation, and endless crying about how the country being called out is a victim for the atrocity they committed. These rants don’t change the reality of the issue being raised originally.
This entire post is about western governments who are currently engaging in genocide calling out an event in China that if you look at the proper context is bad but not an atrocity
Least braindead Marxist
Some commentators have defended the usage of whataboutism and tu quoque in certain contexts. Whataboutism can provide necessary context into whether or not a particular line of critique is relevant or fair, and behavior that may be imperfect by international standards may be appropriate in a given geopolitical neighborhood. Accusing an interlocutor of whataboutism can also in itself be manipulative and serve the motive of discrediting, as critical talking points can be used selectively and purposefully even as the starting point of the conversation (cf. agenda setting, framing, framing effect, priming, cherry picking). The deviation from them can then be branded as whataboutism
Wow. Fascinating. Thanks for the link.
That shit gets brought up all the fucking time, in their own threads. Notice how people don’t bring up Tiananmen Square, Taiwan, Tibet, Hong Kong, the Uyghurs, or the many other atrocities the CCP has committed whenever an American atrocity gets mentioned.
Your comment ignores the context that the US is doing anti-Chinese propaganda here, and there is no parity.
Imagine if the shoe was on the other foot, and China was releasing PR statements on every anniversary of every US atrocity. They would still be issuing multiple statements every day.
All the fucking time? Really? When was the last time the Coup d’état against Aristide was discussed around here?
Post about it on it’s anniversary then. Don’t bring it up as a whataboutism in unrelated threads.
I didn’t bring up anything, the comment you responded to did. My comment was my first intervention in this thread and I was responding to you specifically. You said that things like that get brought up all the time. I am asking you for the receipts. When was the Haitian coup d’état brought up before today?
WHATABOUT.
Name a more iconic duo than tankies and misinformation.
Hey, the difference is, you can post this list here, and nothing will happen to you.
Become a Chinese citizen, and then post that single bullet item about the TS incident in China, on a Chinese social media. Then see what happens.
That may be true, but it doesn’t excuse the list at all.
My country is responsible for the majority of international violence since WWII. I find that morally unacceptable.
I make posts like this because I want my country to do better. But the sad reality is we have yet to learn our lesson. We have been aiding and abetting an ongoing Holocaust for almost two years now.
People like you are evidence that Marxism is failed ideology that cannot be defended by it’s own merits. You know it’s a failure, which is why you resort to fallacies and misinformation.
Yeah, the amount of hatred Americans are fermenting on their own country is just mind-boggling. It’s like their number one wish in the world is to fail.
Don’t take this site as a reflection of the world. Lemmy in general is nothing more than a fringe echo chamber on the internet.
The capitalism capital of the world probably shouldn’t be preaching about human rights.
Tankie bot says what now? Get lost.
Every now and then I follow up and ask tankies what their actionable alternative is. They just never have one. Just making perfect the enemies of good. Tankies are deeply un-serious.
Shocking idea (this will blow your mind), but what if we dont fund a genocidal apartheid state? I mean not cut military aid by 30% or delay it three weeks, what if we just dont? What if we dont compromise with fascism?
If you abstain then you won’t have influence to stop funding genocide.
If you are serious please comment a real and actionable alternative.
The fact that voting inherently requires accepting fascism does not make fascism ok, it inherently makes liberal democracy fascist. As for a real and actionable alternative, building dual power through unions. Build communities from the bottom up to resist fascism and arm workers to prepare for eventual revolution.
Boy, you sure did get 'em. No pointing out bad behavior unless your history is unblemished, I guess.
US history is a little more than unblemished, though. Hell, not even history. They are literally arming a genocidal state as we speak.
So is China.
You could pick so many more things to criticize China for especially from its past, verifiable events, yet the west always picks Tiananmen Square, making sure to pick the image of the guy standing in front of the tank, but somehow always forgets to show the video of the guy climbing on top of the tank, asking soldiers to turn around to where the protesters are, and somehow forget mentioning that literally half the casualties were soldiers that were set ablaze. Even diplomatic cables at the time either leaked or declassified prove that.
the guy was blocking the tanks from leaving tiananmen square too
“Never forget” is great and all but from a German perspective it seems to not be enough. It is much more important to make sure the same or very similar things do not happen again, not by China and not by any other nation. Otherwise you end up like we did here in Germany where decades of “never forget” lead to very similar sentiments being expressed by a new major party but since things are slightly different (e.g. the “never forget” was always phrased to be about Jews, this is more about foreigners in general) people seem to allow themselves to ignore them.
“Never again”:
- ❌ “We must never do what we did to the Jews in WW2 again”.
- ✅ “We can never allow what we did to the Jews in WW2 to happen again to anyone”.
I’m surprised trump didnt try to give Taiwan away by tweet yet
Free West Taiwan! Someday, the White Sun will rise above Peking.
