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The redditor "Tienanmen Square massacre" narrative is flat earther levels of crank shit and needs to be recognized as such. (hexbear.net)

submitted 5 months ago by Frank@hexbear.net to c/chapotraphouse@hexbear.net

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This shit has seriously gone on too long. People who continue to cling to the "10,000 dead crushed by tanks hosed i to the gutter" bs are cranks. It's jews control the banks, chemtrails, the earth is flat, the moon isn't real level of crank shit and unless you're feeling very indulgent and someone is asking in good faith it can be dismissed as equally serious to that kind of crank shit.

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[-] 420blazeit69@hexbear.net 8 points 5 months ago

Actually, the massacre wasn’t happening on Tiananmen Square, but next to it.

I've seen this used as a gotcha -- most notably by the Columbia Journalism Review (lmao). Though correct, it's an extremely weak argument.

[-] Frank@hexbear.net 2 points 5 months ago

Even then they're still calling it a massacre. Like i am 100% certain some number of uninvolved civilians were deliberately shot and killed by pla troops who believed them to be insurgents, but as you drill down and drill down and drill down there's no moment where the pla fired en masse and indiscriminately on people

Like, pure armchair general math, but from the pictures it looks like if the 280 number is accurate then probable 5-10% of the people killed were pla soldiers and cops. Which, like; i don't think that has happened in the us. I don't think there's ever been an incident in the us where 10% of the people killed during a protest were soldiers or cops. Like, idk, maybe yes? But that would be in a case where 1-3 cops where killed, idfk.

Like, this isn't just a small amount of violence relative to the scope of the movement, it's a kind of violence that doesn't have clear parallels in the us. Right wing protestors attacked and killed an army troop convoy and then the military fought them and stopped the. This isn't kent state, where the army deliberately rolled up and killed a bunch of students, the armed pla troops came in specifically to stop the insurgents.

[-] o_d@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 5 months ago

Beijing Municipality has checked and double-checked all the figures from the Martial Law Command, the Public Security Ministry, the Chinese Red Cross, all institutions of higher education, and all major hospitals. These show that 241 people died. They included 23 officers and soldiers from the martial law troops and 218 civilians. The 23 military deaths included 10 from the PLA and 13 from the People’s Armed Police. The 218 civilians (Beijing residents, people from elsewhere, students, and rioters) included 36 students from Beijing universities and 15 people from outside Beijing. [29] [30]

https://redsails.org/another-view-of-tiananmen/#fn29

[-] 420blazeit69@hexbear.net 2 points 5 months ago

This isn't kent state, where the army deliberately rolled up and killed a bunch of students, the armed pla troops came in specifically to stop the insurgents.

I think this way of framing it to libs -- a focus on the facts themselves, and how deadly violence by the protesters led to a deadly response -- is better than focusing on what is or isn't a "massacre." It's easy to get bogged down in semantics and hypotheticals when talking about if certain facts fit a definition. The facts themselves should take center stage, and keeping the discussion focused on them leads people to question whether "massacre" is fitting on their own.

[-] Frank@hexbear.net 6 points 5 months ago

I specifically use "insurgents" because that's what they were - cia backed insurgents trying to escalate who attacked unarmed soldiers and bured them alive. They weren't part of the protest movement, they were parasites trying to hijack it. The protest movement was mostly Maoist, like there were all kinds of issues being raised, but it was primarily a Maoist movement protesting Dengist market liberalization. The Insurgents weren'ty part of that.

[-] 420blazeit69@hexbear.net 5 points 5 months ago

That's a good point, too, though maybe something like "instigators" or "hijackers" would be even better. I'm trying to put on my lib hat to see what would cause unproductive debates over language, and "come on, there wasn't an insurgency" seems like an easy one to avoid.

The George Floyd protests were also recent enough and popular enough to provide some good examples of how many protests don't involve everyone acting in lockstep, and their very nature invites all sorts of people to try and steer the crowd to their preferred ends.