British ambassador to China Sir Alan Donald wrote a secret diplomatic cable around 24 hours after the massacre, which was only declassified in 2017. Some excerpts:
"The 27 Army APCs (armored personnel carriers) opened fire on the crowd before running over them. APCs ran over troops and civilians at 65kph (40 miles per hour). Students understood they were given one hour to leave square, but after five minutes APCs attacked.
Students linked arms but were mown down. APCs then ran over the bodies time and time again to make, quote ‘pie’ unquote, and remains collected by bulldozer. Remains incinerated and then hosed down drains.
27 Army ordered to spare no one. Wounded girl students begged for their lives but were bayoneted. A three-year-old girl was injured, but her mother was shot as she went to her aid, as were six others.
1,000 survivors were told they could escape but were then mown down by specially prepared MG (machine gun) positions. Army ambulances who attempted to give aid were shot up, as was a Sino-Japanese hospital ambulance.
The first picture is mostly bikes and the few people lying on the ground are still clearly alive as you can see them lifting their heads to see whats going on. I can't spot any dead people in the second pic either. Also lol at believing a 'British ambassador'
Can you circle the dead bodies in red? Because there literally are none. There are a lot of bikes and a couple of alive people on the ground. What more do you want? Are my eyes just lying to me, so I need to trust Western media instead?
Edit: To be clear, yeah, something clearly happened that caused these people to panic. A couple dozen people dropped their bikes and fled. A couple other people were presumably knocked off their bikes in the confusion. But where is the killing?
But ... you're the one claiming that abandoned bikes are dead bodies. How does that work?
Congratulations though, you finally linked a couple of pictures of what could potentially be dead bodies. Or they could be unconscious / injured in the panic which led everyone to drop their bikes and run away. It's pretty difficult to tell.
Or they could be unconscious / injured in the panic which led everyone to drop their bikes and run away. It’s pretty difficult to tell.
Tipping over on your bicycle wouldn't tear apart your clothes like that. I've had plenty of bike accidents, none of them have ever reduced my shirt into a bloody strip of fabric. We can call into question Western narratives without disbelieving our own eyes and trying to convince ourselves that people who have been maimed are just taking naps. You can support something without pretending it's never had any flaws.
Man, I'm just pointing out that I have no idea what is going on in these grainy, black & white, questionable contextless pictures and neither does any random anti-communist who links them.
It's really fascinating how you're always on the attack, and never actually address valid criticisms that are made of your arguments. It's almost like you're here specifically to stir shit and not actually to discuss anything. Very :amogus:
Prove you're not a wrecker and address this: Why did you link a picture of a few dozen abandoned bikes claiming they are dead bodies?
You're right. The more I look into it, the less crazy of an event that it seems. It was still shitty though. And definitely played right into the hands of the anti-communist propagandists.
People are literally looking up or taking cover you dumb motherfucker, do you have eyes or is there just cables piping hot shit into your braincells? Jesus christ.
Im looking at the goddamn photo and every person I see is either crouched, on a bike or flat on their stomach, supporting their head with their arms, meaning they are taking cover and not dead.
Yea, it's called having eyes that aren't blinded by western propaganda. I see mostly bikes and a few people holding their heads up, clearly not dead, meanwhile you seem to somehow see countless dead corpses... I wonder why.
BODIES AND WOUNDED, HOWEVER, BEGAN TO
ARRIVE AT THE RED CROSS STATION INDICATING THE EXTENT
OF THE FIGHTING AND THE FACT THAT REAL BULLETS WERE
BEING USED. AS THE MILITARY BEGAN TO REACH THE
OUTSKIRTS OF THE SQUARE AND SHOTS WERE FIRED IN THE
VICINITY OF THE RED CROSS STATION, MRS. GALLO DECIDED
SHE WANTED TO LEAVE.
Where is 10000 or indiscriminate firing or tank rolling over? I don’t deny people died, nobody does, the scale is the question. There is very proud tradition to inflate victim numbers of regime’s enemies, so that your fucks up wouldn’t look too bad/make them look bad
Of course, any death is not cool and good. I just feel massacre of even 1000 people been that famous is obviously work of propaganda, each year massacres of this scale happen. Only in imperial core they don’t happen, cause they have fancy security apparatus to get them beforehand/nice crowd dispersal weapons
I softly deny scale, but a) i wasn’t there b) it’s not particularly interesting.
Tplf has massacred 200 people recently, do people talk about amhara massacre? Would they remember them? Us troops recently gunned down prolly 40 people after explosion in kabul, will you remember it 20 years from now?
I’m not even talking mass violence of the 60s, that happened this month. God knows what myanmar is doing, yemen still suffers, colombia completely blacked out in news, india is beating up farmers, I try to remember them instead of some small scale shit in china.
I didn't know that the TPLF was even a thing. And wow, that sounds really shitty. I wish people would just stop killing each other, instead of looking at everything as "relative".
Official CCP announcements shortly after the event put the number who died at around 300. At the State Council press conference on June 6, spokesman Yuan Mu said that "preliminary tallies" by the government showed that about 300 civilians and soldiers died, including 23 students from universities in Beijing, along with some people he described as "ruffians".[190][199] Yuan also said some 5,000 soldiers and police were wounded, along with 2,000 civilians. On June 19, Beijing Party Secretary Li Ximing reported to the Politburo that the government's confirmed death toll was 241, including 218 civilians (of which 36 were students), 10 PLA soldiers, and 13 People's Armed Police, along with 7,000 wounded.[152][200] Mayor Chen Xitong said on June 30 that the number of injured was around 6,000.[199]
So, at LEAST 300 people died. That's a shitload of people for one plaza. I would still classify that as a "massacre".
Seems like there's a few people here are debating that there are dead people in the images. I think there are some dead people in these images. CW: Corpses. I partially agree with Guy Dudeman's Photoshop job here. I think the incident is a use of state power that definitely took out some innocent people. I also believe that it helped stop China from falling like the Soviet Union did. In any case, it's no worse than an average year for America. China is clearly the lesser evil here.
Plenty of Western and international sources claim that nothing happened in Tianamen Square that night.
Those sources do often claim that violence did occur elsewhere and I honestly wouldn't put it past any military or police group to use violence if they can get away with it but it's certainly not as set in stone as you might think.
It's also important to note that governments can often be so segmented in control that soldiers firing on a group won't always be representative of command. For all the deaths and murders that are accountable to the US government in the Middle East, there's also no doubt plenty of murders that were done by more rogue soldiers and squads all promising each other not to tell the higher ups.
So we would want internal documents and communications between higher-ups of the military and the Chinese government at the time to determine intents.
There's certainly a lot of evidence suggesting that there was some pretty violent military action going down, but the details aren't really set in stone at all.
Generally? Cops can be less bastards but they're going to default to being shit the large large majority of the time just due to the position and the offen unchecked (sometimes impossible to check) positions of power they can be in.
Like sadist types are always going to be attracted to that sort of role and they're always going to have situations where they beat up and abuse people while their buddies look the other way.
The idea of a communist state as being perfection free from human evils is just absurdity.
This assumes that we can and eventually will go full communism which is a nice assumption to make but never guaranteed.
Also hopefully we can make other structural changes that better accounts for these issues, how things like the economy functions is only one part of overall life.
Like let's say Life is 50 different pieces, making one or two pieces good doesn't mean that all pieces will just fall into place.
generally cops in the imperial core/western/capitalist country protect the wealth and wealthy, in communist/leftist countries the cops are there to protect the people.
If one believes the PRC is trying to act towards the benefit of humanity, people who work under the direction of the state will be working towards the state’s causes. On this basis, it makes sense to say Chinese cops are not all bastards.
So, on the other hand, if one believes that the US Government (state/local, in the case of the Police) are working towards the benefit of humanity, then are they justified in saying that not all American cops are bastards?
A State is State is State, and all states believe they're working toward the good of humanity.
“Does being a cop in China give one the ability to exercise cruel control over local civilians with a degree of impunity?” In some places, maybe so. In others, probably not, on the basis that cops have way less leeway to behave abusively [at least in some parts of China] than cops do just about anywhere in America.
I would say that cops in San Francisco have a different level of leeway to behave abusively than cops in Florida or the rest of the South do.
you’re one of those liberals that will readily denounce the US while parroting its propaganda
First of all, I resent you calling me a liberal. I am a leftist. One can be a leftist without being a tankie.
Secondly, there is a kernel of truth in almost every bit of propaganda. That's how you get good propaganda.
state officials often lie
Like when China says they had zero covid deaths yesterday?
I think most politicians, being paid to vote and legislate the way they do, are probably not terribly concerned with the morality of their actions, otherwise they probably would not be auctioning their loyalty.
I agree with that.
My argument had to do with the reader’s own evaluation of a state, not the state’s evaluation of itself.
My point is that the purpose of the formation of any state/government is always to "work toward the good of the people of the state". No matter if the policies of that state are objectively moral or immoral, the intention is always benevolent, and often genuinely so.
The people in that pic seem pretty clearly alive. Some abandoned bikes and a few folks wearing white shirts taking cover with no signs of blood.
edit: take the L my guy. As an american I find it hard to care about this when my government nakedly does much worse than this on the regular, with malicious intent
You would choose to allow the capitalist to murder?
No. I wouldn't.
So you actually believe China's capitalist government line that "zero" people died in China from Covid? Why are you allowing yourself to be so gullible?
How can you agree that inaction is unconscionable, and then claim that there is no acceptable amount of bloodshed to protect a socialist project? Capitalists have and will continue to engage in tremendous bloodshed to destroy socialist projects, the only way to respond is with bloodshed, you cant peacefully protest an invasion or color revolution. You are saying that inaction is unconscionable but that no action that will inevitably need to be taken can be acceptable, it doesn't make sense.
I'm not trolling. I'm just telling you how I see it. I don't think we'll get anywhere with this conversation.
Is it that difficult for you to understand that there are people out there who disagree with your assertion that violence is the only way to solve this issue?
Well, SOMETHING killed all these people. What do you think it was ?
British ambassador to China Sir Alan Donald wrote a secret diplomatic cable around 24 hours after the massacre, which was only declassified in 2017. Some excerpts:
The first picture is mostly bikes and the few people lying on the ground are still clearly alive as you can see them lifting their heads to see whats going on. I can't spot any dead people in the second pic either. Also lol at believing a 'British ambassador'
Really, really predictable answer. "All I see are bikes!" Jesus.
Can you circle the dead bodies in red? Because there literally are none. There are a lot of bikes and a couple of alive people on the ground. What more do you want? Are my eyes just lying to me, so I need to trust Western media instead?
Edit: To be clear, yeah, something clearly happened that caused these people to panic. A couple dozen people dropped their bikes and fled. A couple other people were presumably knocked off their bikes in the confusion. But where is the killing?
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It's not unreasonable for people to point out that the evidence you provided doesn't prove what you're claiming it does.
It's not unusual to be loved by anyone either.
Don't take tom jones in vain
Awww! What's new, pussycat?
But ... you're the one claiming that abandoned bikes are dead bodies. How does that work?
Congratulations though, you finally linked a couple of pictures of what could potentially be dead bodies. Or they could be unconscious / injured in the panic which led everyone to drop their bikes and run away. It's pretty difficult to tell.
Tipping over on your bicycle wouldn't tear apart your clothes like that. I've had plenty of bike accidents, none of them have ever reduced my shirt into a bloody strip of fabric. We can call into question Western narratives without disbelieving our own eyes and trying to convince ourselves that people who have been maimed are just taking naps. You can support something without pretending it's never had any flaws.
Man, I'm just pointing out that I have no idea what is going on in these grainy, black & white, questionable contextless pictures and neither does any random anti-communist who links them.
Yeah on these photos it’s obviously dead people, but not on the big one. shit sucks eh
Wow. Just... wow.
It's really fascinating how you're always on the attack, and never actually address valid criticisms that are made of your arguments. It's almost like you're here specifically to stir shit and not actually to discuss anything. Very :amogus:
Prove you're not a wrecker and address this: Why did you link a picture of a few dozen abandoned bikes claiming they are dead bodies?
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I'm going to express my disgust with it, and not endorse any government that does it.
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You're right. The more I look into it, the less crazy of an event that it seems. It was still shitty though. And definitely played right into the hands of the anti-communist propagandists.
How the fuck is this garbage being upbeared
Because there are still some reasonable people in this world.
Adorable.
I'm sorry if I've not become a nihilist.
People are literally looking up or taking cover you dumb motherfucker, do you have eyes or is there just cables piping hot shit into your braincells? Jesus christ.
I'm looking at the same photo you are. Maybe I need new glasses, or maybe you need them?
Im looking at the goddamn photo and every person I see is either crouched, on a bike or flat on their stomach, supporting their head with their arms, meaning they are taking cover and not dead.
Then maybe you're blind.
:PIGPOOPBALLS:
I love that photo.
Yea, it's called having eyes that aren't blinded by western propaganda. I see mostly bikes and a few people holding their heads up, clearly not dead, meanwhile you seem to somehow see countless dead corpses... I wonder why.
Yeah, I guess I'm just blinded by western propaganda. You're probably right.
You are likely a chud so its not shocking.
Why does anyone who hates tankies have to be a "chud"? Would you call Bookchin a "chud"?
:yes-sicko:
You can hate tankies all you want but that doesn't preclude you from being a chud.
What would?
give me an actual definition for tankie, chud.
Auth-Left.
Also, does this mean you think Marx was a tankie?
No, Marx was not a tankie.
Those streets are awfully clean for people who got ran over by tanks…
Not sure which picture you're looking at.
First one
They're literally bikes. Jesus.
Is british cable inherently more trustworthy than a Chilean one?
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Where is 10000 or indiscriminate firing or tank rolling over? I don’t deny people died, nobody does, the scale is the question. There is very proud tradition to inflate victim numbers of regime’s enemies, so that your fucks up wouldn’t look too bad/make them look bad
I'm with you on that. I'm sure it wasn't 10k, but it was a lot of people, and it wasn't cool or good.
Of course, any death is not cool and good. I just feel massacre of even 1000 people been that famous is obviously work of propaganda, each year massacres of this scale happen. Only in imperial core they don’t happen, cause they have fancy security apparatus to get them beforehand/nice crowd dispersal weapons
I don't know. I feel like all the vehement denial surrounding this massacre makes me believe that it actually did happen.
I softly deny scale, but a) i wasn’t there b) it’s not particularly interesting.
Tplf has massacred 200 people recently, do people talk about amhara massacre? Would they remember them? Us troops recently gunned down prolly 40 people after explosion in kabul, will you remember it 20 years from now?
I’m not even talking mass violence of the 60s, that happened this month. God knows what myanmar is doing, yemen still suffers, colombia completely blacked out in news, india is beating up farmers, I try to remember them instead of some small scale shit in china.
I didn't know that the TPLF was even a thing. And wow, that sounds really shitty. I wish people would just stop killing each other, instead of looking at everything as "relative".
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Denial from tankies. Here's Wikipedia's take:
So, at LEAST 300 people died. That's a shitload of people for one plaza. I would still classify that as a "massacre".
Seems like there's a few people here are debating that there are dead people in the images. I think there are some dead people in these images. CW: Corpses. I partially agree with Guy Dudeman's Photoshop job here. I think the incident is a use of state power that definitely took out some innocent people. I also believe that it helped stop China from falling like the Soviet Union did. In any case, it's no worse than an average year for America. China is clearly the lesser evil here.
Plenty of Western and international sources claim that nothing happened in Tianamen Square that night.
Those sources do often claim that violence did occur elsewhere and I honestly wouldn't put it past any military or police group to use violence if they can get away with it but it's certainly not as set in stone as you might think.
It's also important to note that governments can often be so segmented in control that soldiers firing on a group won't always be representative of command. For all the deaths and murders that are accountable to the US government in the Middle East, there's also no doubt plenty of murders that were done by more rogue soldiers and squads all promising each other not to tell the higher ups.
So we would want internal documents and communications between higher-ups of the military and the Chinese government at the time to determine intents.
There's certainly a lot of evidence suggesting that there was some pretty violent military action going down, but the details aren't really set in stone at all.
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Makes sense. So - here's a question for you... are all cops bastards even when they're communist cops?
Generally? Cops can be less bastards but they're going to default to being shit the large large majority of the time just due to the position and the offen unchecked (sometimes impossible to check) positions of power they can be in.
Like sadist types are always going to be attracted to that sort of role and they're always going to have situations where they beat up and abuse people while their buddies look the other way.
The idea of a communist state as being perfection free from human evils is just absurdity.
Makes sense. So when we eventually DO go full-communism, it's still going to be ok to say ACAB? Right?
This assumes that we can and eventually will go full communism which is a nice assumption to make but never guaranteed.
Also hopefully we can make other structural changes that better accounts for these issues, how things like the economy functions is only one part of overall life.
Like let's say Life is 50 different pieces, making one or two pieces good doesn't mean that all pieces will just fall into place.
Kinda like allowing child labor to flourish and billionaires to exist, and to empower western billionaires... but somehow they're "on a leash"?
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That's a good start. They've got at least 400 more to go .
generally cops in the imperial core/western/capitalist country protect the wealth and wealthy, in communist/leftist countries the cops are there to protect the people.
Oh, like this?
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So, on the other hand, if one believes that the US Government (state/local, in the case of the Police) are working towards the benefit of humanity, then are they justified in saying that not all American cops are bastards?
A State is State is State, and all states believe they're working toward the good of humanity.
I would say that cops in San Francisco have a different level of leeway to behave abusively than cops in Florida or the rest of the South do.
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First of all, I resent you calling me a liberal. I am a leftist. One can be a leftist without being a tankie.
Secondly, there is a kernel of truth in almost every bit of propaganda. That's how you get good propaganda.
Like when China says they had zero covid deaths yesterday?
I agree with that.
My point is that the purpose of the formation of any state/government is always to "work toward the good of the people of the state". No matter if the policies of that state are objectively moral or immoral, the intention is always benevolent, and often genuinely so.
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The type of person that becomes a cop is always gonna be a bastard
I agree with you there.
Yeah. All means all.
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The people in that pic seem pretty clearly alive. Some abandoned bikes and a few folks wearing white shirts taking cover with no signs of blood.
edit: take the L my guy. As an american I find it hard to care about this when my government nakedly does much worse than this on the regular, with malicious intent
I don't subscribe to whataboutism, and I don't deny that the US is the worst country.
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300 people dead is still pretty shitty.
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No, there is no acceptable number.
LOL. If you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you. And a vacation home in florida.
I completely agree with you on this.
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No. I wouldn't.
So you actually believe China's capitalist government line that "zero" people died in China from Covid? Why are you allowing yourself to be so gullible?
He said yesterday, not over the entire pandemic. If you're gonna start a spat at least read what they type.
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How can you agree that inaction is unconscionable, and then claim that there is no acceptable amount of bloodshed to protect a socialist project? Capitalists have and will continue to engage in tremendous bloodshed to destroy socialist projects, the only way to respond is with bloodshed, you cant peacefully protest an invasion or color revolution. You are saying that inaction is unconscionable but that no action that will inevitably need to be taken can be acceptable, it doesn't make sense.
I disagree.
Ok, so you are now 100% confirmed a troll, you have :bait: me expertly
I'm not trolling. I'm just telling you how I see it. I don't think we'll get anywhere with this conversation.
Is it that difficult for you to understand that there are people out there who disagree with your assertion that violence is the only way to solve this issue?
When are you going to admit that your hatred of china stems from the fact that you're a racist bitch?
:fedposting: Let's see that piggy
Not sure what that means.
It means show us your hog
Oh! Now I get it. Ok, here it is!
:PIGPOOPBALLS:
How do you get it to show up inline like that? I don't see it in the emoticons menu.
I'll tell you if you show me your dick
Oooh, a feisty one! Here you go, big boy!
It's in the custom emote tab at the end. You can also pull up emotes by typing in a
:Example:
:wow:will create :wow:Thanks!
I love that pic so much.
I think you wanna zoom in on that first pic mate lol
Honestly, what does it mean?
From where I am sitting it seems like some weird armchair history nerd shit about what is elemtally an unimportant historical event.
Is there anything useful we can extrapolste from this for future consideration? I kinda don't think there is
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