I've seen some good takes on this website before, e.g.
Tiananmen Square massacre is a myth; all we’re remembering are British lies
Wikileaks: no bloodshed inside Tiananmen Square, cables claim
Workers World: China’s Tiananmen Square
Tiananmen Square ‘massacre’ was a myth
What really happened at Tiananmen?
West hypes false Tiananmen death toll
The original fake news: Tiananmen Square massacre
The defeat of counter-revolution in China
WikiLeaks - LATIN AMERICAN DIPLOMAT EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT OF JUNE 3-4 EVENTS ON TIANANMEN SQUARE (1989)
Richard Roth - There Was No "Tiananmen Square Massacre" (2009)
Yenica Cortes - Tiananmen Square and the threat of counterrevolution (2009)
Tiananmen - the massacre that wasn’t
No, 10,000 were not killed in China’s 1989 Tiananmen Crackdown (anti-Chinese source, but still!)
Deirdre Griswold - Tiananmen Square ‘massacre’ was a myth (2011)
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Idk what we'd struggle about. Best restaurants to go to after visiting the square?
The Chinese government violently crushed a popular movement that wanted civil rights and a free press.
In much the same way that the Maidan in Ukraine wanted those things.
However, those desires are merely a wedge that could be used to establish Imperial control.
Ukraine would be much better off if Maidan had been suppressed, far less people would have suffered and died.
However, those desires are merely a wedge that could be used to establish Imperial control.
Were the students tied to foreign influence?
A leader of the movement immediately fled China as the protest started, stating that the point of the protest was to incite fatalities to inflame global attention. Doesn't sound like a very non-ngo affiliated person to me. Love 2 deliberately get my supporters killed while i flee in the name of civil rights
Chai Ling, here's a link to a comment by @SnAgCu@hexbear.net https://hexbear.net/comment/3715945, detailing a bit about the situation. And lemme get her quote here:
The students keep asking, “What should we do next? What can we accomplish?” I feel so sad, because how can I tell them that what we are actually hoping for is bloodshed, for the moment when the government has no choice but to brazenly butcher the people. Only when the Square is awash with blood will the people of China open their eyes. Only then will they really be united. But how can I explain any of this to my fellow students?
One would be Chai Ling
Even her NATOpedia page has this transcript from an interview with her:
Chai Ling: All along I've kept it to myself, because being Chinese I felt I shouldn't bad-mouth the Chinese. But I can't help thinking sometimes – and I might as well say it – you, the Chinese, you are not worth my struggle! You are not worth my sacrifice! What we actually are hoping for is bloodshed, the moment when the government is ready to brazenly butcher the people. Only when the Square is awash with blood will the people of China open their eyes. Only then will they really be united. But how can I explain any of this to my fellow students?
"And what is truly sad is that some students, and famous well-connected people, are working hard to help the government, to prevent it from taking such measures. For the sake of their selfish interests and their private dealings they are trying to cause our movement to disintegrate and get us out of the Square before the government becomes so desperate that it takes action....
Cunningham: "Are you going to stay in the Square yourself?
Chai Ling: "No."
Cunningham: "Why?"
Chai Ling: "Because my situation is different. My name is on the government's blacklist. I'm not going to be destroyed by this government. I want to live. Anyway, that's how I feel about it. I don't know if people will say I'm selfish. I believe that people have to continue the work I have started. A democracy movement can't succeed with only one person. I hope you don't report what I've just said for the time being, okay?"
She was smuggled out along with various other protest leaders and dissidents through Operation Yellowbird, a CIA-MI6 joint venture. Again, even the NATOpedia page has to grudgingly admit the CIA had been providing training, funding, even typewriters and fax machines to these people - who it must be kept in mind were a small fraction of the protesters. Though the page does manage to avoid mentioning the NED, which had opened its offices in China for the first time in 1988,
Sure, we can have this struggle session if you want to also go start the same struggle session for every single time any powerful country has done similar. Guess I'll see you post this every single day then? Looking forward to how you critique every country who did something like this equally and fairly.
Just like how the USSR collapsed because people wanted civil rights and free press and OOOPS, manmade horrors beyond comprehension!
“Freedom of the press” in bourgeois society means freedom for the rich systematically, unremittingly, daily, in millions of copies, to deceive, corrupt and fool the exploited and oppressed mass of the people, the poor.
Lenin
This is basic stuff
There's no struggle to session, anybody left here already knows this shit is made up
I ordered Uber Eats tacos to my room, but CCP massacred that shit. That's the real truth that hexbear dot net won't tell you.
My understanding is: People protested in China, between 0 and 1 people died in the square, even western journalists were right there and saw nothing untoward. Somewhere between 0.6 and 5 people per city died as a result of the clashes with police over a 7 week period. The main demands of the protests were to halt the liberalization of the economy and erosion of welfare, and to address high inflation and political corruption. Some had other demands too, but those were far and away the main ones.
Is there a struggle session to be had about it really? Even Wikipedia agrees with the above statements, so that account of events is using pro-Western sources.
When you account for the real numbers, to call it a 'massacre' is little but anti-China rhetoric. Compare for example the '92 LA "Riots", where the deaths were up to 100x higher per capita, if the first was a massacre, what the heck do you call the second?
I don't like to use per capita measures to decide how bad an event was. That's the same reasoning as the "actually if you account for the difference in population, Oct 7th was like 50 9/11's in one day" talking point. But it is important to point out that it was definitely not a massacre because the bulk of the civilian deaths that occurred only happened after skirmishes in which police and soldiers had also been killed. It wasn't unilateral which I think is a pretty important part of a massacre.
Well, I'm using "per-capita" in the sense of "how many people were roughly involved or proximal to the events". Not just "how many people live in that country", as well as only comparing like-for-like (city-wide protests) events, to try avoid that kind of reasoning.
They italians decided one one nation could claim the noodle, and it was going to be them.
from zifnab25:
Wasn't the primary complaint being issued an objection to municipal farmland being broken up and privatized? This was a leftist reaction to Dengism and a rejection of the "modernization" efforts that were sweeping the continent in the waning days of the Cold War.
Yes, a lot of the western media campaign and agitprop was fueled by anti-coms hoping to topple the CCP. But the revolt was fundamentally Maoist, as I understand it.
well... today I learned...
Bro i don't know what happened i was born after it all went down
Fascinating, I was actually born in the square on that day so I made the death toll -1.
There's this book titled Do Not Say We Have Nothing (taken from the line in The Internationale). The book is of course very sad, because Chinese history in the 20th century had a lot of tragedy and it follows a family that lived through all of it. It is basically anticommunist in the way a lot of diaspora literature is. The plot culminates in one of the characters dying in 1989.
Even so, the book takes pains to describe how disillusioned the characters were with western media coverage of 1989, falsely and spectacularly describing soldiers machine-gunning students in the square and such. It ties into the overall theme of a family buffeted by the great waves of history trying to tell their story which has not been told.
For my own opinion of 1989, the contemporaneous collapse of the Soviet Union and resulting human catastrophe showed that suppression was the right move. Western liberals are still hung up on 1989 in China because it ruined their orgasm. The sexpat media class was deprived of another country to turn into their unrestricted cheap brothel. Whatever depredation occurred was still not enough for them.
