hit the character limit
make sure to read sources before sharing them.
DO NOT COPY-PASTE THIS ON LEMMY LOL, THIS IS A BRAINSTORM FOR OUR USE
We should pool our sources and evidence in this thread so that people with approved lemmy accounts can start spreading it there.
Feel free to contribute lol, it's a lot of work for me to do on my own and I might miss stuff or make mistakes, although I'm gonna keep going help or no
I'll grab links in a second (and there are some good articles I'd like to find that gather lots of evidence in one place), but here's some stuff off the top of my head:
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Wikileaks published a private diplomatic cable stating that no one was killed in the square itself, although a smaller number of people did die in clashes elsewhere in Beijing, consistent with China's own official account. (Here is the cable)
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A spanish film crew was in the square all night and filmed crowds of people walking out of the square in the early morning, singing the Internationale. Two wounded people are shown among them, possibly people who had been brought to the red cross station in the square, but no gunshots are heard, no one is running, and there are no bodies. (courtesy of /u/robinn, here's footage of a Hong Kong news report that includes the spanish film crew footage)
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two of the main organizers of the protest, Hou Dejian and Liu Xiaobo, state that no one died in the square, and call out other organizers for lying (courtesy of /u/GarbageShoot: interview where Hou Dejian, a Taiwanese national and one of the leaders of the Tiananmen protests, says he was in the square all night and saw no one killed, and Liu Xiaobo agrees with him — and also courtesy of /u/robinn, here is a twitter thread covering testimony by various organizers, including Hou Dejian and Liu Xiaobo)
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Numerous western media sources have stated that no massacre occurred in the square. (This article links to multiple western sources, including James Miles, attesting that no one died in the square. — be warned that this site also hosts some crank articles, you might want to focus on the sources)
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various western massacre reports cite wildly different death figures, usually with little or no justification for the number
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an attempt to collect all the names of the massacre victims ended early when they only found 155 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Mothers
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CIA and NED goons were known to be present in Beijing and involved in the protests. (Here is an article from the Vancouver Sun in 1992, showing western intelligence involvement was known in the west decades ago)
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during most of the protest, protesters were calling for a return to stricter communism, not for liberal market reforms. These were Marxists. Their signs showed Marxist figures and slogans. (This article shows some images of the protesters displaying Marxist slogans and iconography and discusses it a bit — again, be warned that this site hosts some crank articles, so you might want to focus on the sources)
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toward the end protest signs were suddenly in English
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tank man: the guy survives and is led away by bystanders, and also the tanks in the video are leaving the square (you can see this in the uncropped footage) and it is broad daylight, whereas the main violence occurred at night (also, courtesy of /u/robinn again: China in 1989 for one man vs. the U.S. in 2020 for a whole crowd and courtesy of /u/LegaliiizeIt, another video in the same vein)
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online photos of corpses were visibly taken elsewhere, not the square
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the first violence was against troops, not civilians. On June 2, 1989, two days before the June 4 incident when the main violence occurred, multiple unarmed Chinese troops were burned alive and their corpses hung from nooses in public. ((CW: gore) courtesy of /u/robinn, here is a thread of photos showing dead and wounded troops, some being rescued by civilians. Multiple men were burned to death, others were beaten. Some protesters stole guns from the army and can be seen brandishing them.)
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the violence against troops was uncharacteristic of the previous tone of interactions between troops and protesters in the preceding weeks. Troops and protesters had peacefully coexisted, singing songs and sharing food together. (Here's an article that goes into it a bit — again, be warned that this site hosts some crank articles, so you might want to focus on the sources)
I don't really have much off the top of my head for Uighur genocide stuff
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libs should hear who Zens is
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even the US State Department and the UN concede there is no mass killing in Xinjiang.
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western intelligence has been stoking and funding islamic extremism in Xinjiang. There's that talk by some American general or colonel where he acknowledges this, and I think there are other sources online as well
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Qiaocollective is a good source on Xinjiang, courtesy of /u/BynarsAreOk
I'll stick articles down here, some of which aggregate lots of evidence in one place
How psy-ops warriors fooled me about Tiananmen Square: a warning ...edgy-sounding title though
1989: Tiananmen Square ‘massacre’ was a myth
How Much Longer Do We Need to Propagate Lies About Tiananmen Square?
Tiananmen: The Massacre that Wasn’t
1989 Tiananmen Square "Student Massacre" was a hoax
The Truth Behind the Myth of the 'Tiananmen Square Massacre' - Opinion Piece By Dr. Dennis Etler
Notes for 30th Anniversary of TianAnMen Incident, courtesy of /u/GarbageShoot
Tiananmen Square Massacre – Facts, Fiction and Propaganda Lots of good images and western media quotes, but the site hosts some goofy articles so be careful citing it
Let’s talk about Tiananmen Square, 1989: My hearsay is better than your hearsay
Birth of a massacre myth, courtesy of /u/GarbageShoot
CBS news: There was no "Tiananmen Square Massacre", courtesy of /u/robinn
a NYT questioning the massacre, courtesy of /u/robinn and here's a pastebin rip
dessalines, a Lemmy dev, has a good socialism FAQ, including sections on Tiananmen, courtesy of /u/PorkrollPosadist
[link] [link] these two /r/ChangeMyView comments on China are great, courtesy of /u/geikei
[link] [link] [link] Some old hexbear threads, courtesy of /u/Finger
not China, but /u/robinn also made a carrd on the DPRK and linked a good twitter thread by ProleWiki
Comments in this thread to check out. I'll try to also add their info up here.
/u/robinn: https://hexbear.net/post/271448/comment/3513792
/u/Awoo suggests keeping things short and digestible instead of posting long effortposts, since libs will just count on people not reading the whole thing and they will point at it and say "See? They deny the Uighur genocide" or "See, they deny Tiananmen" https://hexbear.net/post/271448/comment/3514089
/u/GnastyGnuts has some great links but I hit char limit https://hexbear.net/post/271448/comment/3514972
/u/Krause has more great links https://hexbear.net/comment/3529874
Lemmy posts and comments from us
by /u/GarbageShoot: https://lemmy.ml/comment/476526
Exactly what happened here
Fascists like you and followers of the capitalist death cult can only say this: Tibet, because they drove the feudal lords and dalai lama paedophiles; Taiwan, because the bourgeois dictatorship claimed that land as theirs, as if it isn’t historically all one China, a similar story with Malvinas, I guess you also think they belong to the British; Hong Kong, which was a British colony but for some twisted reason you think they should be it’s own thing, because again it historically has not belong to China; the Uyghur thing, which even Western sources deny and/or doubt of its veracity and which was propelled by a right-wing organisation pro US imperialism; and delirious ideas about China being “imperialist” in Africa or South America because it trades with them and builds infrastructure, instead of providing bogus “financial aids” which then end up in the hands of US puppets like you did in Argentina with IMF funds. So basically all of the “imperialism” you claim is China trying to recover its historical territories lost in the process of the proletarian revolution.
Meanwhile, I don’t see any of the likes of you denouncing the plethora of colonies Europe and the US has been having and continue having for centuries. Why are you no so openly in favour of a Hawai’ian independence movement but you are so fervently obsessed with China? I know why, because you have fascists freudian slips and you can’t even realise about it yourself, since you live surrounded by people who justify themselves, and you have never interacted with a person from the Global South that’s not a fascist. By the way, the things I’m telling you, this is not “tankie” stuff, I have Peronists friends, Trotskyists friends, and all over the spectrum in Argentina, and they all know what you people say is complete and utter disgusting, the thought that everyone agrees with this kind of thought is something only maintained in first world imperialist countries. Don’t fool yourself.
Something along this conversation causes a "brain off" switch to trigger and they glaze over.
The information is good, absolutely fine. But we must find a way to make them actually take on board and absorb it. What they are doing is triggering a glaze-over switch that has somehow been programmed into them over years of propaganda and that switch causes the fallback to completely refusing to engage or absorb information. If they absorbed this information they would have to critically analyse the position they continually push, the issue is that they do not.
There is definitely a methodology for breaking this barrier as some of the people here were reached by it at some point along the way. The problem is that everyone who is eventually reached by this information seems unable to properly describe the exact method that broke through this barrier to reaching them.
Perhaps what we need is Chinese educational content that is completely separated from any political ideology? We can then point to this content, which is presented in a purely academic way, and show their position as being historically incorrect.
My take is that it's nationalism causing the problem. As soon as the nationalism trigger is set off in a person's brain they resort to pre-programmed defence mechanisms. As soon as it is made about colonialism or the US in the above conversation they resort to the defensive "west good" "china bad" mindset. Even in the so-called leftists (radlibs really but they wear black and call themselves anarchists) in some of these conversations they have a mindset of "the west is still better though so I side with the lesser evil". This mindset is a nationalist one in defence of the america empire or "international community".
lmao, I stand corrected. after seeing that 196 thread, you and axont are right, it's nationalism. it's fucking nationalism.
It is and we need to revive internationalism with a righteous fury as a counter weight to it. I keep going over this subject again and again and again and I can not find a lower-level issue that needs dealing with, it's a primary core issue that we have very little effort going into countering. It's the primary source of A LOT of shit.
I just don't know how. I'm going to keep talking about it in the hope it spreads to some people who do know how to get that ball rolling. I feel like we probably need more people writing books about this shit to try and get it in front of some people that are good at getting that to happen. Or something. I don't know.
people need to spend time in social spaces where 1) internationalism is articulable and is the overall feeling, 2) nationalism is understood as a problem and people can recognize it and point it out, and 3) there are communists from around the world. Then hopefully the memes and discourse from there spread to shape norms elsewhere. And it's gotta be bigger than hexbear lol
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