So, for example, the Tiananmen square thing. Every once in a while, you see stormfront people go crazy on it, saying shit like "fuck the CCP, can't censor me". I had been a reddit user for a long time before I moved on to here so I used to see those "awareness" posts all the time, though I didn't pay any attention to it much. But now that I've been on lemmygrad for a while, it seems to me that things didn't happen like stormfront made it out to be? The guy in the picture didn't get harmed? There was no massacre? I'm not knowledgeable about any of this, so if anyone have reputable sources, please point me to it. I'm really curious how you get millions of people to believe in something that didn't happen at all.
… saying shit like “fuck the CCP, can’t censor me”. … I’m really curious how you get millions of people to believe in something that didn’t happen at all.
These two points are related. First off, Tiananmen did happen, just not as reported in the west. People can make almost any anti-China/-communist statement they like in the west and 98% of people will believe, accept, and confirm it. There is no chance of any censorship, in fact, it's the opposite. It's not just like when mainstream reactionary celebrities use the front-page of a mainstream newspaper to advertise an interview on a mainstream news website to say that they've been censored. It's worse than that.
Engels, On Authority:
These gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves. This is how these profound thinkers mock at the whole world.
Censor, defined in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, (5th Edition):
- A person authorized to examine books, films, or other material and to remove or suppress what is considered morally, politically, or otherwise objectionable. …
- An officer empowered to examine manuscripts, books, pamphlets, plays, etc., intended for publication or public performance, in order to see that they contain nothing heretical, immoral, or subversive of the established order of government. See censorship.
Not only are 'China' and it's representatives not authorised in the west to 'suppress what is considered morally, politically, or otherwise objectionable', the west will also share lies that are intentionally 'morally, politically, or otherwise objectionable' for China.
These stories e.g. about Tiananmen are calculated to be 'heretical, immoral, or subversive of the established order of government' of China. There can be no question of censure if such messages are (a) not prevented and (b) purposefully spread and given extra attention.
The very act of claiming that one refuses to be censored in the re-telling of Tiananmen reaffirms the idea that China is 'totalitarian' – even outside it's jurisdiction! More on this double-effect, below.
Censorship, same source:
- The act, process, or practice of censoring.
- Prevention of disturbing or painful thoughts or feelings from reaching consciousness except in a disguised form.
- Deleting parts of publications or correspondence or theatrical performances.
- Counterintelligence achieved by banning or deleting any information of value to the enemy.
The only disguised form in which stories about China appear in western media is the anti-China form. The only pain that most westerners are protected from is the pain of having to face the cognitive dissonance that would arise if they were to learn the truth after however many years of being lied to.
At the same time, with regard to Tiananmen, at least, part of the publication has indeed been deleted. Not by China but the west. This is counterintelligence as the deleted information would be of value to the enemy, China and the CPC. That is the very definition of censorship.
In this instance, the lie about Tiananmen is also intended to strengthen the bogeyman of 'authoritarian China'. That's the deeper motif. The surface details of the lie are practically irrelevant. It's the deeper mischaracterisation of China that is (i) harder to forget and (ii) matters more for propaganda purposes.
Tiananmen is convenient in this respect because it's supposedly about suppression of expression. By claiming that one can't speak about it, one implies that China still suppresses free expression. The perfect recipe for propaganda.
As the motif is only implicitly understood, it goes in subconsciously, underneath the intellectual guard. Someone might challenge the facts of e.g. Tiananmen, but they donn't even realise that they should challenge the framing (unless they've been taught to do so, which is really only required to get a first class degree, and even then…).
You might even successfully make someone see Tiananmen differently but, without more, you won't affect the lasting impression of China or the CPC as monstrous. And when some other reprobate like Zenz comes along with another story that supports the motif, the lasting impression becomes stronger. Even if western media puts their hands up and says, 'sorry, everyone, we got the facts wrong', all it does is make people think the press is ultimately honest. It didn't make people think fundamentally differently about China.
Millions of people accept the lie for several reasons. One of those, as discussed above, is that they're lied to. Another, as hinted above, is that they're poorly educated. A third, beneath the surface, which makes people not want to find the truth or become better educated, is that doing so might worsen their material conditions. Westerners know, implicitly, that their abundance comes at the expense of the global south, including China.
It's also not wise to discount the influence of paid bourgeois agents on the public discourse. These operate: in the open, as media personalities; subtly, as academics, teachers, priests, accountants, lawyers, economists (who are in the open but don't tell you they're propagandising, partly because they don't know they're doing it); and in the shadows, as social media puppet accounts and astroturfing campaigns, counterintelligence/misinformation ops, etc.
Just because western liberals and global south compradors claim that they are at risk of censorship does not 'change[] the thing[ it]sel[f]'. The censorship is the other way round, which means westerners are projecting. Westerners can say whatever they like about China or communists. Nobody will stop them. Indeed, they are encouraged to lie.
If it's a good lie, every media outlet will pick up the story and give it credence. That story will enter the public consciousness. It will be in the background of movies and novels 'based on true stories'. Chat show hosts, etc, will talk about it as if it's incontrovertible and common knowledge. And people will accept it, in part because:
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force', (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology.
As for the truth, you might start here: https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/socialism_faq.md#what-about-the-tiananmen-square-massacre
More broadly, you might enjoy Michael Parenti's History as Mystery.
Fantastic write up, it's easy to debunk a lot of the nonsense the press says, but it's rare that we directly talk to people about why they say things like this. Muddying the issue and forcing us to constantly be on the "defensive" with regards to AES is a very common tactic to prevent actual discourse and explanation. But this cut right through it to be very clear about why these sorts of stories propagate.
I'll be keeping this in mind in the future, far too often I get dragged into explaining an event did not happen as is popularly understood, and can even get people to understand that the press lied about it, but a week later the other person will return with a new fabricated story. I'm cutting the weeds off at the top, instead of removing them entirely, which is what your write up does.
Man one of these days I really need to just sit down with like a bottle of wine and dive into that repo. I have it saved but just never got to it yet. Thanks for reminding me about it lol.
What about the Tiananmen square massacre?
Tiananmen Square "Massacre", A Propaganda Hoax
It wasn't a massacre of peaceful students, but a skirmish between PLA soldiers and armed detachments from the pro-capitalist / free market reform movement. The protest movement, as evidenced by their own accounts, called for market liberalisation, and free market reforms, rallying around a replica of the statue of liberty. After the movement had been building in the square for seven weeks, unarmed soldiers were sent in to disperse the protesters, after which many soldiers were beaten to death, torched, and lynched. The New York Times death count went from 2600, to many thousands, to 8000, to tens of thousands. In reality only around ~200 (including soldiers) were killed or trampled, in smaller clashes outside the square. The on-scene New York Times reporter disavowed the article, especially about machine-gunning of protesters. A wikileaks cable from a US ambassador to the US state department, confirmed that no killings or machine-gunnings took place in the square.
The defeat of a counter revolution in China
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20200118135159/https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/c2b7ma/china_megathread_everything_a_leftist_must_know/
https://www.qiaocollective.com/education/tiananmenreadinglist
https://redsails.org/another-view-of-tiananmen/
I’m really curious how you get millions of people to believe in something that didn’t happen at all.
Why? Any liberal or reactionary can easily imagine millions of people believing in falsities by virtue of the fact that opposites on the liberal political spectrum exist.
I mean come on. Sit down and think a little. Humans have been led to believe all kinds of things that are false and many still do. Mythologies weren't stories everyone was in on, they were once accepted truths in many cases.
How could millions of Americans believe Iraq had chemical weapons when it didn't? How could millions of Americans believe JFK was killed by a lone gunman with no meaningful connections?
I mean this is just simple propaganda and mass communication. Look how many people are seething over the Barenstein bears and convinced reality was changed Matrix style because they remember it being spelled differently and other Mandela effect stuff (named itself after the fact a ton of people for some reason believe they heard in the news that Nelson Mandela died in prison, how can they all think that when it's false).
Americans will readily accept North Korea is a nation of brainwashed drones or Russians are subhumans eagerly doing human wave tactics yet the moment they're asked to consider the contrary, the inverse might be the case their brains malfunction, they can't think straight, they can't conceive of it, it's unreasonable.
Free your mind. Expand the possibilities. Accept the empire pushes projection of its own atrocities both past and craved in the present onto enemies.
