Date of 4 June remains one of China’s strictest taboos, with government using increasingly sophisticated tools to censor its discussion
There is no official death toll but activists believe hundreds, possibly thousands, were killed by China’s People’s Liberation Army in the streets around Tiananmen Square, Beijing’s central plaza, on 4 June 1989.
The date of 4 June remains one of China’s strictest taboos, and the Chinese government employs extensive and increasingly sophisticated resources to censor any discussion or acknowledgment of it inside China. Internet censors scrub even the most obscure references to the date from online spaces, and activists in China are often put under increased surveillance or sent on enforced “holidays” away from Beijing.
New research from human rights workers has found that the sensitive date also sees heightened transnational repression of Chinese government critics overseas by the government and its proxies.
As an American I think it’s helpful to put this into some sort of perspective.
Things the US won’t forget:
Things the US will forget:
Korean War (3mil civilian dead)
Vietnam War (2mil civilian dead)
Iraqi War (1mil civilian dead)
Violent overthrow of East Timor (widely considered a genocide)
Violent overthrow of Afghanistan (twice, over 1 mil dead)
Violent overthrow of Nicaragua
Violent overthrow of Grenada
Violent overthrow of Panama
Violent overthrow of Libya
Coup d’etat of Guatemala
Coup d’etat of Iran
Failed Coup d’etat of Syria
Failed Coup d’etat of Indonesia
Many failed Coup d’etat attempts on Cuba
Coup d’etat of Congo
Coup d’etat of Laos
Coup d’etat of the Dominican Republic
Coup d’etat of Iraq
Coup d’etat of Brazil
Successful Coup d’etat of Indonesia (1 mil dead)
Coup d’etat of Chile
Multiple Coup d’etat of Bolivia
Coup d’etat of Haiti
Multiple Coup d’etat attempts on Venezuela
Coup d’etat of Palestine
Mass civilian casualties, destabilization of many governments, people subject to a lifetime of torture without a trial, all under the War on Terror
This list could be so much longer, but I gotta get to work.
Hey, the difference is, you can post this list here, and nothing will happen to you.
Become a Chinese citizen, and then post that single bullet item about the TS incident in China, on a Chinese social media. Then see what happens.
That may be true, but it doesn’t excuse the list at all.
My country is responsible for the majority of international violence since WWII. I find that morally unacceptable.
I make posts like this because I want my country to do better. But the sad reality is we have yet to learn our lesson. We have been aiding and abetting an ongoing Holocaust for almost two years now.
And we know the extent of US involvement in these coups and conflicts because the US declassified the info, becauase all info becomes declassified eventually.
When is the Dictatorship of China going to admit that this happened, when will they declassify the internal documents about this atrocity they were responsible for?
That’s the problem people have with the Chinese government. They can’t even acknowledge reality because they seek to eventually change the records of what really happened to pretend they did no wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_hangout
US declassification falls squarely into this domain. What gets released into the public record is enshrined as “The Truth” and what gets omitted is reserved to the domain of “Conspiracy Theory”. Thus a guy like Allen Dulles can sit on the committee that investigates the assassination of the President and author the copy that the CIA was in no way at fault or otherwise involved in the actions of a disgruntled former agent’s actions against the Chief Executive who personally fired Dulles three years earlier.
The Chinese Communist Party has its own version of Limited Hangout and goes to some length to assert that the riots in Tienanmen were the result of outside agitation, the civilian death toll was minimal, and the reforms that followed succeeded in restoring trust in the national government.
Westerners choose to ignore the official party line and rely on the equally unreliable narrations of participants who were fully opposed to the party, heavily invested in an insurgent opposition, and outspoken in their desire to abolish the CCP and have its leadership executed.
So you end up with a bunch of smug liberals denouncing Chinese state media as controlled, while regurgitating talking points that came straight out of the John Birch Society and the Falun Gong.
It’s propaganda all the way down. Nobody is giving you a complete and accurate picture of events. Any serious scholar must reconstruct events by bits and pieces, sifting through the enormous amounts of FUD. And when their work is completed… good luck finding it, because vanishingly few media moguls have an interest in promoting something that is insufficiently sensational.
WHATABOUT.
Name a more iconic duo than tankies and misinformation.
Imagine thinking that the US has forgotten any of these when they’re a constantly pressure on the cultural zeitgeist even literal decades later. Or, for that matter, that the Korean War is in any way comparable.
Twice? Christ, tell me you aren’t talking about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Not to mention that the ‘overthrow’ of ‘Afghanistan’ the second time would rely on recognizing the Taliban, and not the democratically-oriented Northern Alliance which was fighting them at the time, as the legitimate government of Afghanistan.
Is it better to be drowned out than forgotten?
Not trying to be confrontational or pedantic (there’s enough bickering in here) but it’s important to state that the Korean War is quite literally called “The Forgotten War”. In fact, it’s more important to point out that it wasn’t even a War, but considered a “police action” that claimed the lives of up to 3 million civilians (link).
Council on Foreign Affairs
You can’t look at those statements and not make parallels to what’s going on in America today with the executive branch trying to sequester even more power. Ironically just recently saw a pretty decent video on the war by Mr. Beat
The War Americans Forgot About
edit: forgot an S
You’re joking right
Please tell me this is sarcasm bruh
People like you are evidence that Marxism is failed ideology that cannot be defended by it’s own merits. You know it’s a failure, which is why you resort to fallacies and misinformation.
Yeah, the amount of hatred Americans are fermenting on their own country is just mind-boggling. It’s like their number one wish in the world is to fail.
Don’t take this site as a reflection of the world. Lemmy in general is nothing more than a fringe echo chamber on the internet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
This makes perfect sense, it’s one thing for Taiwanese and Chinese people to remember it but its absolute hypocrisy for the west to comment. Especially as they fund the genocide in Gaza and Western Liberals make excuses for it.
No, it doesn’t. Only people who are full shit use and defend this fallacy. People who have principles call out shitty behaviors and actions whenever they see them, that’s because principles are universal. If you selectively choose when to apply them, then you don’t believe in them.
If you acturally call out genocide and shitty practices wherever you see it than its being principled. If you only call it out when a “bad” country does its hypocrisy, and tbh I have seen people do the later far more often while claiming the former.
Tell me, when Western Europe plunders the global south to subsidize their social programs do you complain? Or when the Zionist Occupation slowly takes more land away from the natives? What about the western funded dictators committing genocide across the third world and selling their nations for scraps?
Do you acturally call for freedom, an end to the exploitation, or do you demand a compromise? Do you demand native Palestinians give up half their land to the occupation? Africans half their resources to Europeans? And dictators to kill half as many minorities?
When somebody supports said “bad” countries, they’ll view any instance of these countries being called out for any shitty actions as hypocrisy. What this actually shows is that these people are in fact hypocrites themselves. If they were principled, then they would’ve acknowledged the shitty actions of whatever country is pointed out and moved on. Instead, they go on they go on the brainless rants that are filled with fallacies to distract from the original issue and dismiss criticism, misinformation, and endless crying about how the country being called out is a victim for the atrocity they committed. These rants don’t change the reality of the issue being raised originally.
This entire post is about western governments who are currently engaging in genocide calling out an event in China that if you look at the proper context is bad but not an atrocity
Least braindead Marxist
Wow. Fascinating. Thanks for the link.
That shit gets brought up all the fucking time, in their own threads. Notice how people don’t bring up Tiananmen Square, Taiwan, Tibet, Hong Kong, the Uyghurs, or the many other atrocities the CCP has committed whenever an American atrocity gets mentioned.
Your comment ignores the context that the US is doing anti-Chinese propaganda here, and there is no parity.
Imagine if the shoe was on the other foot, and China was releasing PR statements on every anniversary of every US atrocity. They would still be issuing multiple statements every day.
All the fucking time? Really? When was the last time the Coup d’état against Aristide was discussed around here?
Post about it on it’s anniversary then. Don’t bring it up as a whataboutism in unrelated threads.
I didn’t bring up anything, the comment you responded to did. My comment was my first intervention in this thread and I was responding to you specifically. You said that things like that get brought up all the time. I am asking you for the receipts. When was the Haitian coup d’état brought up before today?