This shit has seriously gone on too long. People who continue to cling to the “10,000 dead crushed by tanks hosed i to the gutter” bs are cranks. It’s jews control the banks, chemtrails, the earth is flat, the moon isn’t real level of crank shit and unless you’re feeling very indulgent and someone is asking in good faith it can be dismissed as equally serious to that kind of crank shit.
My favourite bit is when Wikipedia itself is like “the 10,000 claim was made by one dude who basically instantly retracted it and claimed the still unplausibly high number of 2,000”.
Also, the Tank Man photographer talks about the protestors throwing molotov cocktails and beating police officers to death.
And the whole “China pretends it didn’t happen”…they have official death estimates. 300 people. The US have their own estimate. 900 people. But no matter the number, it was much fewer than the protest leaders had hoped for.
To quote one of the protest leaders “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” - Chai Ling
By the way, that person is alive and well running a firm that fires people for not praying at work.
the protestors
It needs to be made clear; The insurgents were a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the student movement, a few hundred, maybe a few thousand people out of hundreds of thousands of activists across the country. They were not at all representative of the '89 protest movement. Chai Ling wasn’t a protest leader, she was just some CIA backed asshole and she and her goons bullied their way up to the PA and took it over. They did not represent the student movement or Tianamen Square. It must be stressed that the movement was mostly in opposition to Dengist market liberalization. Folks wanted to preserve communism against marketization of the economy. A secondary factor was a desire to create a more permissive social environment that reflected communist views of gender equality and allowed young people more freedom to express themsevles. Again, not because of government repression, but because they viewed contemporary chinese culture as very staid and conservative in a way that was not in line with their communist values.
It’s always funny to fire back at Redditors that the vast majority of the protestors weren’t mad about communism, they were mad that things weren’t communist enough.
Wrong. They wanted freedom to wear jeans and buy 50 flavors of industrial sized mayonnaise
To quote one of the protest leaders “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” - Chai Ling
By the way, that person is alive and well running a firm that fires people for not praying at work.
Wait, you mean the ebil CCP didn’t send her to a camp??
Thank god the CIA stumbled upon her situation by happenstance and with no previous connections to her, managed to ferry her and her co-conspirators out of the country just in time after only having just heard of her plight 😌
She, along with other Assets student leaders fled before the clash actually happened.
The army psyop unit released an edgy trailer for their unit, and there was a segment where the text says something like “we are behind it all” and it shows a montage of world conflicts, including the Tiananmen protests. Of course, that itself could be a psyop to make people paranoid, but it’s pretty obvious that competing superpowers would hop on each other’s conflicts.
To quote one of the protest leaders “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” - Chai Ling
This only works when the people also think it was unjustified.
Every revolution in history has one of these instigating moments, including colour revolutions. Most recently Ukraine’s moment in 2014 was the sussy sniper moment that has all kinds of evidence pointing towards far right shooters being involved and covered up. Even the February Revolution had a moment like this when the palace guard shot all the unarmed protestors.
The key point is that it’s unarmed protestors that didn’t deserve it. When it’s a situation where people understandable grit their teeth and say “yeaaaaaah but the protestors hung cops and burned them alive” it doesn’t work.
The people need to be enraged and believe the government NEEDS to be overthrown for it to work, if people think the protestors kinda brought it on themselves they don’t enrage in the same way. The CIA and fascists pull these false flags off all the time, I can’t think of a single incident in history where the left has.
The USSR had ties with unions and communist parties and leftist terrorists. But I don’t think they ever planned any false flags to help those movements. Like the Italian militants supported by the USSR were doing bombings and killings in response to the mob and fascists who attacked first. I don’t think even westerners have claimed the USSR faked any terrorist threats to bolster their factions. “Whataboutism” is used by liberals to cry about leftists because all they had to do was put up a mirror. Not saying intelligence agencies never lie, but it seemed that spreading propaganda to a diverse country whose minorities suffer was sufficient
But there have been some claims of false flags. For example, a KGB defector claiming that the KGB planted a story about the Vatican knowing about the holocaust and not doing anything about it.
Chai Ling is great, there is a lot more from that interview where she just openly displays what an unhinged monster she is, like when she adds to that part that the students are stupid and unworthy of her sacrifice, which is why she plans to escape (and though she didn’t leave quite as quickly as she seemed to plan, she did leave quickly enough that she wasn’t around for when the “massacre” would have happened)
Oh! And it’s also important to note that it was her interviews with western outlets following fleeing the conflict that produced the “tanks mulching corpses” story
