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
@daveywaveyboy@feddit.nl care to elaborate how this is “racist and batshit”?
dutch redditor takes time away from busy blackface schedule to call out racism
The only fun part about being a mod is seeing some of the asinine reports people make about hexbear posts.
Also going mad with power and forcing everyone to be trans, don’t forget about that
If I had to take a guess based on my own past as a dumbass radlib who believed anti China bullshit I’d say he’s trying to claim that by not listening to Chinese people who claim it happened we’re ignoring their voices and that makes us racist against Chinese people even though he’s the one who actually hates China
See in his mind he thinks every single Chinese person who knows it didn’t happen is brainwashed and they just don’t know the truth so it’s OK for him to not listen to any of them, also he believes that it’s physically impossible for him to be racist by virtue of being a liberal
So yeah, very tangled mess of brainworms but I think I sorted them out
I can’t believe I used to think like this and consider myself smart for it
There’s a legit thing where “smart” people can be more susceptible to confirmation bias because they’re skilled at finding patterns in information, but that doesn’t mean the pattern is necessary real or significant. “Intelligence” (i am skeptical of the concept of a single intelligence trait) doesn’t necessarily protect you from weird cognitive stuff.
I thought this was a comment on the racist and batshit students https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_anti-African_protests which lead to the Tiananmen square protests!
But no just a fedditor
The only famous video/image 99.9% of all Americans see of it is tank man NOT getting run over by a tank, and even then so many of them will be like “um yeah you don’t want to know what happens after the video cuts off” but the full video DOESNT CUT OFF AND HE JUST WALKS AWAY UNHARMED.
Meanwhile in America if you google “NYPD running over protestors” your results will be like:
-NYPD running over protestors May 2024
-NYPD running over protestors February 2024
-NYPD running over protestors December 2023
-NYPD running over protestors October 2023
-NYPD running over protestors March 2023
And so on and so on, and that’s just in one city
The only famous video/image 99.9% of all Americans see of it is tank man NOT getting run over by a tank, and even then so many of them will be like “um yeah you don’t want to know what happens after the video cuts off” but the full video DOESNT CUT OFF AND HE JUST WALKS AWAY UNHARMED.
The ones that have seen the full thing all say “but then he was disappeared afterwards” with no evidence and everyone just totally believes it because they just believe that’s what China does.
The guy gets escorted by what looks like bystanders concerned about his well-being. But if you ask redditors, they were undercover agents who took him to a black site to execute him even though he was just a guy coming home from shopping and not an activist lol. It’s the equivalent of an american cop killing a random student because he happened to stop by to ask a cop what the protests are about - which is more likely to happen than the tank man being killed
This is my go to for the power of propaganda but it only works in person. It’s “Do you know what happened to the Tank Man at Tienanman Square?” People almost always answer that he was run over. The response is great because while we don’t know exactly what happened to him we know one thing for certain; he was not run over. That’s the one thing we can say for sure and its the one thing they believe happened through the power of propaganda.
Yeah, a bunch of people run up and push him out of hte way of the tanks. And no one ever talks about how he climbed up on to the tank to have a chat with the tank commander, then climbed down, and absolutely nothing happened to him. Imagine climbing on to a cop MRAP or APC in the US.
My headcannon is that the tank commander was his kid and he climbed up there to discuss what they were having for dinner.
They tried to go around him multiple times, then when they realized he was just gonna block their way, they decided to stop so they wouldn’t accidentally crush him lol. That’s authoritarian.
There’s a Parenti line something like “the evil 1984 authoritarian CCCP USSR… broke up without major bloodshed”
EV_Dabs supercut link anyone? I know the original uploads got deleted, but I though someone reuploaded them under a new account.
Sorry, I’ve seen a video linked here a few times that’s pretty much exactly your comment, so I assumed you might have seen it too. I thought it was from a prolific user (Eugene_V_Dabs) that posted here a while back, but I don’t see it in the linked archive (I may have overlooked it, the titles are not easy to parse for content).
Hopefully I can find the link eventually, and I won’t seem so weird.
Actual footage from Tiananmen square as covered by the CPC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8dqOuHqcBQ
https://youtu.be/7bl_cyYHwNQ
Explanation of what happened
https://worldaffairs.blog/2019/06/02/tiananmen-square-massacre-facts-fiction-and-propaganda/
Translation of official government explanation
https://www.mango-press.com/report-on-stopping-unrest-and-quelling-counter-revolutionary-riots/
Tankman full vid
https://youtu.be/GRb4VY2dU4c
Pretty much everything people believe about it isn’t true, but nobody cares because it’s aimed at bad country
I’m still shocked they actually admitted Saddam’s shredder wasn’t real.
The fact that most Americans just assume tank man got run over and killed even after seeing part of the video of it is what genuinely drives me insane. Like the rest of the video is readily available bro you can see him walk away
That baffles me, because even when I was a turbolib I realized the whole point was that one guy was holding up the tanks. If they had just run him over, why would they have stopped?
As a kid, I figured he singlehandedly stopped the tanks from doing something terrible.
Saddam’s shredder?!?!?! I am too young to remember Saddam, please elaborate
They said Saddam owned a woodchipper or big shredder that he would throw dissidents in to execute them and destroy the body.
The moment I realized r/LateStageCapitalism had been ruined was when someone was unironically defending the Iraq War by referring to Saddam’s shredder. In the old days that person would’ve been quickly banned.
I think one of the interesting things about Tinyman and the tankman picture in particular is the mass psychosis (sorry if there’s a better non-ableist term I currently can’t conjure it) that the man in the picture was ran over by the tank. It’s a claim that can be categorically disproven by 15 seconds of video. But it contradicts the hegemonic narrative, so it’s like the video isn’t real, the vibes are more real than hard evidence that this man was allowed to just walk.
This is potentially a good starting point for exposing the greater mythology about the event.
Ask if the person you’re speaking with thinks the tank man was ran over.
- If they say yes, pull up the video, and ask if that makes them wonder what else about the incident has been mythologized. If they can admit they bought some BS you can work with them, if they dig in (“oh I’m sure something sinister happened to him later”) you’re wasting your time.
- If they say no, ask why a column of tanks was so deferential with that one guy when the story goes that there was an unprompted slaughter going on elsewhere. You can talk about how the event escalated, who was escalating, etc.
I’ve seen youtube comment sections where the full video is shown and people are like “ah, but the people who shooed him away from the tank were actually see see pee secret police in disguise”.
We know basically nothing about him or the other civilians involved from what I understand.
I’m not sure. I thought they were random concerned bystanders. Regardless, libs jump to the least charitable interpretation whenever the subject is [insert bad country here].
mass psychosis (sorry if there’s a better non-ableist term I currently can’t conjure it) that the man in the picture was ran over by the tank.
I feel like the term Mandela Effect would apply here.
Yeah it’s somewhat similar. The mandela effect people love to cite evidence for their claims though (even if it’s bunk evidence), in this case it is entirely 100% vibes based.
Actual footage from Tiananmen square as covered by the CPC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8dqOuHqcBQ
Explanation of what happened
https://worldaffairs.blog/2019/06/02/tiananmen-square-massacre-facts-fiction-and-propaganda/
Translation of official government explanation
https://www.mango-press.com/report-on-stopping-unrest-and-quelling-counter-revolutionary-riots/
Tankman full vid
