Who wants to risk it and repost this to memes in .ml?
Risk what? Would anything of value be lost?
"you dont understand! nothing happened INSIDE the square! (ignore that masses were killed beside the square)"
Well, to be perfectly clear, here in Mexico happened a students massacre in the Three Cultures square in 1968. The CIA was involved.
Nice whataboutism. How hard can it be to understand that China having a shitty government does not mean that the US is perfect?
Americans will post a meme about Tianimen Square while eating a Chiquita banana.
maybe you should post it as a separate meme since people are crying about whataboutism. I hadn't heard of this one actually.
24 downvotes telling me actually this never happened.
Also, nobody talk about Grenada in 1983. Or Iran Air Flight 655. Or the MOVE bombing in 1985. Or the police response to the LA Riots. Or the police response to the Iraq War protests. Or the police response to OWS protests. Or the police response to BLM protests. Or the police response to the campus protests in defense of Palestine.
That's Whataboutism.
You can't just talk about ACAB or discuss the broad problems of a heavily armed carceral state looking for heads to crack. Only Foreign Countries are Bad.
You're right. TWO culturally shocking things happened that year.
A repeat of 1932-1933 Ukraine, really.
Edit: Hoping the downvoters are just confused by what I'm talking about. I'll just drop this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor_denial
There's a huge difference between "the famine never happened" and "The widespread crop failures caused famines in some regions due to ineffective policies, bad estimates grain production, and local conflict".
The former is just as wildly ahistorical as the "Stalin did holodomer because he was evil" that's taught in schools.
While that might work for someone whose only interest in the event is demonizing (or eulogizing) the USSR, if you actually want to know how and why things happened, a deeper understanding is necessary.
It certainly true that "Stalin did holodomer because he was evil" would be a stupid thing to say. Good thing very few people are actually saying that then.
The actual point is that when the crop failures started happening Stalin decided to make sure it disproportionately hurt non-Russians, especially Ukrainians. Whether that's technically genocide or not depends how severe it was and what else they were doing to try to Russify the area at the time, but frankly, if we're talking about the subtleties of the definition of genocide I hope we can agree that whether it crosses that threshold or not what happened was not okay.
They felt the same way the Kent State Students felt before the attack.
That tens of millions of people across the nation were about to be slaughtered, broadcast on tv around the world?
It wasn’t tens of millions deaths if that’s what you’re implying. An atrocity but always good to stay to the facts.
Why are people so laser-focused on this one event that happened over three decades ago?
Are you for real? Should we forget the people that are silenced in this world?
Because there is a real effort by a government to prevent people millions of people from remembering.
I don't know anyone who is laser focused. But anyway, do you think important historical events exist? If so, what are your top ten of the last half century?
The idea of Tiananmen Square being one of the top ten most important historical events in that time period is wild to me. Just in terms of death toll, the highest estimate mentioned on Wikipedia of 10,000 comes from a US ambassador citing an anonymous "friend," and is many times higher than any other estimate - a more realistic generous estimate is closer to 1,000 (the official number is 300). Let's compare that to the lowest estimates from the list of genocides page:
- Gaza: 38,000 (ongoing)
- Darfur: 98,000 (2005)
- Congo (Effacer le tableau): 60,000 (2003)
- Congo (Massacre of Hutis): 200,000 (1997)
- Rwanda: 491,000 (1994)
- Bosnia: 31,000 (1995)
- Somalia (Isaaq): 50,000 (1989)
- Iraq (Kurds): 50,000 (1989)
- Cambodia: 1,386,000 (1979)
- Indonesia (East Timor): 85,000 (1999)
- Uganda: 100,000 (1978)
The same year that Tiananmen Square happened, two separate genocides were ongoing that, even by the most ridiculously generous comparisons possible, each killed at least 5 times as many people. Searching "Isaaq" on either .world or .ml gives exactly one hit which is a comment listing off a bunch of genocides, like I'm doing now. Entire cities were leveled and hundreds of thousands of people were forced to flee the country, but nobody ever talks about it (myself included, until today).
In addition to that list, if we're talking about events in general, then we should also look at the list of interstate wars (again, lowest estimates):
- Persian Gulf War: 29,000 (1991)
- War in Abkhazia: 25,000 (1993)
- First Congo War: 235,000 (1997)
- Kosovo War: 16,000 (1999)
- Eritrian-Ethopian War: 53,000 (2000)
- Second Chechen War: 20,000 (2000)
There's ongoing conflicts in Myanmar, in North Africa, in Mexico, and in Sudan, and more, each of which has left more dead than Tiananmen this year and the year's not even over yet.
So it doesn't seem especially significant in terms of raw numbers, but you could argue that it's more significant because of the effect it had on Chinese politics, as the controversy led to the resignation of the head of state, Deng Xiaoping. Except that I never ever see anything like that discussed. Either way, it didn't change the broad direction of the reforms.
I could give my own reasons as to why it's given such a high position of importance, but I'm genuinely curious to hear your own explanation of why Tiananmen would warrant a spot on a top ten list of important events, compared to any of the other events I've listed.
I don’t know anyone who is laser focused.
Really? You haven't seen the many posts on this one event on lemmy.world? Hell, this is the shitpost community, not even a political one.
Because Lemmy is considered and made by communists.
Communists, tankies who will always rush in to defend the CCP and suppress the atrocities committed by the CCP, without fail. It's both hilarious and madening.
Basically what shitposting is all about.
try posting it on grad, they'll love it
Yeah .ml will be enough
A grad is being sent to your location
Or ml. Or Hexbear.
Why can't we have a leftist instance that doesn't suck CCP dick?
We do. DB0 and Solarpunk.
Marxists generally support AES, so instances that are pro-Marxism tend to be supportive of the CPC. I don't think there are any Syndicalist instances or anything, so you'd have to go to an Anarchist server like dbzer0 or something. Lemmy.world tends to be right-wing, especially because it's defederated from Marxist instances and some of the mods have ridiculed Marxism in general.
Solarpunk is one. I guess my instance is leftist too, however it is very tiny.
A lot of bad actors on Slrpnk but overall the community is anarchist leaning, anti-dictatorship.
https://queer-bolshevik.medium.com/the-aes-doctrine-wrong-then-wrong-now-a8666de371da
This is a good read. There is a pretty large socialist movement that seems to have the idea that to reach global socialism we need to defend every self proclaimed socialist state without asking any questions at all and hope they'll get better over time.
Genuinely there are a lot of people that would like that. Maybe start with a community first before an entire instance.
I wonder if there are comments here that I've blocked
I don't know if this is the case for other apps or anything, but on Jerboa I end up seeing blank posts (like a post but without any user or instance attributed to it) that just say "there is no record of this comment" whenever it's someone I've blocked.
I use these posts to tag people, so I can disregard and ridicule them in different posts.
