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World won’t forget Tiananmen Square, US and Taiwan say on 36th anniversary of massacre
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2025
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You can't just make up shit. The soldiers weren't given orders to "murder anyone that moves" or else the tank would've run that guy over. Where did you get that? They just looked at each other for awhile. I don't think anyone even died in Tiannamen Square itself. Battles happened in other parts of the city as soldiers defended themselves, though. It wasn't peaceful like you said earlier, soldiers died. Not that I think every protest necessarily has to be, or should be, peaceful, but at least get the facts straight.
And of course similar things happened in the US. We bombed an apartment building. There was the Kent shootings, the Haymarket massacre, Whiskey Rebellion, the incident in Waco, the assassination of Fred Hampton, hell, cop shootings happen every year. Not to mention hundreds of years of slavery where who knows how many were killed.
And no, Mao is not worse than Hitler. Mismanagement leading to famines is bad and the Cultural Revolution went too far in some places, and China acknowledges those mistakes btw, but they don't compare to the targeted genocides, holocaust, and wars of Hitler. And most of those things you said weren't even Mao. Plus, the US has done all those things of illegally occupying places (that's how we got a bunch of states like Hawaii or Texas, as well as territories later like the Philippines), we did more than re-education camps of Native Americans, we killed them all and are now helping Israel do their own genocide and occupation in the present day, we have basically taken over the sea in the whole world and kill people who don't agree (like Yemeni civilians), and have military bases all over including places they don't want us (like Guantanamo Bay in Cuba), and have massacred civilians protesting peacefully as I said above, and helped other countries do the same, and have people under-fed and poverty stricken in the richest nation in the world.
You say you acknowledge the bad the US has done and then ignore all of them to make it sound like China is the worst places to have ever existed, at the same time an ongoing genocide is happening facilitated by the US. All you've proved is you consume propaganda uncritically and without context.
Tank man stood in front of the tank on June 5th, the massacre happened on June 4th.
What was that again about me making shit up? It sounds to me like you're getting high off you're own supply.
You know what, that's a good idea. Let's get the facts straight, shall we? Go ahead and post your sources that actually support your claims. Shouldn't be a hard thing to do if they're facts like you say. I'll be waiting.
Lol you really had to do mental gymnastics to come up with any examples at all. I mean you had to go all the back to 1791 to the Whiskey Rebellion (if we're going back that far then look up the Taiping Rebellion) to find something and then used the Waco Seige of the Branch Davidians cult as an example. The only relevant example you have is the Kent state shooting, and even that's from 1970 and only 4 people were killed. Even then, I'm honest enough to acknowledge that this event was indeed bad and should be condemned.
Highly debatable. Mao has a very good case to top Hitler. He killed way more people and he was just as ruthless. Mao tops Hitler as the worst dictator of the 20th century.
Somewhere between 40 and 80 million people died under Mao's reign. That can't brushed off with an "oopsies". Also, China still hails this guy as a national hero even though his successor, Deng Xiaoping (who's responsible for the Tiananmen square massacre), had to literally do a de-Maoization like Khrushchev did with de-Stalinization to save the country from collapse.
Don't get it twisted, Hitler is one of the most evil men in history. There's a reason why he reached infamy in history. I'm just pointing out that he wasn't without rivals during the 20th century, and Mao is one of the very few people with a legitimate case as being the shittiest human of that century.
Wow, you are slow. It's not a competition. The reason why I brought up those things about China was to demonstrate no matter what examples are brought up about the US, China has an endless bag of atrocities to match or even exceed. That's not the point because nobody is arguing which country has the worse history, the point of contention was that the person that I replied to originally claimed that the US today is worse than China today when it comes to things like Tienanmen Square massacre and their examples had no relevance to their claim at all.
You don't need to have a ledger of condemnations so tankies can be satisfied with their perceived proportionate amount of criticism being applied towards China or any country. If an event is worthy of criticism then it should be criticized, simple as. If you're seething over people condemning an atrocity and drowning yourself in fallacies like whataboutism, then there's a good chance you either support the atrocities or the entity responsible for committing them.
If you made a post about the Kent State shooting, for example, right now on Lemmy or anywhere else really, you're not going to get a hoard of Americans or non Americans in the comments crying about "BuT wHaT aBoUt ChInA hYpOcRiTeS?!?", they're just going to condemn the event and move on... as they should. But when it comes to doing the same thing for a country like China or Russia, you will always get a hoard of tankies defending the reprehensible acts and crying hypocrisy... even though they themselves are hypocrites.
Ironic coming from you
They're always combined together. They're considered part of the same event.
Journalistic and diplomatic testimony at the time confirms this. It's pretty accepted by people who were there, including Western journalists. This is one example of a journalist there for the Washington Post at the time who later wrote a piece regretting writing their article in such a way that contributed to the myth that people died in the square.
I gave more recent examples too. The only reason I went back that far is to show that the US has been shooting at its citizens from the beginning. Keep in mind, China is a lot newer of a country than the US, so it feels fitting. When cou tries are newer, they are a lot more vulnerable to different conflicts and, sadly, these things can result as different factions fight it out. It's only been around since about the 50's. And 1970 isn't that much older than 1989. You act like it's ancient history.
Once again, Mao didn't kill more than Hitler. Famines are not the same as purposeful targeted genocides. If you want, we can say that US Presidents are worse than both if you add every death resulting from every war, and every post-war famine, civil war, etc that the US has been involved with. You'd add up basically every death from everything that's happened in all of South America and the Middle-East since the 50's in there.
Not to mention that the numbers you quoted aren't reliable. Their sources are dubious and usually CIA funded. Deng's numbers are a bit more realistic at 16.5 million but still most likely exaggerated because of the downplaying of Mao's legacy they were doing at the time, like you mentioned. US numbers are usually wild guesses and extrapolations.
And of course they still hail him as a hero. Even if policy-wise he wasn't the best, he was still a great and successful revolutionary who freed them from an oppressive monarchy, brought them socialism, cut poverty, increased life expectancy, reduced mortality, increased the spread of education and healthcare, and led them on the path to where they are now as an extremely successful country. And yes, they were increasing life expectancy even while he was in charge.
And yes, the US is worse today. They are enabling a genocide. That's basically the checkmate of atrocities.
Its not a competition, but the point is that these statements and propaganda always start as a way to encourage war and conflict with other countries. Every single time. It's why China doesn't celebrate the Kent massacre every year or the Civil War, or things like that that the US does. They don't have military bases all over the world and aren't constantly invading and occupying other countries, so they don't really need the excuse to drum up propaganda as an excuse for war. And while China has a lot of negative points, that's what makes the US worse that people in it don't understand: it's inperialistic nature.
Are you really dumb enough to not understand my point with the dates? You made the stupid argument that if there was a really a massacre then why isn't the tank man dead. This isn't the "gotcha" you think it is because it shows you don't understand what happened. The Chinese government gave the soldiers the order to massacre the students protesting on June 4th, tank man and the picture of him happened AFTER the massacre on June 5th.
So let me get this straight, your grand argument to justify this massacre is that the people weren't killed in the square itself but right outside of it? Damn, you sure showed how innocent and glorious the CCP is with this zinger.
You literally had one single relevant example. Even if we take all the other examples you gave and ignore their validity for a second, they still had less deaths combined than the Tienanmen Square massacre.
No way somebody is dumb enough to think China, one of the world's oldest civilizations, is newer than the US. China didn't start in 1949.
You don't even know what the topic of conversation is, do you? If you scroll up this thread and read what the original point of contention is, then you'll quickly realize that it's about some idiot saying that the US TODAY is worse than China. You citing examples from 1791 to 1970 shows that you either have no idea what the conversation is about or your argument is so weak that you have go that far back to find anything.
Mao's death toll is so high that his non famine deaths give the Holocaust's death toll a run for its money. Let's do some basic arithmetic:
Chinese land reforms: 1 million - 4.7 million
Government violence during the Great Chinese Famine: 2.5 million
Anti-Rightist Campaign: 550k - 2 million
Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries: 712k - 2 million
Three-anti and Five-anti campaigns: 100k
Cultural Revolution: 500k - 2 million
That's bring us to: 5.362 million - 13.3 million
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_China#People's_Republic_of_China_(since_1949)
So even if we exclude the famine, which we shouldn't because those deaths are direct result of his policies, his death toll is still either half of that of the Holocaust at best or even higher the Holocaust at worst. When we factor the Great Chinese Famine that he caused, then he's well and away the greatest killer in history.
Except we're not going to say because that's idiotic logic. First of all no, not a single American president comes even close to Mao's death toll. Second of all, his death toll, like Hitler's, is a direct result of his policies. These death toll figures don't include deaths caused by wars. If we included the Chinese Civil war or the host of other wars that he involved in, then he might actually top 100 million death by himself. Thirdly, even IF we did include wars, what kind of clown counts every single death in wars, including the deaths caused be the enemies, as a part of the death toll? Not only that, but including subsequent events as well? That's stupid.
No, they're extremely reliable. All the estimates are provided by independent research teams and well respected academics who's full research, sources, and methodology are have been peer reviewed and are available to all who wish to see them. You just want to find any excuse to dismiss the figures because they don't conform to your tankie biases.
Do you actually think successfully arguing that the death toll is "only" 16.5 million is some sort of win? Not only is it sad that you think that, but it's also a losing battle because that figure is well below what most academics estimate. There's another thing, simply putting saying "US" or "CIA" in front of everything you don't like doesn't discredit the validity or accuracy of those figures or statements whatsoever nor does it make the association inherently bad. These assumptions exclusively exist in the empty minds tankies who think the rest of the world thinks like them, well they don't.
People understand that despite all it's flaws, the US is still a liberal democracy that actually has freedom of speech and freedom of the press. This means that academics in the US are extremely reliable because they're independent researchers who can publish all their research without fear of manipulation or censorship from the government regardless of how the government wishes the results were or how they make the government look.
This isn't the case in China because it's an authoritarian country, and so research on touchy subjects is inherently unreliable because it all goes through the great CCP filter. Not to mention that the research on Mao's astronomical death toll isn't exclusive to US researchers. Academics all over the world have studied the same material and came up with estimates that are largely in the same range. So no matter what excuse you come up with, they simply won't mean anything because you're defending a position that contradicts reality.
What monarchy lmao? China has been a republic since 1912. I know tankies are ignorant, but do you seriously not know who the communists fought during the Chinese civil war? Because that's astounding levels of ignorance.
Literally all of this is false. Mao's policies were such massive failures that killed so many people and brought so much suffering that the country was actually on the brink of collapse. After he died, his successor, Deng Xiaoping, had to do a de-Maoization to help save the country. The Chinese economy under Mao was extremely small and stagnant, and China didn't experience any real economic growth until Xiaoping started liberalizing the economy. In the late 70s and throughout the 80s, he introduced a series of reforms that allowed people to own private property, allowed foreign investment to flow into the country, created "special economic zones" where capitalism ran free, and allowed markets to exist again. Only then did China economic rise start to take off.
You can literally see this in GDP numbers:
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/chn/china/gdp-gross-domestic-product
The country went through a genocide that killed 30 million people followed by a civil war that killed 10 million people. The life expectancy in China in 1945 was 33.4 years. Literally any sort of stability would've seen a rise in life expectancy. We saw the same thing happen in Russia, Germany, and bunch of countries who exited eras of brutal war. With that being said, Mao wasn't exactly good for the life expectancy, you clearly see in the country's life expectancy graphs when the famine happened as well as when his brutal massacres started slowing down:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041350/life-expectancy-china-all-time/
China is arming Russia's genocide in Ukraine as well as committing their own genocides in TIbet and Xinjiang. So if we're using mental gymnastics make the US indirectly supporting Israel count as enabling genocide, then China has a checkmate x3.
These atrocities are historical facts, not propaganda, and recognizing them isn't going to start wars. What kind of idiot thinks that recognizing and condemning an atrocity like the holocaust is propaganda to start a war? If you ever get the self awareness to wonder why nobody likes tankies, this is why.
Nobody is celebrating this massacre you dimwit. People are acknowledging and condemning it because, unlike the US, the Chinese government denies the atrocities it committed and pretends this massacre never happened.
Yes they literally are. Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, India, Tibet, and the list goes on and on.
Clearly, you don't understand what imperialism is either because if you think China isn't imperialist then you're huffing something strong.