this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2024
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@seahorse@midwest.social you're being rightfully called out in this comments section.
https://archive.is/gaR4u
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8555142/Wikileaks-no-bloodshed-inside-Tiananmen-Square-cables-claim.html
https://redsails.org/another-view-of-tiananmen/
CBS NEWS: “We saw no bodies, injured people, ambulances or medical personnel — in short, nothing to even suggest, let alone prove, that a “massacre” had occurred in [Tiananmen Square]”
BBC NEWS: “I was one of the foreign journalists who witnessed the events that night. There was no massacre on Tiananmen Square”
NY TIMES: In June 13, 1989, NY Times reporter Nicholas Kristof – who was in Beijing at that time – wrote, “State television has even shown film of students marching peacefully away from the [Tiananmen] square shortly after dawn as proof that they [protesters] were not slaughtered.” In that article, he also debunked an unidentified student protester who had claimed in a sensational article that Chinese soldiers with machine guns simply mowed down peaceful protesters in Tiananmen Square.
REUTERS: Graham Earnshaw was in the Tiananmen Square on the night of June 3. He didn’t leave the square until the morning of June 4th. He wrote in his memoir that the military came, negotiated with the students and made everyone (including himself) leave peacefully; and that nobody died in the square.
200-300 people died in clashes in various parts of Beijing, around June 4 — and about half of those who died were soldiers and cops..
A Wikileaks cable from the US Embassy in Beijing (sent in July 1989) also reveals the eyewitness accounts of a Latin American diplomat and his wife: “They were able to enter and leave the [Tiananmen] square several times and were not harassed by troops. Remaining with students … until the final withdrawal, the diplomat said there were no mass shootings in the square or the monument.”
Numerous military buses, trucks, armored vehicles, and tanks being burned by the “peaceful” protesters. Sometimes the soldiers were allowed to escape, and sometimes they were brutally killed by the protesters. Numerous protesters were armed with Molotov cocktails and even guns.
Wall Street Journal: In an article from June 5, 1989, the Wall Street Journal described some of this violence: “Dozens of soldiers were pulled from trucks, severely beaten and left for dead. At an intersection west of the square, the body of a young soldier, who had been beaten to death, was stripped naked and hung from the side of a bus.”
The official report of the Chinese government from 1989 (translated here) shows that more than 1000 military and police vehicles were burned by rioters. And 200+ soldiers and policemen were murdered. Just imagine how much restraint the military and the police had shown.
Wait, how could the protesters kill so many soldiers? Because, until the very end, Chinese soldiers were unarmed. Most of the times, they didn’t even have helmets or batons.
What exactly happened in Beijing in 1989 that lead to this bloody affair?
The answer lies with two key figures: General Secretary Hu Yaobang, and Ambassador James Lilley.
Hu Yaobang was a member of the communist party of China and was one of the three major rightist-reformers that set China on the path its on today, the other two being Zhao Ziyang, and Deng Xiaoping respectively. Hu Yaobang as a reformer was also a spokesman for the intelligentsia and by the end of his life was well-beloved by the youth of China (we're talking below 30 here, folks) therefore when he passed away the youth of China organized public grieving events with the largest occurring in Beijing. This is to say if Hu didn't die from old age that year, none of this would've happened that year. This is to also say this event had nothing to do with "freedom" or "democracy" or whatever pigshit your favorite rush limburger propagandist spoon feeds you, it was a funeral service that was hijacked to unseat the Chinese government - which so coincidentally is a speciality of the agency the second person we're talking about.
Ambassador James Lilley, the son of an american expat oil executive for Standard Oil, was a CIA agent operating in east Asia from 1951 to 1981 with little officially known about him (I know for a fact he's fucked around Korea and Laos, so it's not a stretch to say he's likely been involved with every conflict that occured during his official career). In his "post" CIA career he's acted as a diplomatic liason to the provice of Taiwan, a teacher to future state department ghouls, and "helped" South Korea end its military dicatorship by helping the military win the election "democratically", and abruptly five days after the death of General Secretary Hu Yaobang James Lilley was appointed as the US Ambassador to China by also former CIA ghoul and president of the United States George H. W. Bush. What an astounding coincidence.
In an article from Vancouver Sun (17 Sep 1992) described the role of the CIA: “The Central Intelligence Agency had sources among [Tiananmen Square] protesters” … and “For months before [the protests], the CIA had been helping student activists form the anti-government movement.”
Credit to @Alaskaball@hexbear.net for the second part of this comment.
I would give you Hexbear gold if I could afford it. Instead you have my ungilded thanks.
:hex-silver:
I'm a little confused about what the main contention is here. Most of the links you shared still say that people died and there was a massacre, even though the quotes you pulled out all seem to indicate that no one died at all.
Are you trying to suggest that China was correct to do whatever it did June 3rd and 4th? Or are you upset that the violence all around the area is being lumped into one big Tiananmen Square Massacre, even though no one probably died inside the actual square?
Yes but the people killed outside the square were actually armed and had killed police officers already. There were people demonstrating inside the square that did not, for example, lynch and burn police officers alive.
So what, you want to say China squashed a rebellion? Suppressed a riot? Dispersed a violent protest?
Do you believe that martial law was declared a few weeks earlier? I'm trying to get a baseline for what you think happened, so far from this thread I'm seeing something between "no civilians were injured" and "it was a violent mob that needed to be stopped by any means."
Can you point out where you're seeing those things specifically?
We (at least many of us) have read the sources that have been linked. What is described there, particularly the accounts of people who were there, is what we assert is what happened. In the few instances where there may be contradictory first hand accounts (and mostly, the accounts are not contradictory but rather corroborate each other) there may be some ambiguity. But even taking that into account, it is ridiculous and downright ahistorical to say "Chinese authorities massacred people."
For the most part, this hasn't even been about making moral judgment calls, which sounds like what you're fishing for and why you seem to think it's difficult to parse our position. This is partially implied by your phrasing "suppressed a riot? dispersed a violent protest?" etc. This has been about us just saying: Look, here is how things actually went down and by no stretch can that be called "a massacre" unless you want to also say that protesters in the streets were "massacring" soldiers and cops. Also, all of this happened relatively far away from the square, which is relevant because that is where many students were protesting and where the imagery for the "Tiananmen Massacre" false narrative comes from. Unless I have missed a comment or two somewhere, no one here is saying that "no civilians were injured." In fact I think your phrasing of it that way is dishonestly projecting a position onto us that none of us hold. People were killed on both sides of the conflict, and indeed it was PLA soldiers who were killed first which unsurprisingly, understandably culminated in a violent response. The narrative that the CPC ordered the PLA to massacre unarmed student protesters is just a load of propagandistic horse shit.
Here is a bit from one of the links already provided:
There's your "baseline" for what we "think" happened.
The “no civilians were injured” is coming from Awoo pulling quotes out of the links and “it was a violent mob that needed to be stopped by any means” is from Nakoichi. Both of them are my interpretations of what they said, only slightly exaggerated.
First off, that bit isn't from the link unless you're summarizing it for me, in which case thank you.
But second, that article picks and chooses what information it wants from its sources even if the sources overall contradict each other. It uses a wikileaks source from earlier to say there were no deaths at the monument, but later uses a declassified document to confirm the death toll that says "TROOPS BACKED BY TANKS AND ARMORED PERSONNEL CARRIERS BATTLED CROWDS 0F CIVILIANS FOR SEVEN HOURS BEFORE REACHING THE SQUARE SHORTLY BEFORE DAWN TODAY BEIJING TlME . STUDENT DEMONSTRATORS BEGAN TO LEAVE TIANANMAN BEFORE THE TROOPS MOVED IN; TROOPS OPENED FlRE ON THOSE WHO REMAINED".
It says Amnesty International reapeats a bunch of lies and puts the death toll between 1,000-10,000 but the source it links as proof of this claim only briefly mentions Amnesty International, and says they put the death toll closer to 1,000 and doesn't mention any claims they might have made. EDIT: also, your summary goes against the "official record" from China: you're saying 100-150 of the dead were cops/military, but the article says "The 23 military deaths included 10 from the PLA and 13 from the People’s Armed Police."
It goes to great lengths to describe the student's movement and how barely any students were killed, but doesn't dwell too much on who was killed, and what their motivations might have been, why they were so willing to set fire to vehicles and put their lives on the line.
If you're going to say that I said no civilians were injured at least do the courtesy of pinging me so I can send you this link to read
Seriously though. Don't say things that I did not say.
The point made by everyone discussing this topic is not that there were no deaths, it's that the western narrative about the topic is in fact entirely a lie. There was no "massacre" of poor unarmed students at Tiananmen in the square as is popularly lied about by redditors.
There were no tanks running people over. As is popularly lied about by redditors posting that stupid picture of a bunch of bicycles on the floor either.
What ACTUALLY happened at Tiananmen was that a combination of communists and liberals got led on by people that WANTED to see a massacre happen. They intended for everyone there to die that day, we even have interview proof of that.
What ACTUALLY happened was that a protest got wildly out of hand because leadership wanted it to. They hanged and burned alive two unarmed police officers, and then the protest was broken up. What then transpired across several kilometers were various different sporadic battles between armed protestors and the PLA. Resulting in several hundred deaths.
This is corroborated by western eyewitnesses that I've linked and showed you.
The point of this topic is not to deny that deaths happened. It is to correct the story, the lie that is told is one of an utterly cartoonishly evil crackdown on peaceful protestors resulting in a massacre of innocent students that were gunned down in cold blood in the square. But the reality I've just told you is VERY different and the emotional reaction anyone should have to it should be extremely different to that of the lie. The lie is perpetuated in order to claim China is evil, that this event was evil, this is very far from the truth and once people open their eyes to how much this particular event has been lied about it starts to make them question what else has been lied about or exaggerated to the extreme.
Worth adding, to clear up a point of possible confusion — There is no evidence for deaths in the square itself. There were deaths elsewhere in the city that night, but these were violent clashes in which soldiers also died, and the death toll was in the low hundreds, not thousands. This is what we're all saying in this thread.
You linked to Awoo's comment to say that she said (or quoted someone who said?) that there were no civilian injuries. But a ctrl-f of 'civilian' shows the word mentioned nowhere in her comment. In your replies to that comment, where you quote from some of the linked sources only shows cases of people talking about civilian injuries! Please point directly to someone saying, or even implying, that "no civilians were injured." It may be there, and I'll wait for you to actually point it out if it is, but until then, it sure as hell looks to me like you're making shit up and expecting us not to double check.
What Nakoichi said in the comment you linked was:
"Yes but the people killed outside the square were actually armed and had killed police officers already. There were people demonstrating inside the square that did not, for example, lynch and burn police officers alive."
None of that has anything to do with "needing to be stopped by any means." It is simply stating what happened and showing beyond any shadow of doubt that the claim of CPC/PLA/Any Chinese authority conducting a "massacre" but rather instead responding in an entirely understandable and justified way to extreme violence and murder of their comrades.
Oooooooh, ok. There it is. You are just making shit up and telling us people are saying things that they aren't actually saying.
Yeah, it looks like I pasted a different link than the one with the text I quoted. My bad on what is essentially a typo. This is the link I meant to paste that does correspond to the text I quoted and that was one of the sources already linked above: https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/06/06/tiananmen-the-empires-big-lie/
There is no contradiction there. Opening fire on the remaining students does not mean that students were killed at the monument. But all of that is immaterial anyway. It's a fucking nitpick. Like you liberals will accuse us of nitpicking about "no actual deaths in the Square" because they happened exclusively (or almost exclusively) in other areas. And as I said, the reason that is singled out is because of the way the false narrative is built around the square itself. It would be an irrelevant detail whether people were killed there or not, were it not for the fact that the picture that anti-Sino western narrative deliberately paints of a massacre that didn't happen, is centered around and built upon those details. But in this case, you really are just saying "nu uh! I caught you in a contradiction because one source said people died in this spot and another says they didn't!" which first of all, doesn't even matter to the context we're providing here that... again... there was no "massacre," and secondly was something I already addressed in my previous comment where I specifically mentioned that contradictions in the details of first hand accounts does mean there is some ambiguity around those specific details. Provide us with something that isn't just a detail that is ultimately inconsequential and that has nothing to do with the invalidity of the "massacre narrative."
As for your other "gotcha," there are discrepancies in the exact number of deaths, which no one here has denied and again, I addressed in my last comment where I said: "In the few instances where there may be contradictory first hand accounts (and mostly, the accounts are not contradictory but rather corroborate each other) there may be some ambiguity." It's funny how you seemed to have latched onto trying to find those ambiguities, but totally ignored the whole reason I said that. Once again, those ambiguities only show us that even where things are uncertain and discrepancies in first-hand accounts exist, they come nowhere near to the claims of the massacre narrative, in this case the blatantly spurious death toll of many thousands. It's almost like no matter which details from first-hand accounts you choose to go with, all of them discount the bullshit that the US State Department would like us to believe about the evil See See Pee via their PLA soldier-goons gunned down gorillions of innocent students and ran over poor Tank Man. (The student thing is especially ironic, given the militarized police crackdown students in the US are right now having to face while they protest a literal genocide the US is funding and helping to perpetrate, but that is obviously for another thread).
Well, then keep reading the sources that have been generously provided by @Awoo@hexbear.net and others and maybe even do some of your own research. You may even be shocked to learn how many of those student were protesting the liberalizing of the economy and were against the increasing influence of capital, wanting to remain ideologically and economically socialist. But I'm getting tired of answering your homework questions for you. I've got my own work to do, good night/day/whatever.
Are you just going line by line and didn't want to waste your effort on the first two paragraphs you wrote?
Apparently I read half a dozen of the wrong first hand accounts.
I really don't care about this, the students weren't the ones killed for the most part. They're basically irrelevant to the conversation, aren't they?
Right now the biggest discrancy I'm seeing is that most of the people here want to tell me that almost half of the people killed were state employees, but that red sails articlesays the official number is closer to 10%. That, and the fact that there really is no official number because China doesn't talk about it and doesn't want anyone else to either.
You'd think that after a few decades someone would have done that homework and posted it online somewhere. But I guess it's everyone's responsibility to become an amateur historian to figure it out themselves.
It has, but every time a liberal decides they want to dissect it they latch onto some irrelevant distinction without a difference pretends they just don't understand what's being asserted.
QuietCupcake is affirming the casualties you're pointing to in your pullquotes, but is arguing that because most did not occur in the square itself as described in the westernized accounting of the event and because the violent response started when protestors assaulted and killed several officers, the label of a 'massacre' is an intentionally misleading description that ignores what actually happened. There being a couple hundred casualties doesn't make the event a 'massacre' and honestly I think you know this. Given that you haven't defended the term but have only complained about discrepancies in first-hand accounting makes me think you know it's an indefensible description.
Oh look, you did the thing QuietCupcake was pointing out you were doing right after he pointed it out
'I'm just trying to get answers so I can understand.' Bullshit. You're farming for vague details so that you can dismiss the broader point being made and keep your a-historical and politically-motivated description that was suggested to you from decades of red-scare propaganda.
So why weren't those linked? Why do I need to read 5 articles that say there was a massacre, just around the square and not in it, written by or about people who were actually there, just to get to a blog post that links those same articles and selectively pulls quotes to try and convince me that there wasn't a massacre?
If January 6th ended with the federal government sending in tanks and hundreds dead, but everything else about it stayed about the same, I would still call it a massacre, or at the very least understand why others would.
And you ignored the second point I made, that we really can't know too many details about what happened. And yet everyone's so certain they know the full story, and it just so happens to align with what the government is[n't] saying.
After having read the articles, I'm more convinced now that a massacre did happen, it just wasn't in the square and mostly didn't involve students. Yet everyone here seems to want to say that there was no massacre at all, it was a government declaring martial law and putting down a violent rebellion with overwhelming force. I'm not sure that's much better, but whatever.
Thank you for conceding.
It's so funny that this person has kept going at this for nearly two days now while I've just been vibing at the karaoke bar the last two nights.
I'm just saying it wasn't the massacre of wholesome pro democracy protesters like every lib assumes. There were actual skirmishes outside the square but there were people actually murdering police and shit. There are more than enough sources in this thread for you to do your own investigation. As Mao said, no investigation, no right to speak.
Alright, well I read the ones linked above because they're credible enough to dismiss the massacre in Tiananmen square, but they're also saying things like residents were trying to stop the transport of troops and weapons into the square and that there definitely was a massacre in the surrounding area, just not in the square we use to reference it.
Is that a good enough investigation, or do you want to point me to a more credible source that actually explains what you think happened?
They fucking burned people alive dude that is why the military went in.
Cool, so the unruly mob was burning cops/military alive, and that's why they needed to send in the military.
try THAT in a small town
You're not very good at this
Alright, then who was being burned alive? Because I was under the impression it was the military/police. Nakoichi is saying that they burned people alive and that's why the military was sent in, but it was the military being burned alive, meaning they were already there.
Yeah I'll definitely waste my time explaining shit to someone being obtuse in order not to concede a point, that sounds like fun
Is burning a cop alive not a valid reason to quickly end the protest? Just trying to gauge what your stance is on immolation.
It is, but when hundreds end up dead as a result you can still be a little critical about it.
Welcome, comrade.
To clear up some confusion, the soldiers and police who were burned and lynched at Muxidi were unarmed. The government responded on June 3-4 with an armed crackdown. The armed crackdown also encountered firebombs, but @Nakoichi@hexbear.net was referring to the earlier attacks at Muxidi.
Correct.
China did not have specialized riot police at the time, it flatout wasn't ever necessary. The PLA was the only force existing with the manpower and equipment to handle the situation.
additional context for what Nakoichi said, the cops and soldiers killed were mostly (I say mostly as a hedge not because I have any evidence suggesting otherwise) unarmed. So please don't think the protesters were using violence against violence or anything, they were hunting down and brutally killing unarmed people.
Is police/military presence at a protest not a form of violence by way of intimidation and suppression? Even assuming none of them were armed, wouldn't their presence be a form of escalation?
And I'm surprised how empathetic and defensive you're being towards cops considering some of the other comments coming out of hexbear (1) (2) (3)
How is an unarmed person violence? Genuinely, what violence were they engaging in if a bunch of liberal students burned them alive without dying? Look up the pictures, watch the videos, Chinese police are very different than the ones we (assuming you’re in a country that’s any degree of westernized) are used to. Think the old times type of dude with bright sticks directing traffic.
Cops under capital =/= peace officers under socialism. I very much wish a terrible fate to American cops while also recognizing that that isn’t the same thing as a cop protecting the revolution. We are capable of nuance here.
Furthermore, even if I were to concede the “the presence of authority is violence” point (side note, are you a libertarian? Not trying to dunk, just wish to understand where you are coming from) the first violence was from the protestors (who were led by a woman that straight up said she wanted people to die for propaganda purposes, it’s on video, it’s on YouTube). So if we can agree that the secondary aggressor has lesser culpability then even then the “violence” of trying to keep the peace was self defense.
Oh, and do you know what the inciting incident was? The initial core of the student movement was opposing liberalization. The protest hijacked by the anti communist mentioned above (who fled to America btw, wanted her followers to die for cynical reasons yet considered herself too important).
Because that person is a cop or military member ordered there by the state specifically to oppose a protest.
I don't know what you think happened June 3rd and 4th 1989 in Beijing, but I'm lead to believe that plenty of civilians died.
Honestly, that's not the vibe I'm getting.
I'm actually not well versed on the topic as I'm sure you can tell, but are the people living under the revolution supposed to be able to have their complaints and desires heard? If not, who decides what the revolution's goals and priorities are, and how different is it really from the life I know in the US?
I've always been of the opinion that those with more power and resources should bear more of the responsibility in a conflict, but maybe that's a naive way of looking at things.
Yo, I’m not trying to doge but drunk af rn. Mid if we reconvene tomorrow?
Ayyy it's my weekend and I spent the last two nights getting plastered at karaoke night
I would be careful with this particular point (emphasis mine):
The article does not say where the "half" figure comes from or give evidence for soldier deaths being that high. The estimate is only mentioned briefly in passing.
Fair, this is me copying @Alaskaball@hexbear.net's old comment. He might have some thoughts on it, or agree with the criticism.