Because it’s what happened.
Comment on Absolutely nothing happened June 1989
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 1 week agoI don’t understand why you think it’s important to insist that nothing happened precisely inside Tiananmen Square, but you are perfectly happy for a massacre to have occurred in, say, Changan Avenue.
Anyway, to respond to the original challenge rather than argue your questionable morals.
A tank set ablaze by protesters burns in Tiananmen Square on June 3.
roguetrick@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 1 week ago
The other poster is trying to claim nothing bad happened inside Tiananmen Square itself. This is bullshit, and irrelevant.
alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
A handful of protesters killing cops and soldiers does not justify indiscriminate murder, particularly when you consider it the government’s responsibility to make sure protesters never get to the point that they feel the need to lynch and burn cops to achieve their aims. I didn’t think I needed to spell that out.
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I agree with this statement, but it’s very different from the “defence of the Chinese narrative, westerners are wrong” ship you sailed in on.
roguetrick@lemmy.world 1 week ago
The thing to keep in mind is there were a massive amount of people occupying the square. The key point is, the army did not massacre those people. They left after negotiations with the army. There was no gunning down the occupiers or crushing them with tanks. One person picked up in CIA/SIS Operation Yellowbird said that the tanks ran over tents with people sleeping inside them in the square, but that’s frankly dumb. The others that were actually there noted that it was a largely peaceful dispersal if you compare it to what happened before with the protesters fighting the police on the streets of Beijing and the soldiers indiscriminately opening fire on entire apartment blocks because someone threw a rock.
alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Nobody is happy that a massacre happened, there’s a huge difference between “10,000 unarmed protesters were murdered by tanks in cold blood because they wanted freedom, that’s how you know that China is a totalitarian police state that murders anyone who protests” and a more complex situation where ~300 protesters were killed after lynching a couple dozon cops and soldiers.
The Chinese government didn’t handle the situation correctly, even by their own evaluation, evidenced by the president of China resigning, and future protests being met with much more compromise, even in cases where the protesters were absolutely in the wrong, (such as anti-covid protesters or NIMBYs opposing the expansion of the shanghai maglev)
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 1 week ago
So we are now trying the, it’s only 300 people so it’s not a massacre argument. Seeing as you bring up the 10,000 number, let’s look at the source.
The Chinese army crackdown on the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests killed at least 10,000 people, according to newly released UK documents.
Combined with the above photos, this seems closer to the truth than the official 300 Chinese story.
alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
That’s not what I’m saying at all.
The photo of students filling the square is from days before the massacre, the square had been evacuated peacefully, as evidenced by the Tank Man video showing the tanks leaving the empty square, with no piles of burning bodies and “tank pie” as the UK alleges.
300 people getting killed by cops due to the government’s failure to compromise and meet their demands is a tragedy, you don’t need to make up shit about tanks murdering 10x more people and then liquefying their corpses.
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 1 week ago
If mods removed the above comment then I disagree with this censorship.
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 1 week ago
The million protesters were peaceful. The local Beijing army regiment were largely sympathetic to the protesters and were not aggressive.
many of the soldiers in the People’s Liberation Army did not follow the orders to enforce martial law that night. Some soldiers were emotionally conflicted and were hesitant to turn their weapons on the students. They believed that the PLA belonged to the people and that they were supposed to fight for them and not against them
I’m quoting from Wikipedia and British diplomatic cables. It’s you who is trying to whitewash history.