Absolutely nothing happened June 1989

try posting it on grad, they'll love it
- Or ml. Or Hexbear.
  Why can't we have a leftist instance that doesn't suck CCP dick?
  
  Blåhaj is here! I don't recall seeing a tankie with a blåhaj account, and also we have personalities outside of politics.
  
  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.
  
  db0 is pretty neutral while being intentionally left.
  
  most communities on ml are fine tho, also I got banned on hexbear because I called the CPC (their official name) CCP
  
  Solarpunk is one. I guess my instance is leftist too, however it is very tiny.
  
  From what I know, dbzer0 is libertarian left and therefore not tankie
  
  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.
  
  We do. DB0 and Solarpunk.
  
  Genuinely there are a lot of people that would like that. Maybe start with a community first before an entire instance.
- Yeah .ml will be enough
- A grad is being sent to your location

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.
  
  That is hilariously in-line with the joke at play
- Hexbear will flood this post if they find it
  
  Hexbear
  Post on .world
  ...
- I use these posts to tag people, so I can disregard and ridicule them in different posts.
  
  It was a relief when I started tagging them since I realised it's just a small handful of people that are usually all over the comments so it looks like there's way more of them.
  
  Instead of blocking them I should start tagging them so I can still clown
- Yup.
  https://sh.itjust.works/comment/14370697
  https://sh.itjust.works/comment/14370697

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?
  
  Whatabwhat? Do you think that's what I don't understand? No, I get it. It's just that, if you are an US American defending your government, I couldn't care less about your opinion on matters of other nations.
- Americans will post a meme about Tianimen Square while eating a Chiquita banana.
  
  Americans can, and will, openly discuss this stuff, and think badly of their government for it, and won't get in trouble with the government for doing so publicly.
  
  And making Dole pineapple upside-down cake with Imperial Sugar.
- maybe you should post it as a separate meme since people are crying about whataboutism. I hadn't heard of this one actually.
  
  I don't think I can do memes of crimes against humanity, but thank you for the suggestion. Getting people to know, or be more aware, about the hideous activities of entities like the CIA is enough for me.
- 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.

- 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.

- Very legit sources. Everyone I know goes to prolewiki and johnmenadue.com lol
  
  Well I can't exactly quote CNN for you to show you the counter to Western propaganda, can I? Tell me a "legit source" that isn't skewed by Western media.
- I'm sorry, I'm afraid that if I do not use an illegal VPN, my government will punish me for clicking those links
  /s
  
  What a funny way to ignore information that counters your viewpoints.
- If only there were extensive images and videos of what happened.
  Oh wait, there's extremely graphic ones. (NSFL)
  
  That video literally shows the people that're rioting and throwing Molotovs at military vehicles. This is also outside the square. Tankman is also the day before the riots and the tanks are leaving the square, not going into it.

Why are people so laser-focused on this one event that happened over three decades ago?
- Are people in China or on Chinese social media allowed to talk about it today?
  
  Being able to talk about the genocide of the Palestinian people doesn't seem to change anything. Turns out freedom of speech is happily granted when your speech is powerless.
- Are you for real? Should we forget the people that are silenced in this world?
  
  No, just wondering why the obsession with this one event. This particular event gets brought up more on lemmy.world than perhaps any other historical event. I would ask the same if people kept bringing up the great molasses flood and cracking the same old "slow as molasses" joke.
- Because there is a real effort by a government to prevent people millions of people from remembering.
- 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.

- "After several weeks of standoffs and violent confrontations between the army and demonstrators left many on both sides severely injured, a meeting held among the CCP's top leadership on 1 June concluded with a decision to clear the square.[15][13][14] The troops advanced into central parts of Beijing on the city's major thoroughfares in the early morning hours of 4 June and engaged in bloody clashes with demonstrators attempting to block them, in which many people – demonstrators, bystanders, and soldiers – were killed. Estimates of the death toll vary from several hundred to several thousand, with thousands more wounded.[16][17][18][19][20][21]"
  When you go to Wikipedia, click on those numbers in the brackets
  
  As I said, there were clashes at major thoroughfares surrounding the square, there was not tanks gunning down masses of protesters inside the square.
- Only when someone denies the massacre do I link to these horrific NSFL photos.
  
  You do know that the pictures support what he said right? There's pictures of dead soldiers because they weren't given ammo when marching into the city. Once they started getting killed, they gave them ammo and they just started shooting everybody. Before then the protesters smashed their heads, stripped them, and burned them.
  The ones who stayed in the square were mostly the peaceful hunger strikers and not the fighters so the square itself was cleared without much trouble compared to the march into the city.
- ACAB 😄🖕
- Like clockwork you're here to deny the many atrocities of authoritarian despots.
  What do you even get out of constantly getting your metaphoric-cock beaten into the dirt 2 dozen times a day?
  
  What exactly do you think happened, and what do you think I am claiming happened?
- Your comment after being imported into China:
  ~~The chinese narrative isn’t that~~ nothing happened ~~, it’s that there was a battle outside the square, including protesters lynching and burning cops and cops gunning down unarmed protesters on bikes from their trucks~~. This is corroborated by videos and pictures.
  The western narrative ~~of tanks going into the square and gunning down tens of thousands of protesters (after getting delayed by tank man)~~ is blatantly false, ~~as you can see in the uncut tankman video pans over to show the square the tanks are leaving was empty~~ except for some bikes.
- https://youtu.be/kMKvxJ-Js3A
- Fuck you.
- No nuance, only china bad evil commees who kill their own people because they hate freedom.
- You're never going to convert sinophobes. It's like trying to convert white supremacists, except even more unlikely to work since there is zero pressure to not be sinophobic in society.
  
  Criticizing a regime isn't racism against the people living under that regime.
  
  Imagine knowing what words mean.
  At this point I should ask for a delicious cookie recipe...
  
  This is no different from calling critics of Israel antisemites even though plenty of us Jews do it too.
  There are a huge number of Chinese people not living in China who are very open about their contempt for Xi's regime.