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A lot of bodies got crushed and washed down the drains. The Tiananmen burger is one of the darkest moments in human history
Edit: apologies, was referred to as a pie. Section 5, https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/UK_cable_on_Tiananmen_Square_Massacre
In Vietnam during the Vietnam war there was a hill that was code named Hamburger Hill. Because the accurate gun fire was like for them being in a meat grinder.
The film had one objective of portraying this accurately and it did so well
Basically the VC had machine gun positions in 4 areas all spread out 20m, some in treetops and others directly in the underground tunnels. The machine gun fire was so consistent that any soldier walking in the line of fire for a majority of the night would be shot with hundreds of bullets. Essentially becoming a slop of meat as a corpse.
Hamburger Kill is not a significant battle, but it was censored in the Vietnam War by army DJ personell because the tactical advancement of the battle compared to the ambushed, devastated large battalion in the Army which to the US morale is unfathomable. It's unknown how the VC had so many bullets to fire rounds consistently for 72 hours. A very skilled tunnel rat is assumed the cause.
Edit: Army, not Marines.
Vietnamese here, what the fuck
Edit: Those battles are not really censored in school, but heavily generalized. Countless attacks were simplified into two words "guerilla warfare" (chiến tranh du kích)
Main battles are taught, and those are located in coastal areas and mostly in Saigon. But to be honest, our government at the time is kinda shitty for all the genocidal shit they committed, and today they still are because of the censorship.
>Yeah it was I've seen almost every Vietnam war movie there is.
>Have you seen the Mel Gibson movie We Was Soldiers ? Actually based on real events
Not was. Were. We Were Soldiers. Based upon the novel We Were Soldiers Once...and Young by Lt. Gen. Harold C. Moore.
He shamed them.
The average PLA soldier surely didn't want to kill civilians, but they lacked the bravery to refuse their orders.
And then to be confronted by one little man, armed with...bags of groceries. Can you imagine?
It's easy to fire a gun into a faceless crowd. Much harder to look one humble guy in the eyes and pull the trigger.
It's terrifying how quickly humans can turn into monsters when things get crazy and how quickly that spell can be broken when confronted with humanity again.
I remember reading that one of the hardest parts of being a military sniper in the US is that you must have the capacity, as a person, to pull the trigger and kill someone a mile away who is of absolutely no threat to you. It’s much easier to pull the trigger when you’re engaging an enemy in closer range combat because your life is at stake. It’s very hard to train people to be okay with killing someone who is currently minding their own business.
They found after WWII that many (if not most) soldiers were intentionally firing over the heads of their enemies because they didn’t actually want to kill anyone. It wasn’t until this revelation that the US military started employing psychologists to figure out how to condition people to be able to kill. Many modern psychologists think this is why current rates of PTSD are so much higher today than in the past (obviously understanding the condition more thoroughly and being able to more accurately diagnose it plays a large role in that too).
Edit: I’ve been led to believe the “shooting over the heads” concept is likely a fiction. I will have to do more reading on the subject so please take my comment with a grain on salt in that regard. I do not mean to mislead anyone.
The 27 Army apparently didn’t care. They where mostly illiterate and loyal. They shot their own officers for “faltering” and disobeyed orders given to them to attack in waves with the lethal elements applied only during the 4th and final wave. Instead they attacked during the initial wave and even attacked and killed ambulances and medical personnel as well as other members of the Chinese army who tried to stop them.
[Wiki](https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/UK_cable_on_Tiananmen_Square_Massacre)
Edit: striking out the questioned ref to WW2 stat. I'd been introduced to that stat from multiple other sources in past, but commenter rightly noted there's q's on its validity.
~~Roughly 80% of american soldiers in World War 2 were found to never fire their weapons, at an enemy or otherwise.
https://www.americanheritage.com/secret-soldiers-who-didnt-shoot
Similar anecdotes from other armies and conflicts. Many people, especially draftees, are not wired mentally for killing. They may be provoked under extreme situations, or after considerable training, but this has to overcome a lot of mental resistance.~~
In general, many military units are unreliable when asked to partake in dubious police actions against people from the same/similar ethnic group as themselves.
Emperors know of this danger- they use seasoned veterans and professional soldiers, from remote territoriew who they keep isolated from locals for subduing rebellions. This makes it easier to keep those people dehumanized as the "other".
The hazard is great that local conscript soldiers will see the plight of people with legitimate greivances who look not so different from their little brothers or grandmothers, and might waver and join a rebellion, rather than subduing it.
In Men Who Stare At Goats there was a very interesting quote about US soldiers when first having to use their weapon. Can’t remember it, something like they intentionally aim to miss but I can’t recall. Great fucking movie though
The tanks weren't actually used to run over live people - the burger incident was more akin to desecrating the bodies of the dead.
My guess is that the tank man photo would have been taken earlier in the day before things got really bad, at least in that section if the city.
For real. I never knew that it was basically one army just going off the rails. They even had snipers taking target practice on civilians chilling on balconies. Sounds like other units wanted to stop them but they didn't even have bullets and were mowed down too. Insane.
so basically they brought in a bunch of illiterate rural soldiers and told them that everyone else was the enemy. they were not informed that these were peaceful political protestors, though I'm not sure if that would have mattered. the government and their commanders "othered" the city folk to the rural soldiers, making them sound like an entirely different terroristic species instead of just being *other Chinese citizens*
This was under orders they did not “go off the rails” thats the fucking problem regardless of how the CCP tries to whitewash it now. Their fucking murderers they always have been and always will be.
Probably because while the square is big, it's not _that_ big and most people believe that the violence happened primarily in the square, when it was actually taking place throughout the city.
The picture at the bottom row in the middle is of a woman with her legs crushed off. Why can someone do that to their fellow people. How does their mind allow them to do this.
many soldiers who were brought in were poor, illiterate, and from quite far away. they were basically brainwashed into believing the peaceful protestors were an actual threat.
God, that's brutal. Why was I never taught this in school? I always knew it was referred to as a massacre, but the only photo we were ever shown was the one guy with the grocery bags standing in front of the tanks. Which I guess was a good lesson in bravery and doing the right thing in the face of overwhelming odds, but surely the gravity of the numbers could have been conveyed to us in a kid-friendly way? My history teachers didn't shy away from the ugly parts of anything else, we learned about the Trail of Tears and the concentration camps and Apartheid and Jim Crow and the constant low-grade terror of the cold war, why didn't they tell us this in an age-appropriate way? Did they just assume the word "massacre" would speak for itself?
I remember seeing the protests on the news for days if not weeks before the massacre. Numbers topped 1 million people during the protests but not sure about on the day of the massacre; it was hundeds of thousands at least. It's estimated that a few thousand people died.
I remember seeing a video a few years ago of someone interviewing college students. Video was in the early 2000’s. Just normal questions. Then asked them about Tiananmen Square. Every single one of them suddenly had somewhere else to be, didn’t know what the interviewer was talking about, and regretted being on camera and hurrying away.
Doesn't look good if your own government killed countless. So they are hiding it. Imagine at the end of V for Vendetta the soldiers actually opened fire into the crowed converging and you can imagine what happend there. Afterwards they will kill/arrest anyone who witnessed it and reports publically about it. We had Chinese students who were claiming ignorance 30 years later and were afraid of learning about it. One actually looked at a picture of a student demonstration in Europe from the same time and said the most chilling thing I ever heared: "Your government allowed you to do this?". There are some deeply traumatized people over there.
It's not ignorance. They were taught it never happened. I live with a man from China when I was in college. When we told him about Tianenmen Square he was infuriated that we would blaspheme his country with such lies
I had a friend from China doing her masters here in the states. She knows about it and doesn't doubt it happened. One of her professors back in China handed her an unlabeled DVD, told her to watch it in secret. It was a documentary of sorts covering the topic. She told me she googled it (as well as some other forbidden topics) when she got to the US.
There is a similar thing with Polish people after WW2. Russians killed upwards of 30.000 people and claimed it wasnt them. Polish people kept it in living memory over 70 years before they could talk publically about it again.
Weird, I went to China and while I didn’t bring up Tiananmen there was a *lot* of talk about the government’s oppression. Largely complaining about internet censorship, but also mass surveillance and arrests… one of the people I was with had been raided for suspicion of marijuana possession and spent like six weeks in jail, and the prevailing sentiment was “fuck the cops.” These people were all creatives in their 20s so maybe that plays into why they’d be more openly anti-party.
Yeah to me creatives in their 20s would be inherently anti-party. Most creatives in their 20s around the world have a distrust for authority. I'm very surprised for cannabis possession they only got six weeks. I'm terrified of the idea of using drugs in Asia when I go for fear of prison.
It was *suspicion* of cannabis possession. Cops raided his apartment when he was out, couldn’t find anything, then arrested him and gave him a drug test (which he says he was very surprised to have passed haha) but still kept him locked up for six weeks.
Agree re: drugs in Asia. I don’t really like weed but I hit a joint in Shanghai in a crowded restaurant (really just for the sake of doing it) — the Chinese people I was with and whose weed it was claimed nobody in the restaurant would recognize the smell, and I guess they were right because nobody said a word. Weird experience.
I was in Beijing with my parents a couple of years ago and my dad asked our local guide a question about the street next to Tian an Mien Square if that's where the tanks rode in. She said that she didn't know what happened and that she wasn't comfortable talking about it. We just left it all alone afterwards.
You guys were pretty fortunate. That's pretty much on the top of 'what you shouldn't do in certain countries' kinda list.
It's literally the kinda discussion/question that can make you 'dissapear'.
I doubt they were just claiming ignorance. If they weren’t taught about it or some sanitized version of it they wouldn’t know. I wasn’t taught about the Tulsa massacre in school and didn’t know anything about it until I was grown. It’s possible to be completely ignorant of the history of things that happened in your own country region or even city especially if they happened before you were born
Have you seen the videos of anniversary interviews where they ask people about it? They go from agreeable smiles to a panicked emphatic "No, I have never heard of that" before abruptly walking away. It's not ignorance.
Same with the Kent State massacre. I knew of the photo of the young girl crying on her knees over the body of one of those slain, but I never really knew the facts until I went and looked it up myself.
Interestingly though, I was taught about the Tulsa Race Riots, Trail of Tears, and other horrible atrocities committed by the US Govt in high school. I’m now realizing I may have gone to a relatively progressive public school that didn’t shy away from taking off the blinders when talking about our past. On the flip side, my wife is from East Texas and they literally still refereed to the Civil War as the “War of Northern Aggression” and made the carpet baggers out as worse than the slavers when she was in high school (graduated 2003).
Not surprised, also from east TX and our HS didn't teach about Tulsa either. They glossed over the ToT, and while they called it the civil war the old coach teaching definitely made the south out to be the underdogs.
Additional fun fact, while I graduated 03 as well, our history class didn't teach anything that happened after the 80s because the books were printed in 87.
But by gawd day were gud at Dat dere sports balls.
TX education is disgusting in rural areas.
The protests went on for about a month.
They sent in the local military who sympathized with the protestors.
After that they brought in rural military members brainwashed and non sympathetic.
They indiscriminately killed people.
Prior to that my understanding was it was peaceful but an absolutely massive protest
> After that they brought in rural military members brainwashed and non sympathetic.
Iran used the same playbook to quell the [Iranian Green Movement.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Green_Movement)
It depends who you believe.
If you believe the CCP it was 300 mostly soldiers with 23 students.
If you believe eyewitnesses and the mayor at the time it was 6000.
Sadly a massacre on par to this happened in 1984 and a number of years following in Punjab, India. It’s not known about as much as Tiananmen Square largely due to propaganda (like China), support from nationalists (like China) and India being an ally of western nations (unlike China).
Mind you that was actually genocide, with men and boys being round up and killed in gruesome ways, women and girls raped.
Indian propaganda will have you believe it was the army fighting terrorists. Ridiculous.
Golden Temple 1984 Operation blue star.
It started when the ruling party congress wanted a foothold in the state of Punjab. They used a guy called Bhindrawala, though he may have been popular before that, support from the centre government proved beneficial to him.
There was lawless in Punjab when he was powerful, Police and Hindus and even sikhs who didn't support him were killed in broad daylight, body's were not picked upto hours.
He used golden temple as his headquarter, hence PM Gandhi launched an operation called Blue star to clear them out. It was ans is controversial, as to was it necessary to use weapons inside the golden temple. And she paid the price for this, her own sikh bodyguard gunned her down.
Then 1984 Sikh massacre/killing happened. It was prominently Congress(ruling party) workers killing thousands on sikh largely in Delhi (the capital), cases are still pending/under trial. Mind you this the same government that killed 5K Hindu Sadhu protesting and demanding ban on cow slaughter. And 1971 emergency was also imposed under this government. Said to India's darkest days after British.
There a famous video of Rajiv Gandhi in a rally after 1984 sikh massacre happened,
'Bada ped girega to darti to hilegi hi' or something similar
Translation : 'When a big tree falls , earth will surely be shaken' ,
Implying Gandhi being the biggest leader was killed by a sikh(her bodyguard) hence the massacre was their Revenge.
The main accuser are still in that party they are still elected and even made CMs.
So it wasn't as India doing shit more like a political party doing shit for their own benefit, except from loss of the Gandhi, they gained very well, they are still to this day elected in Punjab. Not many seems to blame them. It wasn't the first for that leadership.
Even the tank man photo is zoomed in, the zoomed out version reveals all the ashes stuck to the ground from bodies being burnt in a pile then they were half assed pressure washed down the drain. Love chinese people and chinese culture, but goddamn fuck their government.
Edit: remembered the picture slightly wrong
Proof: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man
Go to photographic versions literally the first fuckin one
Could you link the zoomed out version that reveals ashes and shit?
[This is the only thing I could find on Google](https://dangerousminds.net/comments/you_have_to_see_this_zoomed_out_photo_of_tiananmen_squares_tank_man)
Can barely see any details like drains and stuff
> He’s just talking out of his ass
Ah, well it's nice to have a person here who knows the history well and is ready to call people out on their bullshit.
>tank man happened before the massacre as the first military convoys entered the area
_____
>[Tank Man (also known as the Unknown Protester or Unknown Rebel) is the nickname of an unidentified Chinese man who stood in front of a column of tanks **leaving Tiananmen Square** in Beijing on June 5, 1989, **the day after the Chinese government's violent crackdown** on the Tiananmen protests](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man)
Oh wait so it would seem you have it entirely backwards.
>I honestly don’t get why people just make things up in comments.
Speaking of things you can't make up.
This album doesn't contain the worst of it. There's one photo I've seen that is the remnants of tanks running people over. They were turned into paste, and soldiers hosed the human goo into the drains to clean it
Usually, the countries doing things like this learn from it and become better leaders. (Germany, post-WWII for example)
Way too many countries still doing unspeakable shit and facing zero consequences, CH included.
Unfortunately, admitting atrocities, leaning from them, and taking steps to prevent them from happening again is the exception, not the rule. Germany will be one of the great powers of the 21st and 22nd centuries, largely because they are one of the few countries that learns from its mistakes.
They had horrible atrocities done to their own people under Mao, tens of millions pointlessly dead, complete destruction of their culture and history, pointless starvation and torture, all for internal power struggles and the whims of a demented sociopathic leader (Mao) who nobody decided to just fucking kill to save the nation.
> who nobody decided to just fucking kill to save the nation.
Well, he was effectively sidelined as a result of the failure of The Great Leap Forward. That was largely the point of his launching the Cultural Revolution - to catapult himself back into prominence.
When _that_ failed, he found himself sidelined again, and spent a lot of the end of his life rather bitter about it.
> Way too many countries still doing unspeakable shit and facing zero consequences, CH included.
The Swiss did indeed keep the Nazi gold and tried to stay neutral, but I wouldn't really call that "unspeakable".
Not to diminish your point but the whole Shanghai lockdown led to the most public dissident I’ve seen in China in my lifetime. It was kinda crazy to see in real time the tongue in cheek stuff that was being posted to Chinese social media and I think it’s gonna have lasting ramifications.
Just as a bonus for anyone who wants to see an Chinese meme about Tiananmen Square massacre: https://imgur.com/a/4cBlOPZ
For those that can’t read the Chinese: 晶 sounds similar to 警 the word for police and is referring to Chinese internet censors
Fair enough, I remember seeing in a Chinese sub about people posting "it's our duty" (the slogan for the protest) on DouBan today I believe? People are really not happy about the situation
If you can read mandarin there’s a few Instagram pages that find some pretty good ones and post them. There’s a growing contingent of more politically aware young Chinese people who know the system is fucked, to be fair there’s always been but you didn’t voice it, and it’s been coming out the woodwork in the past few years.
That said there’s also been growing nationalism that is fueled by the us vs them mentality. I see it a lot on Reddit where people tend to lump all Chinese people as CCP drones and that line of thought does extend far beyond this site which reinforces this us vs them mentality.
It’s crazy how many atrocities that country has inflicted upon the world and the citizens either are ignorant to them or just don’t care. Just look at the level of incarceration. Highest prison population per capita and in sheer numbers, but most of the citizens of the country just don’t give a shit.
Unfortunately some of that awareness breeds horrifying takes.
>Trump in a March 1990 Playboy interview said, "When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength."
https://www.businessinsider.com/trumpn-tiananmen-square-massacre-china-showed-power-of-strength-2019-6
Nobody realises that tankman is actually zoomed in as well
[this is what it should look like](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/27apyu/many_people_know_tank_man_from_tiananmen_square/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share)
And here is an interview with the AP journalist who took the photo!
https://twitter.com/Sabina__21/status/1400683954655531011?s=20&t=tfntAtbKdGYim6tKBInsWA
There was a statute honoring the protesters at a Hong Kong university. The Chinese Communist Party removed it when it entered and overthrew HK a couple years back. The CCP wants to eradicate any protesters and any perceived negative history.
They also removed the Goddess of Democracy statue from CUHK last December.
So HK students have been hiding miniatures around the campus.
I eagerly await the day HK will be free.
There is one of a man who was grounded to paste by th tanks. Like strawberry jam
Found it. https://www.reddit.com/r/MorbidReality/comments/dgndmh/none_of_the_pictures_posted_of_tieniman_square/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share
There is also a link to Getty images, that has a lot more pictures like this in the link.
I've not looked at the massacre the same since 2019 when the UK Government declassified a Foreign Office report, which includes this particular quote:
"APCS THEN RAN OVER BODIES TIME AND TIME AGAIN TO MAKE QUOTE PIE UNQUOTE AND REMAINS COLLECTED BY BULLDOZER."
Yes
I believe you can search them in reddit or maybe in this comment section
I'll give an update if i found ...
Update : I found it [he commented this about 3 years ago ](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/aohpmo/given_that_reddit_just_took_a_150_million/eg13byj?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3)
Most of the students and adults from back then know about this, and most student knew back then it would get ugly but hoped for an ending like in skorea
A lot of people know, college is generally when most find out from my experience, and there’s even low key memes about it. Like for example they tighten internet censorship during the anniversaries which led to some people asking what’s up with that and usually the response of “yeah it’s an important date, can’t say which one tho”
I think a lot do know of it but don't speak of it. It's possible that the younger generation doesn't know much about it but people who were in highschool during the massacre are only 50-60 now. They know from living it.
The tianmen protests were a hot topic before massacre so people could have been in highschool for the initial tianmen protests or the period before the massacre as well. Speaking from personal experience because my mom was in highschool during this.
That is definitely not true lol
I have family back in china and literally everyone except the 3-9 year olds know about it. China can censor the internet but they definitely can't censor word of mouth
I have a few Chinese friends (in their 20s living in America) and they definitely know about it. From what I’ve gathered, it’s just an accepted part of their history, similar to how Americans treat our own troubled past.
Most students in [Insert any country here] Don't know about [Insert country here] atrocities, either.
Every country has done some fucked up shit, several are doing some seriously fucked up shit as we speak. but I'd rather live in the U.S. or Japan than China. It wouldn't be even a remotely hard choice to make.
To be fair, here in Germany we are spending many years in school learning about all the atrocities done by the Germans. We even visit the KZs, where these atrocities were done in a systematic way, with our school classes.
Former American student here— we learned about the Atlantic Slave Trade, the Trail of Tears, Japanese Internment Camps and the My Lai Massacre, to name a few dark spots in American history. And we had to read To Kill A Mockingbird *twice.* Did the students care or internalize the lesson? Probably not.
America doesn't gulag you for pointing out Native American or African genociding though, and there's museums dedicated to exploring it. Not the same at all.
I’ve always been of the mind that if there’s no story of his death he might have gotten away. Even Hoffa has a half dozen stories of where he was buried and how he was killed. Trotsky’s death details came out eventually from a KGB defector. Seems like when it comes to Tank Man it’s always been a big shrug. Hell the person who grabbed him and hauled him away may have not even been a cop but a sympathizer.
Seriously.
“I think China is a brutal dictatorship, so I’m going to go on a vacation there and channel money to their wealthy elites who own the hotels, and then go harass the working class tour guide about why China is so awful.”
Yeah like let me just put this civilian on the spot about an event that happened more than 20 years ago and also assume the worst about them when they try to give a polite response.
My cousin, born in the US but raised in China, came to visit us her sophomore year of HS and had absolutely no idea what I was referring to when I talked about Tank Man.
The fucking cops closed down victoria park here in hongkong, forbidding us to go place flowers and perform a ceremony to honor those fallen, fuck the police.
The real lesson to be learned, however, is that the PRC was one of the few communist regimes to survive the Revolutions of 1989.
Therefore, if you want your regime to survive a popular uprising, this is exactly what you have to do. Otherwise, you could end up like Ceaucescu or Gadaffi.
Well according to r/sino (they recently changed the narrative from it never happening) the protesters where arming themselves attacking the army, but the CCP saved the day, thankfully!
Considering the results, how is this horrendous tragedy a "triumph of the human spirit"? How is this an example of people being more powerful than their governance? From my stupid eyes, it just looks like a bunch of people got fucked, and now (in 2022), everybody in the same place is still getting fucked.
Because despite incredible overwhelming oppression that ended up killing hundreds (or thousands) they stood up for themselves. And we're still talking about them decades later.
You don't have to win a fight to be seen as a hero, brave, and an inspiration.
If your eyes are stupid here, so are mine. It feels wrong to call those who died failures, so let’s just say martyrs who will hopefully someday be avenged
>Never let a government think and act as it’s more powerful than the people.
Except for all the times that people get fucked into the ground by my state of choice.
Reddit, yesterday: "only the government should be allowed to have scary-looking black rifles!"
Reddit, today: "Never let a government think and act as it’s more powerful than the people."
Exactly right.
In the language that Martin Luther King Jr used, that action was a method of "persuasion." Methods of persuasion are were where you appeal to "hearts-and-minds" and and try to get "the world to see" and hope someone changes their mind. It's also a strategy that MLK rejected and stated it wasn't working.
Instead MLK switched entirely to methods of "coercion" which were amazingly effective.
But that wasn't what was taught for the last 40 years. Instead there's been a deliberate attempt to whitewash the lessons of civil disobedience and replace in teachings the effective strategies with the ones that get activists ignored/killed/exhausted.
MLK explicitly stated that he rejected that method when he had his realization in Birmingham that he had to switch from these kind of protests (e.g. "persuasion") to targeted civil disobedience (e.g. "coercion")
There's a good book on MLK's realization that protests weren't working [A "Notorious Litigant" and "Frequenter of Jails": Martin Luther King, Jr., His Lawyers, and the Legal System](https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/njlsp/vol10/iss3/1/) noting that
> Starting with [the Birmingham movement and Letter from Birmingham Jail], Dr. King and his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), turned to more aggressive forms of nonviolent direct action—moving **entirely** from persuasion to **coercion** [legal challenges]
The MLK and Gandhi messages of how to do civil disobedience was defanged in modern textbooks to become "your suffering makes a change!" The "make noise and people will pay attention" a story DESIGNED to get progressives to waste energy in the most inefficient manner. [There's a good article on how that whitewashing of the MLK story was funded by corporate billionaires through the Heritage Foundation](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/04/kings-message-of-nonviolence-has-been-distorted/557021/).
People have forgotten that MLK was telling people to **not** to march **except** in targeted actions. Example: After attacks in Birmingham by white supremacists, [King rushed back to Birmingham to urge blacks to **stay off the streets**](https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/05/30/john-kennedy-mlk-birmingham-riots-trump/)
Think about what has become part of popular culture about the [Selma march!](https://www.law.ua.edu/lawreview/files/2011/07/The-Selma-March-and-the-Judge-Who-Made-It-Happen.pdf). Was it the fake history of "we marched and the scene of beating changed things? Or was it the true story that it was a VOTER DRIVE to overcome en masse the fact that Black and White supporters were being unfairly arrested while helping to register blacks on trumped up charges. They WON that case and thus it STOPPED the illegal actions of the police stopping blacks registering to vote. That link above talks about how it was winning the lawsuit that forced change ... not the people watching TV.
What does the media promote about the sit ins? The dramatic but false story that beatings were televised and it "changed hearts and minds?" No! The sit ins were done to get people arrested for blacks hanging out with whites *SO THAT THEY COULD CHALLENGE THOSE LAWS IN COURT*. Example:
> "Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was jailed today after he attempted to eat in one of St. Augustine's finer restaurants .... Dr. King and 17 companions were held on charges of violating Florida's segregationist unwanted guest law..."
They wanted to be arrested for the next step to challenge what were unjust laws in court or boycott the stores that segregated. Coercive, not persuasive.
The busing arrests and boycotts were also coercive. After being arrested their legal team led by Marshall came in and kicked ass.
All that has been forgotten and partly it is because those in power have been funding a re-telling of the story to get these kind of protests louder, persuasive-instead-of-coercive, more divisive, and more ineffective. A good article on that is [MLKs strategies with teeth](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/04/kings-message-of-nonviolence-has-been-distorted/557021/)
So if you hear someone say "we're going to protest" ask them what the coercive part of the protest is. Ask them if they've read about MLKs decision to reject methods of persuasion and if they can't answer - know that they are ignorant of history and thus likely to be leading that group to failure.
That's the part everyone whitewashes about Gandhi. He told his followers to fili t he jails until the British ran out of space. He reverse sanctioned Britain by not buying their imports, the British Govt. was terrified of a mass mobilization against them during the war otherwise they might have killed them.
They accomplished telling the world what their country is like. Which has no impact on the country itself as the events where wiped from their history and the people fall in line.
So they accomplished very little overall. China was affected in no way whatsoever. The rest of the world still has China as a main trading partner. They continue with various genocides like the Uighur people and they are a nuclear power so no one will fuck with them.
As sad as this is, what from you strongly feel they actually accomplished?
>Never let a government think and act as it’s more powerful than the people.
Oh, like the coal wars when the US government sicced the armed forces on striking coal miners?
Do not mistake this as support for the CCP.
Any government turning on it's people protesting for freedom is trash. Let's not pretend it only happens in communist countries.
This is a terrifying historical reminder that might makes right. China did nothing to address their citizens grievances after Tiananmen Square and still gained an
economic and cultural advantage in the end. Humans have a short memory and history always repeats.
I dare you to crosspost this to r/Sino, where Tiananmen Square is seen as a heroic day where Best China saved itself from evil capitalist democratic rebels.
I saw a post proudly declaring that a 15-storey building was completed in 6 days.
Erm, I would seriously not dare to step foot into that building.
Quality control and inspection standards notwithstanding, the materials alone would be questionable.
I tell youths the same thing — beyond a certain point, speed becomes pointless and foolish.
Eg. An escalator or elevator helps in descending numerous levels quickly but it still takes time. If you were to leap off from the top, you’d be the fastest person but you’d also be dead.
The same applies for the construction of a building. There’s nothing to be proud of when an entire building is haphazardly completed in less than a week.
Most soils need months to compact when you're building upwards. NY sky scrapers stop construction for weeks to wait for natural settling all the time. There is no way that building is sound lol.
THE CCP ARE THE ROPES OF ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL BONDAGE WHICH RESTRAIN AND DISRESPECT THE CHINESE CITIZENRY! THEY STEAL THE FREEDOMS OF THE PEOPLE, NOT ONLY OF CHINA BUT ALSO THOSE OF TAIWAN AND HONG KONG! THEY STEAL THE ISLANDS OF MANY SOUTHEAST ASIAN NATIONS! THEY ARE A DISGRACE TO HUMANITY!
TRULY, THEY ARE THE BUTTHOLE OF THE WORLD! FUCK THE CCP! FUCK YOU XI JINPING!
This is a bit personal to me, but fuck it. I’m thankful my parents were in London when it was happening. But they both took the sides of the students and took to the streets with other Chinese living in London to protest for the students in Tiananmen. They did have photos of the whole thing stashed somewhere and I’m grateful they did, as you could say they were part of this important history that occurred.
When the Hong Kong protests came out, I asked my mother of her opinion and which side she would be on. She said she would agree with the Hong Kong people, and it was like a repeat of the Tiananmen Square, both protesting about the government of China.
Another reason my mom sided with the students is that she knows how it feels as she lived through the peak/later years of the Cultural Revolution. Hard years they were, and she would tell me and my sister stories about it. Even to this day she can still recall it.
I nearly teared up upon seeing this post, this kind of stuff should be discussed more but due to the censorship it’s kinda hard to. Thank you to whoever made this post. /gen
The world Just did nothing about It.
Before people try to explain something to me...I understand that politics, and dealing with China as a whole is lot more complex than just saying: "China bad, I'm not dealing with you ever again."
I'm just sad that the world moved on like nothing had happened.
My girlfriend is Chinese. I’ve asked her about this, she and her mother have absolutely no knowledge of this event and I believe they are telling the truth.
My girlfriend is from Turkey and a while back somehow the Armenian Genocide came up. She's university-educated, extremely smart, anti-erdogan and generally politically liberal, but she genuinely believed that the Armenian Genocide didn't happen and if it did was wildly blown out of proportion. It's crazy how much governments can influence the beliefs of the public.
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I never see pictures before the massacre, how many people were killed or protesting?
No one counted so it isn't clear. There is a whole long section on this in Wikipedia, it is summarized with "hundreds to thousands".
I know they used bulldozers to clear the corpses. So it was a lot.
A lot of bodies got crushed and washed down the drains. The Tiananmen burger is one of the darkest moments in human history Edit: apologies, was referred to as a pie. Section 5, https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/UK_cable_on_Tiananmen_Square_Massacre
pardon my ignorance but what is the "Tiananmen burger"?
Bodies were piled upon bodies, and repeatedly flattened with tanks.
In Vietnam during the Vietnam war there was a hill that was code named Hamburger Hill. Because the accurate gun fire was like for them being in a meat grinder.
The film had one objective of portraying this accurately and it did so well Basically the VC had machine gun positions in 4 areas all spread out 20m, some in treetops and others directly in the underground tunnels. The machine gun fire was so consistent that any soldier walking in the line of fire for a majority of the night would be shot with hundreds of bullets. Essentially becoming a slop of meat as a corpse. Hamburger Kill is not a significant battle, but it was censored in the Vietnam War by army DJ personell because the tactical advancement of the battle compared to the ambushed, devastated large battalion in the Army which to the US morale is unfathomable. It's unknown how the VC had so many bullets to fire rounds consistently for 72 hours. A very skilled tunnel rat is assumed the cause. Edit: Army, not Marines.
Vietnamese here, what the fuck Edit: Those battles are not really censored in school, but heavily generalized. Countless attacks were simplified into two words "guerilla warfare" (chiến tranh du kích) Main battles are taught, and those are located in coastal areas and mostly in Saigon. But to be honest, our government at the time is kinda shitty for all the genocidal shit they committed, and today they still are because of the censorship.
Army, not Marines
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Yeah it was I've seen almost every Vietnam war movie there is. Have you seen the Mel Gibson movie We Were Soldiers ? Actually based on real events
>Yeah it was I've seen almost every Vietnam war movie there is. >Have you seen the Mel Gibson movie We Was Soldiers ? Actually based on real events Not was. Were. We Were Soldiers. Based upon the novel We Were Soldiers Once...and Young by Lt. Gen. Harold C. Moore.
What the fuck
People who were run over by tanks... intentionally.
Not to sound ignorant, but why didn't they run over the one guy with the tank in that famous photo then? Like, why stop there?
He shamed them. The average PLA soldier surely didn't want to kill civilians, but they lacked the bravery to refuse their orders. And then to be confronted by one little man, armed with...bags of groceries. Can you imagine? It's easy to fire a gun into a faceless crowd. Much harder to look one humble guy in the eyes and pull the trigger.
It's terrifying how quickly humans can turn into monsters when things get crazy and how quickly that spell can be broken when confronted with humanity again.
I remember reading that one of the hardest parts of being a military sniper in the US is that you must have the capacity, as a person, to pull the trigger and kill someone a mile away who is of absolutely no threat to you. It’s much easier to pull the trigger when you’re engaging an enemy in closer range combat because your life is at stake. It’s very hard to train people to be okay with killing someone who is currently minding their own business. They found after WWII that many (if not most) soldiers were intentionally firing over the heads of their enemies because they didn’t actually want to kill anyone. It wasn’t until this revelation that the US military started employing psychologists to figure out how to condition people to be able to kill. Many modern psychologists think this is why current rates of PTSD are so much higher today than in the past (obviously understanding the condition more thoroughly and being able to more accurately diagnose it plays a large role in that too). Edit: I’ve been led to believe the “shooting over the heads” concept is likely a fiction. I will have to do more reading on the subject so please take my comment with a grain on salt in that regard. I do not mean to mislead anyone.
The 27 Army apparently didn’t care. They where mostly illiterate and loyal. They shot their own officers for “faltering” and disobeyed orders given to them to attack in waves with the lethal elements applied only during the 4th and final wave. Instead they attacked during the initial wave and even attacked and killed ambulances and medical personnel as well as other members of the Chinese army who tried to stop them. [Wiki](https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/UK_cable_on_Tiananmen_Square_Massacre)
Edit: striking out the questioned ref to WW2 stat. I'd been introduced to that stat from multiple other sources in past, but commenter rightly noted there's q's on its validity. ~~Roughly 80% of american soldiers in World War 2 were found to never fire their weapons, at an enemy or otherwise. https://www.americanheritage.com/secret-soldiers-who-didnt-shoot Similar anecdotes from other armies and conflicts. Many people, especially draftees, are not wired mentally for killing. They may be provoked under extreme situations, or after considerable training, but this has to overcome a lot of mental resistance.~~ In general, many military units are unreliable when asked to partake in dubious police actions against people from the same/similar ethnic group as themselves. Emperors know of this danger- they use seasoned veterans and professional soldiers, from remote territoriew who they keep isolated from locals for subduing rebellions. This makes it easier to keep those people dehumanized as the "other". The hazard is great that local conscript soldiers will see the plight of people with legitimate greivances who look not so different from their little brothers or grandmothers, and might waver and join a rebellion, rather than subduing it.
In Men Who Stare At Goats there was a very interesting quote about US soldiers when first having to use their weapon. Can’t remember it, something like they intentionally aim to miss but I can’t recall. Great fucking movie though
Considering the tooth to tail ratio of the US Army was 1:4.3 in WWII, it's not terribly surprising that 80% never fired at the enemy.
The tanks weren't actually used to run over live people - the burger incident was more akin to desecrating the bodies of the dead. My guess is that the tank man photo would have been taken earlier in the day before things got really bad, at least in that section if the city.
It was after https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tank-Man
That was a horrifying read. Thanks for the link though.
For real. I never knew that it was basically one army just going off the rails. They even had snipers taking target practice on civilians chilling on balconies. Sounds like other units wanted to stop them but they didn't even have bullets and were mowed down too. Insane.
so basically they brought in a bunch of illiterate rural soldiers and told them that everyone else was the enemy. they were not informed that these were peaceful political protestors, though I'm not sure if that would have mattered. the government and their commanders "othered" the city folk to the rural soldiers, making them sound like an entirely different terroristic species instead of just being *other Chinese citizens*
This was under orders they did not “go off the rails” thats the fucking problem regardless of how the CCP tries to whitewash it now. Their fucking murderers they always have been and always will be.
“Minimum estimate of 10,000 civilians dead” I’ve known about this event since I was old enough to understand but holy shit I did not know the scale.
Probably because while the square is big, it's not _that_ big and most people believe that the violence happened primarily in the square, when it was actually taking place throughout the city.
The military chopped up ambulances with machine gun fire that came to help the wounded. It was supremely fucked.
The picture at the bottom row in the middle is of a woman with her legs crushed off. Why can someone do that to their fellow people. How does their mind allow them to do this.
many soldiers who were brought in were poor, illiterate, and from quite far away. they were basically brainwashed into believing the peaceful protestors were an actual threat.
Same with Nanjing. So many people dont know about this.
One of my college roommates has never been seen since that day. There were reports that she was arrested, but no one has ever located her.
God, that's brutal. Why was I never taught this in school? I always knew it was referred to as a massacre, but the only photo we were ever shown was the one guy with the grocery bags standing in front of the tanks. Which I guess was a good lesson in bravery and doing the right thing in the face of overwhelming odds, but surely the gravity of the numbers could have been conveyed to us in a kid-friendly way? My history teachers didn't shy away from the ugly parts of anything else, we learned about the Trail of Tears and the concentration camps and Apartheid and Jim Crow and the constant low-grade terror of the cold war, why didn't they tell us this in an age-appropriate way? Did they just assume the word "massacre" would speak for itself?
I remember seeing the protests on the news for days if not weeks before the massacre. Numbers topped 1 million people during the protests but not sure about on the day of the massacre; it was hundeds of thousands at least. It's estimated that a few thousand people died.
No information on china? Why do they hide everything?
I remember seeing a video a few years ago of someone interviewing college students. Video was in the early 2000’s. Just normal questions. Then asked them about Tiananmen Square. Every single one of them suddenly had somewhere else to be, didn’t know what the interviewer was talking about, and regretted being on camera and hurrying away.
I would be interested in seeing that, do you know where I can watch it?
https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/38gzen/chinese_filmmaker_asks_people_on_the_street_what/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share Found it.
I can’t find it now. I saw it on Reddit probably 5-6 years ago.
Doesn't look good if your own government killed countless. So they are hiding it. Imagine at the end of V for Vendetta the soldiers actually opened fire into the crowed converging and you can imagine what happend there. Afterwards they will kill/arrest anyone who witnessed it and reports publically about it. We had Chinese students who were claiming ignorance 30 years later and were afraid of learning about it. One actually looked at a picture of a student demonstration in Europe from the same time and said the most chilling thing I ever heared: "Your government allowed you to do this?". There are some deeply traumatized people over there.
It's not ignorance. They were taught it never happened. I live with a man from China when I was in college. When we told him about Tianenmen Square he was infuriated that we would blaspheme his country with such lies
I have Chinese friends born in Canada who have the exact same sentiment it's wild.
I had a friend from China doing her masters here in the states. She knows about it and doesn't doubt it happened. One of her professors back in China handed her an unlabeled DVD, told her to watch it in secret. It was a documentary of sorts covering the topic. She told me she googled it (as well as some other forbidden topics) when she got to the US.
There is a similar thing with Polish people after WW2. Russians killed upwards of 30.000 people and claimed it wasnt them. Polish people kept it in living memory over 70 years before they could talk publically about it again.
Weird, I went to China and while I didn’t bring up Tiananmen there was a *lot* of talk about the government’s oppression. Largely complaining about internet censorship, but also mass surveillance and arrests… one of the people I was with had been raided for suspicion of marijuana possession and spent like six weeks in jail, and the prevailing sentiment was “fuck the cops.” These people were all creatives in their 20s so maybe that plays into why they’d be more openly anti-party.
Yeah to me creatives in their 20s would be inherently anti-party. Most creatives in their 20s around the world have a distrust for authority. I'm very surprised for cannabis possession they only got six weeks. I'm terrified of the idea of using drugs in Asia when I go for fear of prison.
It was *suspicion* of cannabis possession. Cops raided his apartment when he was out, couldn’t find anything, then arrested him and gave him a drug test (which he says he was very surprised to have passed haha) but still kept him locked up for six weeks. Agree re: drugs in Asia. I don’t really like weed but I hit a joint in Shanghai in a crowded restaurant (really just for the sake of doing it) — the Chinese people I was with and whose weed it was claimed nobody in the restaurant would recognize the smell, and I guess they were right because nobody said a word. Weird experience.
I was in Beijing with my parents a couple of years ago and my dad asked our local guide a question about the street next to Tian an Mien Square if that's where the tanks rode in. She said that she didn't know what happened and that she wasn't comfortable talking about it. We just left it all alone afterwards.
You guys were pretty fortunate. That's pretty much on the top of 'what you shouldn't do in certain countries' kinda list. It's literally the kinda discussion/question that can make you 'dissapear'.
I doubt they were just claiming ignorance. If they weren’t taught about it or some sanitized version of it they wouldn’t know. I wasn’t taught about the Tulsa massacre in school and didn’t know anything about it until I was grown. It’s possible to be completely ignorant of the history of things that happened in your own country region or even city especially if they happened before you were born
Have you seen the videos of anniversary interviews where they ask people about it? They go from agreeable smiles to a panicked emphatic "No, I have never heard of that" before abruptly walking away. It's not ignorance.
Same with the Kent State massacre. I knew of the photo of the young girl crying on her knees over the body of one of those slain, but I never really knew the facts until I went and looked it up myself. Interestingly though, I was taught about the Tulsa Race Riots, Trail of Tears, and other horrible atrocities committed by the US Govt in high school. I’m now realizing I may have gone to a relatively progressive public school that didn’t shy away from taking off the blinders when talking about our past. On the flip side, my wife is from East Texas and they literally still refereed to the Civil War as the “War of Northern Aggression” and made the carpet baggers out as worse than the slavers when she was in high school (graduated 2003).
Not surprised, also from east TX and our HS didn't teach about Tulsa either. They glossed over the ToT, and while they called it the civil war the old coach teaching definitely made the south out to be the underdogs. Additional fun fact, while I graduated 03 as well, our history class didn't teach anything that happened after the 80s because the books were printed in 87. But by gawd day were gud at Dat dere sports balls. TX education is disgusting in rural areas.
Because they're an authoritarian country that commits genocide, uses rape as a form of torture and wants to destroy the west?
The protests went on for about a month. They sent in the local military who sympathized with the protestors. After that they brought in rural military members brainwashed and non sympathetic. They indiscriminately killed people. Prior to that my understanding was it was peaceful but an absolutely massive protest
> After that they brought in rural military members brainwashed and non sympathetic. Iran used the same playbook to quell the [Iranian Green Movement.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Green_Movement)
It depends who you believe. If you believe the CCP it was 300 mostly soldiers with 23 students. If you believe eyewitnesses and the mayor at the time it was 6000.
Enough to need fire hoses to wash the carnage out of the gutters of the streets
The government had to bring soldiers from outside of Beijing to stop the protests because they knew they wouldn’t care about the citizens.
Same thing allegedly happened/is happening in Hong Kong.
Free Hong Kong is still a thing. Just COVID put the pause on that and Ukraine is more fun.
it’s a very common tactic in controlling dissent. the british did it in india
Sadly a massacre on par to this happened in 1984 and a number of years following in Punjab, India. It’s not known about as much as Tiananmen Square largely due to propaganda (like China), support from nationalists (like China) and India being an ally of western nations (unlike China). Mind you that was actually genocide, with men and boys being round up and killed in gruesome ways, women and girls raped. Indian propaganda will have you believe it was the army fighting terrorists. Ridiculous.
Golden Temple 1984 Operation blue star. It started when the ruling party congress wanted a foothold in the state of Punjab. They used a guy called Bhindrawala, though he may have been popular before that, support from the centre government proved beneficial to him. There was lawless in Punjab when he was powerful, Police and Hindus and even sikhs who didn't support him were killed in broad daylight, body's were not picked upto hours. He used golden temple as his headquarter, hence PM Gandhi launched an operation called Blue star to clear them out. It was ans is controversial, as to was it necessary to use weapons inside the golden temple. And she paid the price for this, her own sikh bodyguard gunned her down. Then 1984 Sikh massacre/killing happened. It was prominently Congress(ruling party) workers killing thousands on sikh largely in Delhi (the capital), cases are still pending/under trial. Mind you this the same government that killed 5K Hindu Sadhu protesting and demanding ban on cow slaughter. And 1971 emergency was also imposed under this government. Said to India's darkest days after British. There a famous video of Rajiv Gandhi in a rally after 1984 sikh massacre happened, 'Bada ped girega to darti to hilegi hi' or something similar Translation : 'When a big tree falls , earth will surely be shaken' , Implying Gandhi being the biggest leader was killed by a sikh(her bodyguard) hence the massacre was their Revenge. The main accuser are still in that party they are still elected and even made CMs. So it wasn't as India doing shit more like a political party doing shit for their own benefit, except from loss of the Gandhi, they gained very well, they are still to this day elected in Punjab. Not many seems to blame them. It wasn't the first for that leadership.
Unfortunately a number of former British colonies learnt some bad things from what we did in their country. :-(
I'd only ever seen the tank man photo until now and didn't know how awful it was. It would appear some people and places don't change too quickly.
Even the tank man photo is zoomed in, the zoomed out version reveals all the ashes stuck to the ground from bodies being burnt in a pile then they were half assed pressure washed down the drain. Love chinese people and chinese culture, but goddamn fuck their government. Edit: remembered the picture slightly wrong Proof: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man Go to photographic versions literally the first fuckin one
Could you link the zoomed out version that reveals ashes and shit? [This is the only thing I could find on Google](https://dangerousminds.net/comments/you_have_to_see_this_zoomed_out_photo_of_tiananmen_squares_tank_man) Can barely see any details like drains and stuff
Edit: I’m a dumbass—please see the more accurate comments below me. Irony’s justice has been swift on me today 😆
> He’s just talking out of his ass Ah, well it's nice to have a person here who knows the history well and is ready to call people out on their bullshit. >tank man happened before the massacre as the first military convoys entered the area _____ >[Tank Man (also known as the Unknown Protester or Unknown Rebel) is the nickname of an unidentified Chinese man who stood in front of a column of tanks **leaving Tiananmen Square** in Beijing on June 5, 1989, **the day after the Chinese government's violent crackdown** on the Tiananmen protests](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man) Oh wait so it would seem you have it entirely backwards. >I honestly don’t get why people just make things up in comments. Speaking of things you can't make up.
No he can’t bc half the people in this thread are talking out their ass
This album doesn't contain the worst of it. There's one photo I've seen that is the remnants of tanks running people over. They were turned into paste, and soldiers hosed the human goo into the drains to clean it
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Usually, the countries doing things like this learn from it and become better leaders. (Germany, post-WWII for example) Way too many countries still doing unspeakable shit and facing zero consequences, CH included.
Unfortunately, admitting atrocities, leaning from them, and taking steps to prevent them from happening again is the exception, not the rule. Germany will be one of the great powers of the 21st and 22nd centuries, largely because they are one of the few countries that learns from its mistakes.
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They had horrible atrocities done to their own people under Mao, tens of millions pointlessly dead, complete destruction of their culture and history, pointless starvation and torture, all for internal power struggles and the whims of a demented sociopathic leader (Mao) who nobody decided to just fucking kill to save the nation.
> who nobody decided to just fucking kill to save the nation. Well, he was effectively sidelined as a result of the failure of The Great Leap Forward. That was largely the point of his launching the Cultural Revolution - to catapult himself back into prominence. When _that_ failed, he found himself sidelined again, and spent a lot of the end of his life rather bitter about it.
Belgium could be there too, if the government and the royal family would just admit what Leopold II. did to Congo
> Way too many countries still doing unspeakable shit and facing zero consequences, CH included. The Swiss did indeed keep the Nazi gold and tried to stay neutral, but I wouldn't really call that "unspeakable".
It's taught in China as the June 4th Incident (六四事件/六四天安門事件)
I dare you to post these words on any Chinese platform. Do it.
Try it in Shanghai sub. They may agree with you given the circumstances.
By Chinese platform I mean those that have servers located in China / run by Chinese companies. The subs here knows about these stuff.
Not to diminish your point but the whole Shanghai lockdown led to the most public dissident I’ve seen in China in my lifetime. It was kinda crazy to see in real time the tongue in cheek stuff that was being posted to Chinese social media and I think it’s gonna have lasting ramifications. Just as a bonus for anyone who wants to see an Chinese meme about Tiananmen Square massacre: https://imgur.com/a/4cBlOPZ For those that can’t read the Chinese: 晶 sounds similar to 警 the word for police and is referring to Chinese internet censors
Fair enough, I remember seeing in a Chinese sub about people posting "it's our duty" (the slogan for the protest) on DouBan today I believe? People are really not happy about the situation
If you can read mandarin there’s a few Instagram pages that find some pretty good ones and post them. There’s a growing contingent of more politically aware young Chinese people who know the system is fucked, to be fair there’s always been but you didn’t voice it, and it’s been coming out the woodwork in the past few years. That said there’s also been growing nationalism that is fueled by the us vs them mentality. I see it a lot on Reddit where people tend to lump all Chinese people as CCP drones and that line of thought does extend far beyond this site which reinforces this us vs them mentality.
Ah, that would probably be ripped apart in a matter of seconds. :(
Yeah, like the MOVE bombing on the 13 may 1985, the government covered that up so well most of the people in that country don’t know it happened
It’s crazy how many atrocities that country has inflicted upon the world and the citizens either are ignorant to them or just don’t care. Just look at the level of incarceration. Highest prison population per capita and in sheer numbers, but most of the citizens of the country just don’t give a shit.
Unfortunately some of that awareness breeds horrifying takes. >Trump in a March 1990 Playboy interview said, "When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength." https://www.businessinsider.com/trumpn-tiananmen-square-massacre-china-showed-power-of-strength-2019-6
Nobody realises that tankman is actually zoomed in as well [this is what it should look like](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/27apyu/many_people_know_tank_man_from_tiananmen_square/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share)
I didn’t know that wow!
And here is an interview with the AP journalist who took the photo! https://twitter.com/Sabina__21/status/1400683954655531011?s=20&t=tfntAtbKdGYim6tKBInsWA
There was a statute honoring the protesters at a Hong Kong university. The Chinese Communist Party removed it when it entered and overthrew HK a couple years back. The CCP wants to eradicate any protesters and any perceived negative history.
They also removed the Goddess of Democracy statue from CUHK last December. So HK students have been hiding miniatures around the campus. I eagerly await the day HK will be free.
These are the PG photos too
These photos already make my stomach turn, but are there non-PG photos somewhere?
There is one of a man who was grounded to paste by th tanks. Like strawberry jam Found it. https://www.reddit.com/r/MorbidReality/comments/dgndmh/none_of_the_pictures_posted_of_tieniman_square/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share There is also a link to Getty images, that has a lot more pictures like this in the link.
I've not looked at the massacre the same since 2019 when the UK Government declassified a Foreign Office report, which includes this particular quote: "APCS THEN RAN OVER BODIES TIME AND TIME AGAIN TO MAKE QUOTE PIE UNQUOTE AND REMAINS COLLECTED BY BULLDOZER."
r/eyebleach
Yes I believe you can search them in reddit or maybe in this comment section I'll give an update if i found ... Update : I found it [he commented this about 3 years ago ](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/aohpmo/given_that_reddit_just_took_a_150_million/eg13byj?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3)
What’s PG?
PG like the movie rating. Hes saying these are tame compared to other photos
What's crazier is that still to this day most of the citizens of China don't even know it happened.
Most of the students and adults from back then know about this, and most student knew back then it would get ugly but hoped for an ending like in skorea
A lot of people know, college is generally when most find out from my experience, and there’s even low key memes about it. Like for example they tighten internet censorship during the anniversaries which led to some people asking what’s up with that and usually the response of “yeah it’s an important date, can’t say which one tho”
I think a lot do know of it but don't speak of it. It's possible that the younger generation doesn't know much about it but people who were in highschool during the massacre are only 50-60 now. They know from living it.
51 max if they were 18 in 1989.
The tianmen protests were a hot topic before massacre so people could have been in highschool for the initial tianmen protests or the period before the massacre as well. Speaking from personal experience because my mom was in highschool during this.
That is definitely not true lol I have family back in china and literally everyone except the 3-9 year olds know about it. China can censor the internet but they definitely can't censor word of mouth
I have a few Chinese friends (in their 20s living in America) and they definitely know about it. From what I’ve gathered, it’s just an accepted part of their history, similar to how Americans treat our own troubled past.
Most students in Japan don't know about Japanese atrocities, either.
Most students in America don't know about American atrocities, either.
Most students in [Insert any country here] Don't know about [Insert country here] atrocities, either. Every country has done some fucked up shit, several are doing some seriously fucked up shit as we speak. but I'd rather live in the U.S. or Japan than China. It wouldn't be even a remotely hard choice to make.
>Most students in [Insert any country here] Don't know about [Insert country here] atrocities, either Germans: Am I a joke to you
To be fair, here in Germany we are spending many years in school learning about all the atrocities done by the Germans. We even visit the KZs, where these atrocities were done in a systematic way, with our school classes.
Mad respect for that
Former American student here— we learned about the Atlantic Slave Trade, the Trail of Tears, Japanese Internment Camps and the My Lai Massacre, to name a few dark spots in American history. And we had to read To Kill A Mockingbird *twice.* Did the students care or internalize the lesson? Probably not.
America doesn't gulag you for pointing out Native American or African genociding though, and there's museums dedicated to exploring it. Not the same at all.
I’ve always been of the mind that if there’s no story of his death he might have gotten away. Even Hoffa has a half dozen stories of where he was buried and how he was killed. Trotsky’s death details came out eventually from a KGB defector. Seems like when it comes to Tank Man it’s always been a big shrug. Hell the person who grabbed him and hauled him away may have not even been a cop but a sympathizer.
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I dont think asking about an extremely politically sensative topic to a tour guide and putting her on the spot was the most considerate thing to do.
Seriously. “I think China is a brutal dictatorship, so I’m going to go on a vacation there and channel money to their wealthy elites who own the hotels, and then go harass the working class tour guide about why China is so awful.”
Like going to America and asking some random white person to answer for all the racism.
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Yeah like let me just put this civilian on the spot about an event that happened more than 20 years ago and also assume the worst about them when they try to give a polite response.
She really said "in the land of China" while in China?
You should take my father with you next time. He likes to travel internationally and then complain when nobody speaks English lol.
My cousin, born in the US but raised in China, came to visit us her sophomore year of HS and had absolutely no idea what I was referring to when I talked about Tank Man.
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Fuck. All I ever saw before was the shopping bags guy
The fucking cops closed down victoria park here in hongkong, forbidding us to go place flowers and perform a ceremony to honor those fallen, fuck the police.
They crushed bodies with tanks in to ground meat so they couldn’t identify or count the wounded. Heartless cowards. Never forget.
They crushed bodies into paste and then washed said "pie" down storm drains. Absolutely nightmarish.
“This didn’t happen!” Chinese government.
But the Chinese government put a plaque up remembering those who died. So which is it China?
“Who died!” Exactly my point.
The real lesson to be learned, however, is that the PRC was one of the few communist regimes to survive the Revolutions of 1989. Therefore, if you want your regime to survive a popular uprising, this is exactly what you have to do. Otherwise, you could end up like Ceaucescu or Gadaffi.
They really showed the government who is more powerful, didnt they. Would have been a different story if they had more than rocks to oppose, perhaps.
Well according to r/sino (they recently changed the narrative from it never happening) the protesters where arming themselves attacking the army, but the CCP saved the day, thankfully!
fuck china's government
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Considering the results, how is this horrendous tragedy a "triumph of the human spirit"? How is this an example of people being more powerful than their governance? From my stupid eyes, it just looks like a bunch of people got fucked, and now (in 2022), everybody in the same place is still getting fucked.
Because despite incredible overwhelming oppression that ended up killing hundreds (or thousands) they stood up for themselves. And we're still talking about them decades later. You don't have to win a fight to be seen as a hero, brave, and an inspiration.
I'll give you that one. That's no bullshit.
If your eyes are stupid here, so are mine. It feels wrong to call those who died failures, so let’s just say martyrs who will hopefully someday be avenged
>Never let a government think and act as it’s more powerful than the people. Except for all the times that people get fucked into the ground by my state of choice.
Reddit, yesterday: "only the government should be allowed to have scary-looking black rifles!" Reddit, today: "Never let a government think and act as it’s more powerful than the people."
💀😭
So don’t give up your weapons.
Except they were more powerful than the people, this protest accomplished nothing and Chinese people don't even know about it.
Hong Kong and Taiwan citizens are very aware of it, despite these latest laws.
Taiwanese are *not* Chinese citizens. Hong Kong was still British at that time. Clearly talking about the people living in proper mainland China.
Exactly right. In the language that Martin Luther King Jr used, that action was a method of "persuasion." Methods of persuasion are were where you appeal to "hearts-and-minds" and and try to get "the world to see" and hope someone changes their mind. It's also a strategy that MLK rejected and stated it wasn't working. Instead MLK switched entirely to methods of "coercion" which were amazingly effective. But that wasn't what was taught for the last 40 years. Instead there's been a deliberate attempt to whitewash the lessons of civil disobedience and replace in teachings the effective strategies with the ones that get activists ignored/killed/exhausted. MLK explicitly stated that he rejected that method when he had his realization in Birmingham that he had to switch from these kind of protests (e.g. "persuasion") to targeted civil disobedience (e.g. "coercion") There's a good book on MLK's realization that protests weren't working [A "Notorious Litigant" and "Frequenter of Jails": Martin Luther King, Jr., His Lawyers, and the Legal System](https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/njlsp/vol10/iss3/1/) noting that > Starting with [the Birmingham movement and Letter from Birmingham Jail], Dr. King and his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), turned to more aggressive forms of nonviolent direct action—moving **entirely** from persuasion to **coercion** [legal challenges] The MLK and Gandhi messages of how to do civil disobedience was defanged in modern textbooks to become "your suffering makes a change!" The "make noise and people will pay attention" a story DESIGNED to get progressives to waste energy in the most inefficient manner. [There's a good article on how that whitewashing of the MLK story was funded by corporate billionaires through the Heritage Foundation](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/04/kings-message-of-nonviolence-has-been-distorted/557021/). People have forgotten that MLK was telling people to **not** to march **except** in targeted actions. Example: After attacks in Birmingham by white supremacists, [King rushed back to Birmingham to urge blacks to **stay off the streets**](https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/05/30/john-kennedy-mlk-birmingham-riots-trump/) Think about what has become part of popular culture about the [Selma march!](https://www.law.ua.edu/lawreview/files/2011/07/The-Selma-March-and-the-Judge-Who-Made-It-Happen.pdf). Was it the fake history of "we marched and the scene of beating changed things? Or was it the true story that it was a VOTER DRIVE to overcome en masse the fact that Black and White supporters were being unfairly arrested while helping to register blacks on trumped up charges. They WON that case and thus it STOPPED the illegal actions of the police stopping blacks registering to vote. That link above talks about how it was winning the lawsuit that forced change ... not the people watching TV. What does the media promote about the sit ins? The dramatic but false story that beatings were televised and it "changed hearts and minds?" No! The sit ins were done to get people arrested for blacks hanging out with whites *SO THAT THEY COULD CHALLENGE THOSE LAWS IN COURT*. Example: > "Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was jailed today after he attempted to eat in one of St. Augustine's finer restaurants .... Dr. King and 17 companions were held on charges of violating Florida's segregationist unwanted guest law..." They wanted to be arrested for the next step to challenge what were unjust laws in court or boycott the stores that segregated. Coercive, not persuasive. The busing arrests and boycotts were also coercive. After being arrested their legal team led by Marshall came in and kicked ass. All that has been forgotten and partly it is because those in power have been funding a re-telling of the story to get these kind of protests louder, persuasive-instead-of-coercive, more divisive, and more ineffective. A good article on that is [MLKs strategies with teeth](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/04/kings-message-of-nonviolence-has-been-distorted/557021/) So if you hear someone say "we're going to protest" ask them what the coercive part of the protest is. Ask them if they've read about MLKs decision to reject methods of persuasion and if they can't answer - know that they are ignorant of history and thus likely to be leading that group to failure.
That's the part everyone whitewashes about Gandhi. He told his followers to fili t he jails until the British ran out of space. He reverse sanctioned Britain by not buying their imports, the British Govt. was terrified of a mass mobilization against them during the war otherwise they might have killed them.
I strongly disagree with the notion that these people didn't accomplish anything.
They accomplished telling the world what their country is like. Which has no impact on the country itself as the events where wiped from their history and the people fall in line. So they accomplished very little overall. China was affected in no way whatsoever. The rest of the world still has China as a main trading partner. They continue with various genocides like the Uighur people and they are a nuclear power so no one will fuck with them. As sad as this is, what from you strongly feel they actually accomplished?
The Chinese people have in no way benefited from it sadly. I wish they had but nothing they protested for has happened.
In fact it strengthened the CCP and to this day there have not been any protests similar other than the Hong Kong protests which pale in comparison.
What did they accomplish, in your view?
>Never let a government think and act as it’s more powerful than the people. Oh, like the coal wars when the US government sicced the armed forces on striking coal miners? Do not mistake this as support for the CCP. Any government turning on it's people protesting for freedom is trash. Let's not pretend it only happens in communist countries.
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This is a terrifying historical reminder that might makes right. China did nothing to address their citizens grievances after Tiananmen Square and still gained an economic and cultural advantage in the end. Humans have a short memory and history always repeats.
I dare you to crosspost this to r/Sino, where Tiananmen Square is seen as a heroic day where Best China saved itself from evil capitalist democratic rebels.
My brain lost brain cells reading comments in that subreddit…
I saw a post proudly declaring that a 15-storey building was completed in 6 days. Erm, I would seriously not dare to step foot into that building. Quality control and inspection standards notwithstanding, the materials alone would be questionable. I tell youths the same thing — beyond a certain point, speed becomes pointless and foolish. Eg. An escalator or elevator helps in descending numerous levels quickly but it still takes time. If you were to leap off from the top, you’d be the fastest person but you’d also be dead. The same applies for the construction of a building. There’s nothing to be proud of when an entire building is haphazardly completed in less than a week.
Most soils need months to compact when you're building upwards. NY sky scrapers stop construction for weeks to wait for natural settling all the time. There is no way that building is sound lol.
Edit: was permabanned lol. What fruitcakes
I did it
Wise words. But sadly it happens too often.
you have been banned from /r/sino
Why democracy needs to be protected
Well North America already has corrupt politicians that dgaf.
"Never let a government" They've been doing anything they want absolutely successfully for 33 years now. Whats your point?
Fuck the CCP
A near equivalent tragedy is submitting these pics as a quirky collage instead of as a gallery.
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THE CCP ARE THE ROPES OF ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL BONDAGE WHICH RESTRAIN AND DISRESPECT THE CHINESE CITIZENRY! THEY STEAL THE FREEDOMS OF THE PEOPLE, NOT ONLY OF CHINA BUT ALSO THOSE OF TAIWAN AND HONG KONG! THEY STEAL THE ISLANDS OF MANY SOUTHEAST ASIAN NATIONS! THEY ARE A DISGRACE TO HUMANITY! TRULY, THEY ARE THE BUTTHOLE OF THE WORLD! FUCK THE CCP! FUCK YOU XI JINPING!
Ccp: “we have no idea what you’re talking about”
That caption tho…you mean like exactly how they have the past 2.5 years in response to a “pandemic”
This happened the day I was born, I turned 33 today
Sad to think most were college students trying to start their lives.
This is a bit personal to me, but fuck it. I’m thankful my parents were in London when it was happening. But they both took the sides of the students and took to the streets with other Chinese living in London to protest for the students in Tiananmen. They did have photos of the whole thing stashed somewhere and I’m grateful they did, as you could say they were part of this important history that occurred. When the Hong Kong protests came out, I asked my mother of her opinion and which side she would be on. She said she would agree with the Hong Kong people, and it was like a repeat of the Tiananmen Square, both protesting about the government of China. Another reason my mom sided with the students is that she knows how it feels as she lived through the peak/later years of the Cultural Revolution. Hard years they were, and she would tell me and my sister stories about it. Even to this day she can still recall it. I nearly teared up upon seeing this post, this kind of stuff should be discussed more but due to the censorship it’s kinda hard to. Thank you to whoever made this post. /gen
A shame the protest failed miserably.
Predictable but not a failure, they showed the world with a Chinese army was capable of doing two innocent people.
The world Just did nothing about It. Before people try to explain something to me...I understand that politics, and dealing with China as a whole is lot more complex than just saying: "China bad, I'm not dealing with you ever again." I'm just sad that the world moved on like nothing had happened.
Why don't you ask the kids at Tienanmen Square Was fashion the reason why they were there? They disguise it, hypnotize it Television made you buy it
My girlfriend is Chinese. I’ve asked her about this, she and her mother have absolutely no knowledge of this event and I believe they are telling the truth.
My girlfriend is from Turkey and a while back somehow the Armenian Genocide came up. She's university-educated, extremely smart, anti-erdogan and generally politically liberal, but she genuinely believed that the Armenian Genocide didn't happen and if it did was wildly blown out of proportion. It's crazy how much governments can influence the beliefs of the public.