Its an Israhell psyop, do you not see the clear and obvious JewStar RIGHT THERE in the center left? WAKE UP CAPITALISTS

I mean, even if it is, 200 people is a bloody massacre. If that’s the charitable figure, it’s still fucking awful.

The lower end of that range is, yeah. But the Chinese Red Cross estimate of 2,600 was retracted and was the highest estimate. It’s possible, but unlikely, that it was as many as 1,000 based on the number of university students who left June 4. Which leaves me with the lower end estimates. I’m not going to disregard the original PLA estimate, from people who were actually there, just because it is a Chinese estimate.

The exact number of dead doesn’t really matter except to paint the government and army as barbaric. Killing protestors is objectively bad and wrong no matter the number. I think the handling of the protesters was inept, overly violent, and just overall a clusterfuck that cause many civilians and military personnel to die. I think that was caused largely by the perception by the government that the protesters were co-opted in some way by the West (US intelligence) and the government’s desire to use a strong hand to quell dissent.

The number of dead doesn’t change any of that. But it’s also unfair to say the government just rushed in there and massacred people. Military personnel there as cops, basically (understandable since Tianmen is directly outside the forbidden city palace complex, like if protesters were right outside the White House or Lincoln Memorial - there are going to be military police there), were killed before the army rolled in. Peaceful protesters negotiated safe exit from the square. The government tried to disperse the crowd peacefully first. The government didn’t immediately try to quash dissent violently.

None of that gets the party and army off the hook, but it paints it in a different light than the typical propagandized Western or Chinese portrayal of events.

I mean, they did say that the military responded in a disproportionate way. We’re all in agreement that tanks against protesters is bad.

The “thousands or hundreds” isn’t a defence of the massacre, but an indictment of the reports that somehow felt the need to inflate numbers, as if the original ones weren’t bad enough. That’s disingenuous and calls the general credibility into question.

Multiple things can be true at once:

1. Applying military force against protesters is bad.
2. Misrepresenting facts is bad.
3. Attempting to counter one misrepresentation with another misrepresentation is bad.

The point of the comment you replied to is that we should treat the atrocity with the serious honesty it warrants.

Definitely. It was still an atrocity. No two ways about it. It’s just also an atrocity that the West has grabbed onto to push a broader propagandized anti-communist narrative.

Both of those things are true. I am a socialist and I have zero problem saying that Tiananmen, based on my understanding of the historical accounts I’ve read, was an atrocity and a very bad mishandling of events by the army/government.

Tulsa?

I personally count the Banana’s massacre, which resulted in an estimated 2000 protesters dead. While the shooting was made by Colombian soldiers instead of US soldiers, it was a direct result of the US Goverment’s threat of invading Colombia if the protest done by United Fruit Company workers was not inmediately put to a stop.

EDIT: I think the above comment is a misleading. A better description of the massacre is that it was done to serve US economical interests, aided by US’s military pressure (like US officials asking US army forces to send a warship into the zone) and a possible risk of invasion from US into Colombia’s mainland. I also think a possibly more accurate number of protestors dead is ~1500. I do stand on the opinion that the massacre was a direct consequence of US Government, simply perpetrated by Colombian soldiers.

Yeah, plenty of massacres abroad where the US is at least partially responsible for, but basically none at home. Makes me wonder why?

I suspect generally the US doesn’t do massacres because they don’t need to be afraid of regime change. Their internal propaganda is incredibly strong. We’ve recently seen how foreign agitation propaganda (Russian online trolls, but also Bin-laden’s destabilization strategy) completely changed the political landscape. And even in today’s times of extreme crisis we still see not an inkling of any kind of revolution or regime change on the horizon. Since there is no real threat, there is no overreaction to a threat response, unlike in countries that are actively and publicly being targeted for regime change.

Maybe this will change after the 2026 midterms, but I doubt it.

The US is also very proactive and skilled when it comes to infiltrating and dispersing any groups that could become threats to their state power.

And the mainstream media can spin protests however the government wants to - but only as long as there is no massacre.

Basically there are no massacres because protests are harmless and it would be counter productive, unlike protests in other countries.

You fuckers do that mostly overseas and call it “that school was definitely an evil lair full of satan and aids”

Here you have a full wikipedia page of them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Massacres_committed_by_the_United_States

It is by no means full.

Internally, on your own soil, you do have few famous ones I can name from memory like Tulsa and Orangeburg, and I am too disgusted to even try to google it and find more.

To be fair (so I don’t shit on USA only in this message), I can name 1 French massacre from the 60s against Algerian protesters and it was over 200 dead.

I don’t think we had any more in the EU, but I’m willing to be schooled.

Two things can be bad at the same time.

Which last time?

Not a lot of domestic mass casualty events in modern times, especially with death tolls above 200. That’s true. But there are some truly horrific ones in more turbulent times in US history, particularly when the US was a younger country and cops didn’thave riot dispersal gear/less-lethal ammo. You have to remember that China as it exists today didn’t really exist until 1949 at the end of the civil war.

In the US there’s lots of historic ones. Many of which happened closer to our civil war (in the following decades) - wounded knee, atlanta race riots, tulsa massacre, etc. Hundreds died in all those and were extremely fucked up.

Then there’s more modern ones like the LA race riots in 1992 which killed like 60+ people minimum. Detroit race riots in the 1960s with a death toll of ~50 iirc. Like 40 people died in the BLM protests just a few years ago. Fatalities are largely lower due to cops using less-lethal weaponry.

It’s a different historical and tech context. I’d say they aren’t directly comparable. But yeah the US gov’t hasn’t killed 200-500 protesters in a single event within the last 100 years afaik.

Do you think soldiers have some sort of immortality? Don’t underestimate the power of the masses.

There were like military cops there first. Just to make sure things didn’t get out of hand. There are actually historic photos of civilians fighting with them - I posted one here from the new yorker that just shows protesters surrounding and pulling on cops, but there were some other more violent ones I had seen previously. They aren’t super well-armed soldiers, just dudes in military dress outfits.

It’s sort of reminiscent of the attacks on cops in the Jan 6 insurrection, but more cops died and they were not armed with riot gear and crowd control weaponry.

Things were well out of hand before the army rolled in. This does not excuse them from killing hundreds of civilians, but as I’ve said elsewhere in this thread, it paints a different picture of events.

Modern scholars estimate 700 to 2,600 dead in or around the square during the massacre.

If they had been transphobic they’d probably have gotten an invitation into the development team.

Here in Sweden we definitely didn’t give much room for the horrible stuff we got up to during WWII.

We like to pretend that we were neutral, but we were rather on board with the Nazi philosophies in a lot of ways. Racial biology was a big thing, and we did experiment on our native population.

Seriously I think you just earned another five dessalines dollars!

Getting closer to retirement.

Oh. So your brain is that cooked. Wow.