This shit has seriously gone on too long. People who continue to cling to the “10,000 dead crushed by tanks hosed i to the gutter” bs are cranks. It’s jews control the banks, chemtrails, the earth is flat, the moon isn’t real level of crank shit and unless you’re feeling very indulgent and someone is asking in good faith it can be dismissed as equally serious to that kind of crank shit.
My favourite bit is when Wikipedia itself is like “the 10,000 claim was made by one dude who basically instantly retracted it and claimed the still unplausibly high number of 2,000”.
Also, the Tank Man photographer talks about the protestors throwing molotov cocktails and beating police officers to death.
And the whole “China pretends it didn’t happen”…they have official death estimates. 300 people. The US have their own estimate. 900 people. But no matter the number, it was much fewer than the protest leaders had hoped for.
To quote one of the protest leaders “What we actually are hoping for is bloodshed, the moment when the government is ready to brazenly butcher the people. Only when the Square is awash with blood will the people of China open their eyes” - Chai Ling
By the way, that person is alive and well running a firm that fires people for not praying at work.
the protestors
It needs to be made clear; The insurgents were a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the student movement, a few hundred, maybe a few thousand people out of hundreds of thousands of activists across the country. They were not at all representative of the '89 protest movement. Chai Ling wasn’t a protest leader, she was just some CIA backed asshole and she and her goons bullied their way up to the PA and took it over. They did not represent the student movement or Tianamen Square. It must be stressed that the movement was mostly in opposition to Dengist market liberalization. Folks wanted to preserve communism against marketization of the economy. A secondary factor was a desire to create a more permissive social environment that reflected communist views of gender equality and allowed young people more freedom to express themsevles. Again, not because of government repression, but because they viewed contemporary chinese culture as very staid and conservative in a way that was not in line with their communist values.
It’s always funny to fire back at Redditors that the vast majority of the protestors weren’t mad about communism, they were mad that things weren’t communist enough.
It’s truth or falsehood frankly does not matter to a lot of people who believe this. It confirms their world view and emotionally feels truer than the actual events themselves, which are well documented if they should care to know.
Lol and the concept of brainwashing was invented by the US because they needed to explain why US troops in Korea were defecting, and why defectors and captured soldiers were explaining the war crimes the US committed. “They were brainwashed!”
@daveywaveyboy@feddit.nl care to elaborate how this is “racist and batshit”?
dutch redditor takes time away from busy blackface schedule to call out racism
almost spit beer on my keyboard.
:point-and-laugh-1::point-and-laugh-2:
The only fun part about being a mod is seeing some of the asinine reports people make about hexbear posts.
Also going mad with power and forcing everyone to be trans, don’t forget about that
:no-no-no-wait-wait-wait:
I’m being harrased for bein a :cissues: minority over here :cri:
I’m going to complain about you :t34: :hexbear-trans: to my :lemmitor: friends for being such meanies :rage-cry:
spoiler
also why the fuck does disco basket have a similar face to me wtf
YOU WILL TRANS YOU ARE GENDER
If anyone wants a good example of this brainworm freshly-regurgitated by our .World friends: https://lemmy.world/comment/10437862
Tankies, famous for pretending Tank Man media exists only in the form of one picture. Also one of them says “Peking” for some fucking reason.
Oh god this entire thread is full of gems
These people are not socialists. It’s all just right wing agitprop. It’s extremely obvious.
I assume hexbear is just the russian troll factory.
I can read Russian and I sometimes read Russian media and it uses almost exactly the same topics for their people. There is a new one that they started to repeat recently and it’s that Zelensky is an illegitimate president, because his term has ened.
It’s weird that those forums are in English, reading the insane takes and rhetoric. I also noticed many of the accounts are just prolific posters, making the community seem small to me. Also saw an account with a trans flag, which is surprising they would accommodate such a person or such a person would have those weird views on lemmygrad.
The utility is that they use hexbear and .ml as intro exercises before they promote the trolls to Facebook or reddit.
Last part is true and even more insane/sad because these people are all terminally online gossip mongers that Pol Pot would have immediately executed.
You own a computer? You don’t work in the fields? You wear glasses?
Yep, literally executed.
Zelensky is an illegitimate president, because his term has ened.
Isn’t that like… The basics of how a democratic mandate works?
Not that I’ve ever seen it as a topic here but still. If Rishi Sunak continues as
presidentPM beyond his term time I’m calling him illegitimate. In fact I’m calling him illegitimate now and forever because we literally never got to vote for the fuck. He has/had no mandate.EDIT: Fuck me libs jump to the dumbest conclusions over the smallest shit.
The only famous video/image 99.9% of all Americans see of it is tank man NOT getting run over by a tank, and even then so many of them will be like “um yeah you don’t want to know what happens after the video cuts off” but the full video DOESNT CUT OFF AND HE JUST WALKS AWAY UNHARMED.
Meanwhile in America if you google “NYPD running over protestors” your results will be like:
-NYPD running over protestors May 2024
-NYPD running over protestors February 2024
-NYPD running over protestors December 2023
-NYPD running over protestors October 2023
-NYPD running over protestors March 2023
And so on and so on, and that’s just in one city
The only famous video/image 99.9% of all Americans see of it is tank man NOT getting run over by a tank, and even then so many of them will be like “um yeah you don’t want to know what happens after the video cuts off” but the full video DOESNT CUT OFF AND HE JUST WALKS AWAY UNHARMED.
The ones that have seen the full thing all say “but then he was disappeared afterwards” with no evidence and everyone just totally believes it because they just believe that’s what China does.
This is my go to for the power of propaganda but it only works in person. It’s “Do you know what happened to the Tank Man at Tienanman Square?” People almost always answer that he was run over. The response is great because while we don’t know exactly what happened to him we know one thing for certain; he was not run over. That’s the one thing we can say for sure and its the one thing they believe happened through the power of propaganda.
EV_Dabs supercut link anyone? I know the original uploads got deleted, but I though someone reuploaded them under a new account.
Pretty much everything people believe about it isn’t true, but nobody cares because it’s aimed at bad country
I’m still shocked they actually admitted Saddam’s shredder wasn’t real.
The fact that most Americans just assume tank man got run over and killed even after seeing part of the video of it is what genuinely drives me insane. Like the rest of the video is readily available bro you can see him walk away
That baffles me, because even when I was a turbolib I realized the whole point was that one guy was holding up the tanks. If they had just run him over, why would they have stopped?
As a kid, I figured he singlehandedly stopped the tanks from doing something terrible.
Saddam’s shredder?!?!?! I am too young to remember Saddam, please elaborate
They said Saddam owned a woodchipper or big shredder that he would throw dissidents in to execute them and destroy the body.
The moment I realized r/LateStageCapitalism had been ruined was when someone was unironically defending the Iraq War by referring to Saddam’s shredder. In the old days that person would’ve been quickly banned.
I think one of the interesting things about Tinyman and the tankman picture in particular is the mass psychosis (sorry if there’s a better non-ableist term I currently can’t conjure it) that the man in the picture was ran over by the tank. It’s a claim that can be categorically disproven by 15 seconds of video. But it contradicts the hegemonic narrative, so it’s like the video isn’t real, the vibes are more real than hard evidence that this man was allowed to just walk.
