I didn’t even learn about Fred Hampton till I was in my thirties and it was from the Chapo Trap House subreddit
I’m in my upper 20s and I can genuinely say I’ve learned more in the last 3 years of political unrest than in the remaining years combined
How is that they never post pictures of the students killed on Kent State
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shitlibs love posting that picture of the guy standing in front of the tank, as some kind of own, when if that happened in the US the cops would have gleefully run him over and then been made into a celebrity for it
Death to America
somebody actually did splice together the video when the Chinese tank goes around the guy, and the footage on the other side is from the BLM protests when a cop car just drives into the crowd
“Han Chinese are racial chauvinists” /r/politics libs, probably
Jeff Widener, an American photographer with the Associated Press, won a pulitzer prize for that photo, precisely because it was a still image. He also took a video, but the video tends not to be shown, because it reveals that the man wasn’t run over. Then you have the fact that all the US press corps showed up right as the protests took off, a lot of dark money from NGOs and western think tanks was floating around, and then deliberate conflation of the worker riots (in which PLA troops were lynched outside the square) being confused with the mostly peaceful events inside the square. Then you have that interview with the protest leader where she was crying and basically saying she was trying to provoke a massacre so that the protesters could be seen as martyrs. She got her wish, even if the massacres didn’t actually occur, since that’s how the west depicts those events. Then there the highly suspicious fact that nobody talks about the fact that you had many different types of protester simultaneously. Some were opposed to liberal reforms, privatization, etc, (the workers rioting outside the square) while other protesters wanted more of that stuff (the student protesters inside the square). Then you have some racist elements mixed in with the student protests I’ve heard, i.e. that there were some Chinese who were protesting because they didn’t like the presence of African exchange students at their universities. I don’t know how true that is, but I’ve heard it a few times.
Then you have some racist elements mixed in with the student protests I’ve heard, i.e. that there were some Chinese who were protesting because they didn’t like the presence of African exchange students at their universities. I don’t know how true that is, but I’ve heard it a few times
From Another View of Tiananmen:
Concerns over prices weren’t solely due to absolute levels of privation, however. The complaints were heavily tinged with elitism. Students and urbanites were not happy to see peasants and farmers do so well relative to them. This “economic anxiety” had manifested itself a year earlier in Nanjing, where students affected by cuts to tuition subsidies took out their anger on African exchange students. “From December 1988 to January 1989, students in Nanjing, China waged violent protests against visiting African students.” The writing on the placards was very revealing:
Rachel Corrie tried that in Palestine.
And the comments would say: He sHoUlD hAVe JuSt CoMpLiEd
The tank man image is relevant not because of the tanks but because of the dude. He stood up and made the whole line of tanks stop (momentarily). That’s the kind of energy i like in my protesters.
You’re 100% correct the cops in the US would probably just plow into him, though. Hell, they’d swerve to hit him.
It’s a powerful image for sure, but that power comes from a narrative that is only possible with the single frame, deprived of context, because it allows (and requires) the viewer to infer a lot of things that aren’t actually true.
The implication of the image is that the tanks are on their way to crush a student protest, and a single man bravely stands up to them and (momentarily) delays the violence. The viewer might be led to believe he was run over for this act.
However, the less-famous video shows the (by all appearances clean) tanks leaving the square, stopping and steering to try and avoid hitting the man. They even allow him to crawl on top and talk with the driver for a while.
It’s a classic lie by omission.
“Uyghur people are being GENOCIDED simply for their culture of having knifes to demonstrate their manliness (which the CIA used to agitate for terrorist attacks)”
vs
“actually US settlers were right to kill natives because they were scary and had sharp obsidian knives” :scared:
Manifest Destiny was just a heroic and triumphant settling of new land.
Tulsa What? Kent State Who?
oh yeah, so many people died in those!
I mean four people were killed in Kent State, but why minimize Tulsa? If we are to shrug off four students being killed at Kent State to begin with.
Oh that sucks. Admittedly I’m not too familiar with American poop
Also here in the UK a large majority believe that “Empire” was a nice pleasant good thing that did nothing but good to the countries we merely ’looked after’.
We call the ones that haven’t fully told us to ‘fuck off’ the ‘Commonwealth’ and hold lots of PR events like Olympic-esque games and ‘rich monarch waves at people who’s country has a GDP less than their hat largely because we stole all their resources before they could use them to develop’ tours.
Everyone also thinks the queen was just a passive tourist icon and not an actively supportive participant and cheerleader of that colonialism.
Am I remembering right where William and Kate tried to visit somewhere with one of these bullshit tours and were told to fuck off pretty much?
Jesus Christ, do not ever tell an English person that you think Winston Churchill was a monster. Worst mistake of my life. You’d swear I’d shat on his mum’s grave.
When I was in I think 2nd grade I gave a presentation on the Civil War while wearing a costume of a confederate soldier.
I was taught that factory workers in the north had it worse than slaves, that the
Civil WarWar Between the States was about states’ rights, that Confederate generals were noble and honorable while Union ones were incompetent drunks who relied on essentially human wave tactics and burning down cities to win. Gone With the Wind was presented to me as an accurate and unbiased depiction of history.Growing up I definitely had a couple awkward dinner conversations with certain “history buff” relatives where I was like, “Well sure, but still, I mean, obviously we can all agree the South was wrong, right?” and suddenly people start exchanging looks
I actually got a similar reaction once for saying the Crusades were bad, Catholics are fucking wild I tell you.
I was taught that factory workers in the north had it worse than slaves
In Marx’s “Theories of Surplus Value” which he never published while he was alive, but was instead compiled from his notes by Kautsky, and then later Riazanov, he called out 1700s reactionary anti-capitalists like Linguet who made these kinds of arguments.
Linguet however is not a socialist. His polemics against the bourgeois-liberal ideals of the Enlighteners, his contemporaries, against the dominion of the bourgeoisie that was then beginning, are given—half-seriously, half-ironically—a reactionary appearance. He defends […] slavery against wage-labour.
(Linguet was guillotined by the Jacobins lol)
(Linguet was guillotined by the Jacobins lol)
The kind French Jacobins would have guillotined everyone here
“Wage slave” is the modern equivalent. I get the point is to emphasize how deeply exploitative low-wage work is, but my boss can’t cut off my foot if I don’t show up.
I actually got a similar reaction once for saying the Crusades were bad, Catholics are fucking wild I tell you.
My convert Catholic dad once told me that all the crusades were “self-defence” against Islam. I guess there must have been a really big threat of an islamic invasion of Europe from the Baltics.
That is not true in my case. We learned about various massacres and the trail of tears, ect. Of course that was at a time when you actually studied history.
it really depends on what state you live in, and what decade you grew up in. Southern states were particularly prone to whitewashing US history, especially with respect to colonialism and slavery. I did learn about slavery and indigenous genocide in school, but as an adult I still find the public education I received lacking, incomplete, and still somewhat whitewashed, even if it was loads better than the McCarthyist and Daughters-Of-The-Confederacy sponsored shit I would have gotten jammed into my brain in the 1950s.
For example here are some issues I had with my liberal education in the 1990s:
- it was pretended that the civil rights movement was only successful because of peaceful protesters like MLK and was almost ruined by totally unwholesome radicals like the Black Panthers
- it was pretended that only the south had an economic interest in slavery. It was entirely ignored that the North relied economically on slavery indirectly.
- the civil war was depicted as an ideological crusade by the north to end slavery. this is an inversion of the confederate myth that it was about “states rights.” The main objective of the south was to preserve slavery. The main objective of the north was to preserve the union. Neither side was abolitionist, it’s just that abolition became practical in 1863 as the war dragged on. Lincoln issued the emancipation proclamation so he could draft black soldiers and further demoralize the south. he had never been ideologically an abolitionist, though some in his party to his left (like Thaddeus Stevens) were.
- it was pretended that all the problems of capitalism were entirely isolated to the gilded age, and that once we got a semblance of social democratic reforms (8 hour day, overtime pay, etc.) capitalism was now “fair.”
- labor militancy was altogether ignored. it was pretended that social democratic reforms were won entirely because silver-tongued reformists demolished capitalists with logic and reason, not because shit like the battle of blair mountain happened.
- it was depicted that indigenous genocide was mostly a matter of “both sides” being “equally mean.” i.e. that manifest destiny was mostly colonizers just protecting themselves from raids or something
- zero mention of CIA coups or any of the stuff declassified in the church committee
- zero mention of US supporting dictators abroad
Texas dictates what most states’ textbooks are. Every American child grows up learning a lot of bullshit.
In my history classes, it was like black folks were a footnote until you get to the lead up to the Civil War. Then after the Civil War they disappear from the stage again until the civil rights movement.
I did have a lib teacher who thought it was super important to teach us about Native American society and culture, even if he didn’t cover the genocide part as much as he could have.
That’s exactly what I was taught too.
Live in a red shithole, rural public education. Still learned the horrifics of slavery, trail of tears, black panthers, etc.
who must go?
?
One way to look at this is comparing the western media blitz every year around the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square incident to annual western coverage of any of our many, many domestic atrocities.
We get an annual top-line reminder of how irredeemably evil China is because of a 30-year-old event that even U.S. journalism schools admit we misrepresent. But besides token coverage of “it’s X holiday,” or maybe some stories about “should we even recognize X as a holiday” (see the Columbus Day/Indigenous People’s Day discourse), there is precious little media reminding us of any of our own original sins. Instead, as you note, it’s relegated to history classes, which many Americans never seriously engage with and most Americans never revisit again.
So you tankies agree that Tiananmen Square massacre happened? Good job
‘massacre’
What do you think happened exactly?
https://www.liberationnews.org/tiananmen-the-massacre-that-wasnt-2/
Edit: the other source I was looking for
https://archives.cjr.org/behind_the_news/the_myth_of_tiananmen.php
The thing to get is that there was no massacre on the square, and in fact there’s no verifiable evidence that anybody died there at all that day. Many people did die elsewhere, in street clashes with soldiers, after demonstrators killed and burned a few of them.
I would like to note also that bringing up events like Tiananmen Square, especially heavily propagandized and warped versions of them, without an understanding of the complex political context which led up to them, is not a gotcha, it’s just ignorant. Not saying you’re doing that or that you would do that, but it’s something others do frequently when they invoke it round here.
US Military Pysops Division literally bragged about how successful they were with Tiananmen in this recruitment video
Ah, I remember that. Almost feels like the cocky bastards are mocking us at this point.
What about the pictures of the massacre like these?
https://www.aboluowang.com/2008/0529/89034_3.htmlFirstly, we insist on content warnings being applied to violent content of that sort.
Second, I’m guessing you didn’t bother to translate any of this or investigate the sources cited - or lack thereof, since most of these images lack citation or provenance. The one source I was able to follow back was an interview of the man who lost his legs, conducted by right wing rag the Epoch Times and signal boosted by noted CIA cutout Radio Free Asia. Most everything else in there is unsourced, and many of the captions just outright lie about what’s being depicted, such as the one claiming the crushed red motorcycle is actually a guy run over on his bike.
Important to note also, none of these pictures are claimed to have been taken in the square itself. That violence occurred elsewhere is not in doubt; I never claimed there wasn’t violence, and the Chinese government themselves acknowledge it. What often gets left out is that the student demonstrators initiated it, and even western journalists working with eyewitness testimony concede that the PLA operated with remarkable restraint until things boiled over.
Third, and this is a comparatively minor point, the site you link to is a noted right-leaning anti-communist news organization which I suspect has ties to RFA. Even if that weren’t the case, it doesn’t seem at all trustworthy, given its clear bias against the Chinese government.
Edit: Upon further investigation, I found that Fang Zheng, the man who claims his legs were crushed by a tank in an unprovoked attack by the PLA, is himself not a very trustworthy source. The one person who he identified as being able to corroborate his claims, declined to do so, saying that she didn’t remember being with him at all on the day that violence broke out. Also potentially significant, he’s a founder of the Chinese Democracy Education Foundation, a California-based nonprofit opposed to the Chinese government. The organization has worked with RFA, and Fang Zheng himself has attended Falun Gong rallies and apparently shares their insane organ harvesting conspiracy theories.
Is this really what you’re giving us?
With no actual evidence, it just seems like China’s word against the US’s. Neither are sources I trust, and both have motives to lie. I’m just going to assume nothing.
Can you possibly explain why the western diplomats stationed there told their home countries nothing happened in diplomatic cables?
Why would they do that if it was real?
I said there was no evidence that a massacre took place in Tiananmen Square. What actually took place there is well evidenced by eyewitness testimony, a fair bit of which is contained in the two sources I linked.
Edit: I also take issue with the assertion that both the US and China are equally untrustworthy, particularly when the Chinese government freely admits that violent clashes between civilians and PLA personnel took place that day, something they would certainly have incentive to lie about if they were as untrustworthy as all that.
I recall seeing eyewitness testimony supporting both sides. Although, its possible the testimonies I saw were about the clashes that China admits to, and were simply framed as being about a massacre. They didn’t seem very specific or definitive.
Even though the Chinese government admits to those violent clashes, its still very plausible they would lie about a massacre. Its much easier to justify that than it would be an actual massacre, especially when the civilians act violently. Its also possible that admitting some aspect of it would benefit them more than complete denial.
You’d have a point there, if there wasn’t ample photographic evidence which also suggests that no concerted massacre took place, in the square or elsewhere. All available photographic evidence that I’ve seen supports the Chinese government’s version of events: scattered street clashes which unfortunately featured some quite heavy duty violence, but no mass formation of tanks coming in and deliberately schwacking everybody in sight.
There is photographic evidence of what happened at the tiananmen massacre but when I posted it, it was immediately removed. It is well known that the Chinese censor their internet, so comments like this make me think that hexbear is participating in that censorship.
Oh, come off it. Your comment was removed because there was no content warning for violent images, which you were told and which is stated in the modlog.
Here, I’ll post your link with a CW and you can watch it stay up.
CW: Violence, Gore
We don’t want this to be a space where people could randomly stumble across images of graphic violence they’re not prepared for. You’re not being censored by the CPC, dumbass.
I clearly stated it was pictures of a massacre. Next time I’ll add additional tags. I guess I expected some sort of comment, reply, or message.
Which side allows it to be discussed?
There’s your answer.
I don’t trust anyone, so i will believe the US
That is not what I said
Honestly this is a good default stance, I respect that.
Without a complex and nuanced model of the world, it’s incredibly difficult and exhausting to parse through layers of propaganda and ideology to figure out what actually happened (in any historical context, not just this).
If you’re interested in developing your understanding some more, learning about the existence/possibility of color revolutions helped fill in a lot of gaps for me. Broadly speaking they’re when a foreign actor either foments or co-opts social unrest, which it uses to destabilize and eventually overthrow a government that doesn’t align with the foreign actor’s interests. The Jakarta Method is a great read for learning about this.
US PUBLIC EDUCATION HISTORY CLASS: And today kids, we are going to learn about all of the native indians, the Southwest Indians, the plains indians, AND the forrest indians. Are you excited to learn about all the indians that were here, kids?
So are y’all china simps? I’m so confused still about hexbear.
If China “simping” includes calling out propaganda then yes
A little bit, I mean they did do this:
Corporate media and politicians lie and present biased framing to get people to hate whoever they want them to hate. We’ve seen it too many times and anytime we try to push back or ask for sources we get labelled as bots, shills, or tankies. We don’t mind criticism of any state, but we expect it to be well documented and framed in a reasonable context, and not just rumormongering.
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WW2 famously lasted from the 1850s to the 1950s.
WW2 didn’t hurt China’s life expectancy, due to the communists taking over the country piece by piece the conditions of the population improved DURING WW2. That’s how bad things were before the revolution. The conditions of a revolution, a civil war and a fascist invasion of extermination were simultaneously better than the humiliation and exploitation reaped by the British, American, and other capitalists. The life expectancy was 33 years old when Mao launched the revolution.
The maoist uprising against the landlords was the largest and most comprehensive proletarian revolution in history, and led to almost totally-equal redistribution of land among the peasantry.
What many don’t know is that WWII was also known as the Hundred Years War, the linear progress of time proofs that.
linear progress of time
Sounds like
judeo-bolshevismcultural Marxism to me
Very quickly reaching levels far beyond what it was before the war, yes.
Me @ the libs: https://youtu.be/9NkkZJHova4?feature=shared
Not a simp, just dont swallow US narrative as truth. Why would i trust the country that regularly tries to debt trap me? 1+1 isnt China Perfext Utopia, its 1+1 is The US is evil and untrustworthy
Well yeah, the biggest reduction of poverty in human history will do that to ya
We’re very clear about our politics. There’s nothing to be confused about.
We’re communists, anarchists, and other socialists. Hexbear is a non-sectarian left space so there is some variation on details or by degrees but we all share a revolutionary socialist perspective. That includes support for AES states. That includes educating ourselves about AES states instead of blindly accepting western propoganda.
They do appear to be China simps.
Nobody condones the Chinese surveilance Städte, which is very much like the US surveilance state. Nobody condones the Chinese liberalization of markets which make the Chinese economy resemble US capitalism in some regards. Nobody condones attacks on environmentalists, may they happen in China or anywhere else. So no, simp wouldn’t be a good term here
Nobody condones the Chinese liberalization of markets which make the Chinese economy resemble US capitalism in some regards.
Criticism of the decision is valid but I definitely think there were merits to it. Despite the increases in standard of living shown in my favorite graph, many Chinese were still living in extreme poverty when the reforms were initiated. According to the World Bank, more than 850 million Chinese people have been lifted out of extreme poverty, and China’s poverty rate fell from 88 percent in 1981 to 0.7 percent in 2015. And China’s rise as an economic power has allowed it to help establish an alternative economic bloc, which means now other countries can have access to foreign trade while maintaining more control of domestic policy than they would through the West.
It’s a complicated issue and I understand why some people consider it a deviation but I also understand the reasons for doing it and I think it’s met with some degree of success. I don’t think we really have an official line on it.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say “no one”, the simping i’ve seen is pretty hardcore.
I wouldn’t describe China’s economy as resembling US capitalism, but they’ve definitely gone capitalist “with Chinese characteristics”. China fucking sucks at communism, these days if not in the past.
Introducing the profit motive means the tea producers in China have had to go to quantity over quality, too, and i like my tea :(
I just read to my parents about the Haymarket tragedy and the origins of Mayday, and how the United States freaked out that people all over the world began recognizing that day and in order to cut it off in the US they made May 1st loyalty day and used red scare shit to make sure nobody would demonstrate or do anything on May 1st here lol. They had never heard of any of it.
I hate to use the “both sides” argument but can’t we all agree both governments have done some pretty awful shit to their vulnerable populations? Nothing in this world is truly black and white (except for Nazis, fuck them). It anything this should tell us not to idolize any side or else we’ll be blinding ourselves to some ugly truths because we’d instinctively think the other side is merely making shit up.
I would say that culturally erasing a nation’s foundational and ongoing genocide is a lot worse than even the liberal fantasy of “no one in China can talk about when a few thousand people died”. I would even say that trying to draw an equivalency is a form of genocide denial.
I’m not denying anything bad happened here. It’s bad to cause a genocide from either party. It’s bad to for the US to have stolen land from the Native Americans, forcing them to relocate in shitty places, and systematically destroy their culture through isolation and cheap alcohol.
It’s bad to force Uyghurs into “re education camps” to erase their culture and harvest their organs.
It’s bad for the US to have squashed protests about the Vietnam War in front of the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention.
It’s bad for the CCP to have squashed calls for democracy and freedom of speech in Tiananmen Square.
It’s almost like people in power do shitty things regardless of the type of government.
jfc the organ harvesting is just made up Falun Gong shit. Even the China Bad people tend to avoid citing that since it’s so obviously just pulled out of thin air.
Most china haters are careful to avoid that Falun Gong cult shit, but you just went right for it lmao
Seriously come on, do you also still believe Saddam had WMDs too?
It’s bad to force Uyghurs into “re education camps” to erase their culture
Erasing islamic extremism in a non-violent way is good actually. The method the west uses is to simply to try to exterminate islamic extremism, which has not worked a single time.
harvest their organs.
This is propaganda from Falun Gong, a literal cult. They believe their religion makes them healthier, and that by extension they have the juiciest organs in the world. They spread organ harvesting bs for the purposes of religious recruitment.
It’s bad for the CCP to have squashed calls for democracy and freedom of speech in Tiananmen Square.
It’s bad and regrettable that the US tried to stir a colour revolution through the legitimate issues that some people had at this time. It’s not bad that such a revolution was prevented. It would have led to exactly the same outcome as the soviet bloc had in the 90s when capitalism was undemocratically forced on its populations.
Oh god not this crap. Hexbear is generally pretty reactionary when it comes to China, but this too much even for me… no sources cited in that first one, nice.
s/both/all
Question to American comrades: How are the genocides of native Americans and
Lebensraummanifest destiny being taught in American schools? What does the average American know?I remember being taught that it was just their desire to expand to the Pacific Ocean, they believed it was their god given destiny. Big focus on that. I don’t recall a lot of all of emphasis on how it impacted the natives.
I learned Christopher Columbus would chop the hands off of indians that didn’t follow orders, and we wiped out 95% plus of their population
But I went to school in California. Unfortunately, other states can teach their version of history
My school rushed all the events of US history, “manifest destiny” was no exception and was merely a brief footnote, though the trail of tears was mentioned.
The only history I remember from school was that Constantinople was the capitol of the Byzantine empire. I do know that outside of school, it’s generally widely understood that the colonists genocided native americans. Then government certainly doesn’t try to prevent anyone from talking about Manifest Destiny being just a fancy word for murder
