I disagree

Okay? It doesn’t really matter if you agree or not though, I’m right. “White” isn’t “real” in the sense that gravity is real, or even in the sense that the English or French or German cultures are “real.” Yet the world in which we live was and still is divided into whites and non-whites. Whiteness pervades throughout our legal and economic institutions to this day. But you personally don’t believe it’s real, so all of that must be a figment of peoples’ imaginations, right?

In an objective sense sure, but regretably there’s no such thing as an objective perspective. A thing is real when it’s taken to be real, and when broad swathes of human life and society are built around a racialized conception of humanity, and when people reductively classed as “white” place themselves at the top of the resulting heirarchy, you can’t just say it isn’t real and end your analysis there. I sympathize with what you’re trying to say, it’s well intentioned, but if you want to really reckon with this fucked up state of affairs, you’ll need a materialist understanding and analysis of why it exists, who it benefits, and the history of how it came about.

Much appreciated. I could do with more specificity the next time I have to make this argument lol

Reactions like yours are why I still bother. All I ever want is for people to look at popular historical and political narratives critically. I apologize if I came off as hostile at all, we get a lot of calumny coming our way, as you might imagine.

It wasn’t nice, to be sure. The workers’ protests which happened concurrently with the events of Tiananmen Square were reportedly the source of much of the violence, and it got properly nasty at times. The two events are often conflated though, and I felt it important to draw that distinction. Anyhow, I appreciate your open-mindedness.

My BOY how is that not better than sleeping on a piece of cardboard on the sidewalk??

Anyhow, what, is every single home in China a flimsy shack? Can you dredge up one single solitary study on what percentage of homes in China are of substandard construction? Can you do any goddamned thing but regurgitate half-remembered unsubstantiated talking points from youtube from lord knows how long ago?

If you can, have it. Give us a source and we’ll have a talk about it. Otherwise, shut the FUCK up

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.

Firstly, 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?

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.

Ah, I remember that. Almost feels like the cocky bastards are mocking us at this point.

Literally no such thing. The Holodomor is a fiction created by Nazi propagandists to paint the failures of Soviet agricultural policy in dealing with a famine as a deliberate attempt to exterminate Ukranians.

Important to note, this was merely the latest in a long series of famines which had historically plagued this part of eastern Europe. It was also the last.

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.

You can’t be racist to white people.

Racism directed by white people against, say, Chinese people is despicable not only because white people on the whole have an inordinate amount of wealth and social and political power, and thus their own racial animus presents a real threat, but because the Chinese specifically have historically been the victims of majority white imperialist nations and the targets of the most vile racial discrimination in majority white countries.

It’s the same as cracker versus the n-word. Guy calls me a cracker, it’s little more than a simple insult. I call a black guy the n-word, it’s far more offensive, because people who looked like me used to call people like him that word while owning them as property, denying their human rights, and lynching them.

The powerful cannot be the victims of the powerless, and one categorically cannot be racist to white people.

A person can only believe otherwise if they’re wholly ignorant and deny the history of racism and racial inequality.

Hell, I dunno. This sort of thing got through to me eventually, maybe I’m hoping I can change minds myself.

That’s not what he meant and you know it. He’s making light of an obvious double standard regarding the standing in which we hold two sources with obvious national biases.

My pleasure. I hope it wasn’t too rambling, my worst habit is to say in ten words what can be said with five.

If you’d like to know our reasons for doing that (or anyway, my reasons), they’re twofold. First, even with the rise of China and the seeming return of global multipolarity, western countries continue to dominate world affairs, militarily and economically. It’s simply a matter of scale; when they act up, it’s likely to effect the lives of millions of people around the world, directly or otherwise. Second, most of us are ourselves westerners, and of those I’m betting most of us are from the the US. As citizens of these places, our first responsibility is to point out our own nations’ crimes, both because of their widespread influence, and because of our proximity to them.

There’s also the matter of communist countries being the subject of a truly absurd amount of western propaganda. We feel the need to push back against certain narratives about the supposed crimes of communist countries because we know many of them to be exaggerated, misrepresented, and at times outright fabricated. Most of us are close students of history, some of us like myself are even academic historians, and it can be frustrating to provide reams of evidence for our claims (or more often, counter-claims) and be met with accusations of whataboutism, rather than earnest engagement. It’s why so many of us are quick to assume that the pushback we get is in bad faith, because it quite often is.

But anyway, I’m getting off track. Very few of us, I find, are unwilling to acknowledge the flaws, missteps, and yes, even crimes of actually existing socialist states, when they are well evidenced. For instance, I doubt many of us would defend the deportation of the Crimean Tatars, but we’re equally unwilling to accept the Holodomor as an example of deliberate ethnic genocide because the common narratives surrounding it rely on fabricated numbers, misrepresentations of Soviet state policy, and Nazi propaganda, to say nothing of their denial of professional historical consensus.

For real though. It’s hardly difficult to find a bunch of leftists arguing about China lmao

If you payed closer attention you’d notice that we have a range of opinions on China, and we don’t all think everything they do is correct. That’s what the term critical support means. It’s a recognition that even socialist states are imperfect, as the nation state as an institution is fundamentally imperfect and will always and everywhere undermine freedom to some degree. But a state which is undergoing the transition to socialism, particularly one that’s putting themselves in a position to undermine US imperial hegemony like China is, is well worth supporting, even as we acknowledge its flaws and contradictions.

What none of us will ever tolerate are accusations of genocide with one discredited religious fanatic as the source, or racist insults being hurled at their head of state, both things I’ve seen numerous times from users from other instances.

The CPC isn’t genociding the Uyghurs Adrian Zenz, and you wouldn’t give a crap even if they were. This is nothing but a convenient gotcha for you, you don’t know a single Uyghur person. Don’t know their names, their struggles, even their language, much less the language of the people you claim are genociding them. Which is why you’re an intellectual hostage to the fabrications of a religious whackjob.