“I hope this is not true forever but I can’t argue with you. My father is the artist, he turned 88 on Monday, so he has witnessed the rise and fall of most of the dictatorships of the 20th century. A neo-conservative of the 1960s, Andre believes that, while the CCP may not fall in his lifetime, that eventually it will crumble to the will of the people.”
I’m still unable to wrap my head around why for something the west calls a “massacre,” they chose the specific event where no one fucking died. HE NEVER DIED. The column of tanks also weren’t hostile to the guy because they tried to fucking go around him, and they all stopped when they realized he kept blocking their way. They even had a casual conversation with each other before parting ways.
Fuck man this shit is annoying. That’s emblematic of democracy more than anything. In the US the soldier would’ve been applauded for running over the uppity whiny protestor for blocking the intersection. You’d think they’d choose more violence and death to show the “massacre” that went on in Tiananmen but it’s always just pictures of students standing around or marching and the tank man. But weirdly enough they never show the pictures of soldiers and the same students have camaraderie with each other because many of them didn’t want to overthrow anything.
There are some pretty gory pictures of the battle that happened in the surrounding streets. But there’s burnt out police vehicles too, so it kinda contradicts the image of a million peaceful protesters getting mowed down by machine guns and then run over.
Lynched and burned PLA guys as well
Besides the PLA corpses, are there really gory pictures? I’ve seen a pretty large amount of documentation and, in the rare instances of something seeming to be a gory protestor death, there was no usable citation presented with it that would allow me to actually place the picture at that event (unlike, to pick an easy example, the wide-angle shots of the streets that invariably show a bunch of abandoned bikes rather than corpses). Maybe a military equipment person could tell, but I certainly couldn’t.
There’s a couple of pictures of what appears to be a single person who got run over by a tank, but the idea that it was ordered by the government, or anything other than a singular tragedy during a poorly managed crowd control effort due to the existence of an active insurgency in another area is ludicrous.
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I can’t avoid thinking of that video of British royal guard soldiers who trampled a small child that did the rounds on the internet a couple of years ago. Back then lots of people thought that the soldiers were right in doing so as the kid was standing where they were supposed to march, stopping or taking a step to the side would be against their orders so it was really the child’s and their parents’ fault.
But when a Chinese guy who was part of a violent riot against the government walked out in front of a column of tanks and wasn’t hurt at all then it is the crime of the century.
I recall at the time people mashing together footage of the Buckingham guard plowing through a child with footage of some PLA soldiers doing a similar patrol coming across a child and walking around them.
It’s not that no one died anywhere, but Tank Man didn’t die and neither did anyone in the square itself. Some PLA troops, insurgent guerillas, and bystanders did die and, critically, some of the student leaders who were being used by western intelligence got on TV immediately after the chaos of the event to tell ridiculous stories like the tank-mulching thing. They tried to create an actual massacre and, when they failed to, they just said that one happened anyway.
The “specific event” I was referring to is the rank man, not the whole protest. But that’s what I mean. Whether it was students dying or soldiers dying, you rarely see pictures of that. It’s always the same stuff of the tanks or students standing around