GarbageShootAlt2

I was mainly remembering Critique of the Gotha Program, I think

Your position doesn't make sense. We know that testimony on atrocity propaganda is sometimes a complete fabrication:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony

So that is one of the things worth considering, but that hypothesis isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card and needs to be weighed against other factors like the variety of sources and people involved, their history and material interests, etc.

Yes, I am saying things need to be scrutinized instead of just taken at face value if they comport with our prejudices, I apologize if that takes the wind out of your sails, but blind faith won't lead you to good conclusions.

What did they say?

You're just question begging, it gives me very little to engage with.

It's nice to know there are cool people on blahaj zone. Near the start of the reddit migration I saw that there was a bit of a red scare going on there. Are things a bit better now?

Edit: I looked up that user's comment in the modlog a yeesh, they really went whole-hog with Park's spiel. As an aside, people say some really unhinged shit, like since then there was another comment about how the only thing to do about the DPRK is invade and diplomacy is a waste of time.

We got at least a couple of takers, and I expanded a little on some of my views. What do you think?

I should mention that one thing that probably skews matters is a prevalent thought (that I mostly agree with) among communists that the criticism of rivals of one's state to appease liberals is not a good use of time. The reasoning goes that you aren't really in a position to correct those problems, so spending time on these things when speaking publicly is only going to support the basis for a "left opposition" to those foreign states even if that's not your personal aim. A version of this has been used by the FBI.

Because of this, I think your sampling might have been sabotaged by people operating on that principle, because convincing a liberal to be an anarcho-bidenist [someone who claims to be a radical but supports US foreign policy and/or the Democrats] isn't really a useful effort.

Do you know what double-think is? Was the military killing armed insurrectionists, or was it all made up? Or were they standing their with tanks and watching the armed insurrectionists kill everyone?

You are underestimating me. There was no killing in the Square itself, but there was fighting all around the surrounding area. The Square was killed with the highest degree of violence being hitting some protestors with batons when they didn't disperse on the deadline after having many hours to comply.

My position is completely consistent.

and more than propaganda recordings from the Chinese government.

It was a documentary made by westerners! The people speaking were student leaders at the protest and all remain Chinese dissidents! What level of being a "friendly source" could even hypothetically meet your standard without agreeing with you? I can dig up literal internal memos from US political actors that were leaked and you would still call it Chinese propaganda!

I can dig it up for you if you'd like, though.

Are you implying that the soldiers with machineguns were ther ebecause Falun Gong members set themselves on fire? And not because

I'm saying there is a history of many violent incidents in connection with the Square and the government doesn't want to let more happen. You literally suggest they are there to wordlessly pressure people into what to think despite that same incident that lead to that conclusion having the opposite effect on you! It's a nonsensical psychodrama, not a cogent political observation.

No you’re right. People can have panic-based hallucinations when tanks open fire

As far as I know, the tanks never opened fire, it was all gunfire from the PLA side. It was an urban combat situation within Beijing (because it wasn't on the Square itself, but slightly more closed areas) so having the tanks fire seems like it would be excessively destructive and hazardous. Then again, I don't know.

And the first thing they’ll do is try to take photos of it. And no matter how hard you try, the photos come out eventually. Let me reiterate, photos of bodies crushed by tanks.

I think you might be thinking of some famous photos of what are clearly bikes strewn about and people taking cover.

I’ve seen photos of the massacre. I have heard witness testimonies that corroborate those photos, and witness testimonies that do not. I am aware of several governments (including my own) that have used false or intimidated witnesses to try to hide an atrocity. Why EXACTLY do you see me as “reaching for excuses”? Do you think I WANT any government to mass-murder its protestors?

I don't know your life, I can't say. You give the impression that you are a sensitive person who was traumatized and now you seek to affirm that trauma, but that's just my impression. Atrocity propaganda is very effective, turns out, and western powers are happy to give you as much morbid slop as you can stomach. If you've seen any photos of people killed on the Square, feel free to reproduce them.

At what point should I throw out every piece of evidence I’ve ever seen in my life and believe this? How would you prove to an outside observer that Tienanmen Denial is different from Holocaust Denial?

[Aside from that being a hysterical comparison] When you speak so strongly about the evidence and then don't produce it, you aren't really giving me a reason to believe you. If I wanted to persuade you on the Holocaust, I'd have plenty of photos that I could show you of mass graves, piles of shoes, piles of gold teeth and fillings, nail marks on the doors of the gas chambers, and notably virtually no one who was kept prisoner in the camps who denied that killing and brutality were taking place! It's not like we have people who were prisoners in Auschwitz saying "yeah, there were no gas chambers, no butchering, it was just a prison." Plenty of Holocaust Deniers say that, but none were prisoners of Auschwitz.

And yet, I can point you to people who were actually at the Square and say no one was killed on it, meanwhile other people who were already gone by that time talk about viscera being washed down gutters. In the video I showed you, two people were there to see it and one person wasn't, and you are literally defending the "witness testimony" of the person who wasn't there! Furthermore, she says in the hotel interview before the Incident that [in so many words] it was her plan to create atrocity propaganda in order to "wake the Chinese people up"! She explicitly wanted stories of bloodshed for the sake of her political goals, to the point of trying to deliberately endanger students who trust her for the sake of them being harmed! What makes you think she wouldn't lie when every fact about the situation also makes it impossible for her to be telling the truth?!

Eh, I've seen errors here and there (and called them out, as you can see) but I think they are generally putting forward decent arguments with better evidence. The Yuri Gagarin stan for example is very well-read and intelligent, you just need to demonstrate good faith (and maybe catch him in a not-bad mood). Anyway, here's the thread that I just made. Feel free to upvote for visibility, we'll see how it goes.

Your "no u" line about how actually I am telling children's stories doesn't work as well as you think it does. The crux of my case is that these states aren't monoliths and potemkin villages but actually have complex internal politics where people of varying viewpoints are able to openly disagree and protest, as is observably true in these countries! Not everyone in the Russian legislature supports the war, and they generally did okay with this position. There are all sorts of left/right debates in China among various politicians and journalists and so on. To call this kabuki theater or totally inconsequential without any actual evidence is silly.

Also your timeline is bad. The Great Famine ended circa '61 and the Cultural Revolution began in '66. The Cultural Revolution certainly had its issues, but it didn't cause a famine. Deng did end the Cultural Revolution, sort of, but only after Mao's death and the purging of the Gang of Four (prior to Deng's re-ascent).

As an aside, I don't think Deng was ever imprisoned in connection to the Cultural Revolution, though he was half-purged and assigned to menial duties in one case and basically paid leave in another. It's quite interesting how pissed Mao and his clique were at Deng and yet they held their hand, relatively speaking. Wasn't it supposed to be a death sentence to oppose Mao, as the liberals tell it? Of course, Mao took pride in trying to rehabilitate people (even the last Chinese Emperor and captured Japanese soldiers!), so he would in almost all cases resist having someone killed or left to rot in prison.

There's a wild bias in western media in trying to make a Khrushchev out of Deng, but Deng himself vociferously refuted those comparisons while in office, calling Khrushchev a fool, a traitor, and so on, and saying that being compared to Khrushchev was an insult (which is true).

That's a little heartening. Lemmygrad is aware of this thread, but I'll try to word the post to not tip my hand too too much, and then I'll link it back here and you can watch it (actually, you can post in it if you want since you're on a lemmy.ml account, but that's up to you).

Let me tell you from experience that sometimes people only look ridiculous because of prejudices we are bringing into the interaction (though some people are ridiculous).

Should I include Russia or is that too easy?

As an aside in the meantime, what do you make of the fact that I am quite willing to talk about negative elements despite being a "tankie"?

You seem to be projecting a lot of things that don't have a firm basis in external reality. Are the guys with machine guns there to intimidate tourists, or are they there because Tienanmen Square is right in front of the Chinese equivalent of the White House and several other important buildings that require high security? The incident (which, let us be clear, also involved armed insurrectionists with incendiaries and commandeered rifles) wasn't even the last major violent event in the area, as people did die actually in the Square some time later when Falun Gong members set themselves and a small girl on fire in protest of the group being banned!

The thought police you are imagining seem, if anything, to be a much better case for you being wrong. However you might feel intimidated in the moment, clearly once you left you understandably made a firm association between the Square and machine guns!

Furthermore, you're making silly excuses for liars. There were people who weren't even there for the supposed massacre (see the video) who were accounting very peculiar events in lurid detail, like tanks running over inhabited tents and then mulching them and such. Do you think some scared college student is going to have an anxiety-based hallucination that causes them to think they were places they weren't and saw things that have probably never happened anywhere? When does that happen besides severe schizophrenics and children who aren't processing that they just had a nightmare?

It seems to me that you are reaching for excuses, especially since you are disregarding the numerous witness, both domestic and foreign visitors, who all saw that there was no massacre in the Square as the media hysterically portrayed. Leaked state documents over the years (from ambassadors and such) only affirm this further. I can look up some if you like.

Your comment got removed before I saw it. If you'd like to give it another shot, I guess maybe check the modlog to see what rule you broke and reword it a little.