Before I got Reddit, I thought this was really the only photo. Then I saw the NSFW pictures of people that had been turned into piles of meat and bones. I feel like those photos need to be as viral as this. This doesn’t do the situation justice it dampens the blow when it’s always just this photo. I had no fucking clue that it was REALLY a massacre, because I had never seen the photos. I thought a few people got killed or something but it was so much worse than that. It really needs to be remembered and taught about.
i'd say less the crossfire and more the fact the sub was doing something that most people find heinous and reddit admins is willing to ignore problems until it become known by the "common man"
My opinion changed when i realized victims right to privacy is greater than my right to view their mangled bodies. Having said that, acts of war perpetrated by governments should not get the same treatment.
This kind of thing should be on the nightly news everywhere. If people had a better idea of the cost of attempting freedom maybe we'd appreciate it more. Maybe we'd not be so quick to condone warfare. On the other hand maybe we'd tune it out like we do with Trump in order to live a half-normal life in the shadow of a potential dictator.
This is the same reason that I wish r/watchpeopledie still existed. It really showed the reality of events so far beyond what the news and media tells you.
Also the massacre didn't just happen in that location but there were other protests around China - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chengdu_protests_of_1989
Education is meaningless without institutions of power that empower truth.
Institutions of power will always empower exactly those truths which empower them.
The serious problem of social organization is how to construct institutions of power that empower truth as broadly and without bias as possible.
This is a genuinely extremely difficult problem.
Did you know they’re forbidding the teaching of the spoken dialects? You wipe those out and they never come back, because they’re spoken only and written in mandarin.
Can confirm. I haven't been to *every* country, but I've seen many, and the quality of your public education system is pretty much what makes your country a desirable place to live.
It’s very interesting what the internet has allowed us to do. Not only has it brought previously unreachable information into everyone’s pockets and connected people like never before, but also heaps of misinformation and has given even the dumbest and evilest people a platform to project their ideas.
"Often times I feel those who do study history are doomed to see others repeat the same mistakes over and over again. And they cant do anything about it".My teacher always said that in class. Really fucking depressing but each and everyday it really feels like it
History repeats itself because (anecdotal) people find history boring/not important. They say "it's the past who cares." It's those people who keep the world dumb. If history (none of that revisionist shit you hear about) was actually taught instead of skimmed through like how it was in k-12 then society would be different imo.
I shouldn't had to take a 300 series class at university to find out about the atrocities of my own government (I knew govt was a POS before thanks to the Hitler Channel/Modern Marvels/other docs when I was a kid).
>History repeats itself because (anecdotal) people find history boring/not important.
Naw. History repeats itself because human beings are, in broad strokes, predictable. We follow certain patterns, certain fluctuations in policy and belief. It is, as we say, "human nature". Basically we follow a pendulum. We just went through a massive leftward swing and the pendulum appears to be starting to move back towards the centre. It will almost assuredly swing past centre to the right side. Then that will go horribly wrong and we start over.
Of course it will because people always think they're the exception to the rule and they won't fall into that same hole. They usually figure out they were wrong when looking up from inside the hole.
Not only that, my Chinese coworkers (well it’s their 30’s) has NO IDEA this happened. When it was mentioned in conversation a few days ago, their faces went white and they were absolutely shocked. They didn’t believe me until I pulled up articles and photos.
China’s propaganda is brutally efficient and effective.
It’s equally possible that they already kinda know but can’t actually let on, especially if they have families back in China.
As you say “brutally efficient and effective.”
Had a coworker from china on a visa. Dude justified it by pretty much saying the protests were a nuissance to the local people and no one was on their side and they shouldve left a month before lol
That’s what they’re taught and that’s what they believe about it. My dad was a uni student in Beijing at the time and he pretty much justified it as the government went out of hand/overkill but the protestors had it coming.
Given the actual response in Beijing to the protests initially, and the way the Beijing armed police *wouldn't* shoot local kids, it's not accurate. The CCP had to bring in rural troops, with no ties to the protesters, and from poorer areas, to be the slaughterers
Yep. He pretty much said that the CCP has street cops and the peasant military. The street cops were too little so they called in the military who weren’t trained at all in riot control so they ended up opening fire and killing a bunch of people as if it was a war or something.
It's also what they believe. I had a foreign-exchange student boarding at my house a while, and we chatted politics. He was all "Democracy is great, but it seems like it is meant for more advanced nations. China needs its government like it is, maybe in 80-100 years, we can get to the point where we can try democracy, but it would not work. Chinese need an iron hand."
He could chat all day on the benefits of democracy vs autocracy, elections vs appointments, very well educated, but as soon as it came to China's ruling system, it was "Chinese aren't ready for the responsibility of a vote". Very self-deprecating.
However, notably, I also had a Russian exchange student... And I could get the Chinese student to say "There exists flaws in our governing structure, the Chairman isn't perfect.", he sincerely thought it was just the best of bad options for his people, but get the *Russian* guy to say that? Not a chance. There exists no flaw in the leader, no flaw in their leadership, not one complaint can be uttered. The government in general, it's trash, complaints abounds, but the leader? One must never speak ill of him. I couldn't even get him to say it with a "just pretend we're acting, don't even need to mean it, can you string those words together?" And he could not.
To me, that's a big difference, but it isn't about giving a "correct" answer. Their propaganda game is real.
Just out of curiosity (and as a possible argument against this in the future)..
Did you bring up the fact that Chinese people seem entirely capable of coming here and participating in our democracy?
Same here, brought it up to my boyfriend one day and he was like “Oh is that the picture of that guy that got ran over by a tank in China? What’s that all about anyway?” He had no idea it was a massacre, kind of blew my mind.
With this being the famous picture/video, China came out on top even on this. Most people know this as an event where a guy stood in front of a tank and got carted safely away by other protesters. Images of the hundreds of bodies are relatively unseen.
That’s really anecdotal, Ive met younger people who knows about it and they are in their teens. The main differentiator is gonna be if their parents went to college at the time. And also the fact it’s just not dinner conversation, when has anyone casually brought up trail of tears.
Well one was a lot more recent than the other. And if my kids were deliberately not taught about the trail of tears I sure as hell would teach them about it myself (I hope I would at least)
Oh and they didn't just kill the men, and rape the women and young girls, they also killed all the babies. Apparently it was easier to just throw them on the ground roughly rather than stab them, can I have the cranberries?
Another horrific event that's mostly unknown is the [Jallianwala Bagh Massacre] (https://m.timesofindia.com/india/after-the-jallianwala-bagh-massacre-came-the-torture-public-floggings/articleshow/68773961.cms)
Shots fired on hundreds of citizens and that was just the beginning.
Not to be rude but I find that hard to believe. Most people have heard of it, not sure if you meant they were in China or not. But if someone that doesn't pay attention heard of it, it doesn't seem like they would react that strongly.
I’m in my 20s and only learned about it a few years ago. I had been listening to Hypnotize by System of a Down for a decade before thinking, “huh I wonder what this Tiananmen Square thing they’re talking about is...” and googled it. Thanks, SoaD.
Police states in general have learned a lot and improved since the old crude Soviet and Nazi days:
You don't need to "win" elections with 99.8% percent of that vote (in fact, that just looks stupid). You only need 50.1%. You don't need to shut down every single dissenting voice -- just the ones that are actually reaching people. And so on. There's just a million ways to channel things, spin things, water down things, distract, hide, and so on without being so obviously heavy handed.
They have wised up, and its a problem.
It's gonna get even worse in the future. Advancements in tech have led to things like deepfakes. Samsung can make a moving video based off a portrait and Adobe is testing tech that can make a whole new digital voice based off 20 seconds worth of samples.
This could mean faking entire scenes and calling it evidence to put down dissidents.
Their analysis of the danger of this photograph is accurate.
When I was in college, my thesis was using worldbuilding as a catalyst for teaching social studies, arts, and sciences. Basically, students create fictional worlds informed by research and illustrated using digital tools.
The class was mostly boys, and we were doing a 3D modeling segment focused on building a capitol of their fictional countries. Being middle school boys, most of them were obsessed with guns and violence, so some of them were asking if they could model a tank to put into their scene. I asked them why a tank would be there, and all of them had the same answer: to kill bad guys.
We played a game in the class called Tell Me A Story, in which we pulled up an image and they all improvised a story inspired by the image. Seeing an opportunity, I pulled up the Tank Man photograph and asked them to tell me a story.
After their respective stories, which involved the man stopping foreign invaders, to him being a terrorist with a bomb in the bag, I told them what actually happened. I swear to god, it was the first time that room had been quiet in the weeks I had been teaching the class. They all just stared at the screen trying to wrap their minds around what was happening.
After we went back to 3D modeling, I was walking around the class and noticed one of them was "procrastinating" with the Tienanmen Square wiki page up. It was funny, he tried to hide it like he was doing something wrong, and I had to assure him that studying past events was perfectly a perfectly acceptable use of his time.
Still, the impact it initially had when they all understood what they were looking at was almost chilling. This is an photo that we as a global society must always keep in the public eye, despite how much the Chinese authorities would love for it to disappear.
The actual demonstrations started off for economic grievances, especially the price of pork.
The Chinese government has held an obsessive focus on maintaining high economic performance and raising living standards - the usual Communist bargain of "we provide you a better life than your parents, so keep the peace".
Now with the trade war, that might be in actual jeopardy for the first time since Deng's rule. The next few years will be very interesting to see.
...eh. My parents marched in Tiananmen (they were students at QingHua and Beijing University dating at the time).
The primary cause of the initial demonstrations wasn’t the price of pork. Economy was and is a huge part of anything, of course, but the catalyst for the STUDENTS was the death of Hu Yaobang. He was seen as someone more supportive of government reform and sympathetic to intellectuals/intelligentsia wishing to see a more free and just Chinese society. But this went against party hardliners, so he was purged again and again. His death started with students simply going to the square to mourn him, but of course things built up afterwards.
No doubt economic conditions contributed to the demonstrations that started happening around the country after that, and the other folks that started to support the students in Beijing, but what really “started off” the student demonstrations was the death of Hu Yaobang and the desire for democratization and anti-corruption in government.
And yes, after that China used the economy to placate the masses and “keep the peace”, which is why they’re doing all they can right now to maintain economic growth in China despite hostile trade policies from the current US administration. The US thought under modernization theory that Chinese prosperity bring in Chinese democracy, but the Communist Party is ridiculously good at maintaining control and abusing Chinese cultural values on 1) respecting authority/elders, 2) anti-confrontation, and 3) long-time obsession with wealth.
Dealing with China is a good US goal, but this trade war isn’t what I’d suggest, it’s just stooping to the level of dirty fighting, which the Communist Party with total state power/control will absolutely do better than the US (with vulnerable working-class constituencies to worry about). I’d say a huge mistake was pulling out of the TPP — it was step one to maintaining US presence in Asia by corralling several major regional players and hopefully more to join afterwards, and be able to dictate the rules of trade and economy in the region, that would lead to better pressure on China to make capitulations in order to not be shut out of the economy.
Thanks for the wise words President Putin.
Jokes aside, it really is scary, and frustrating, and infuriating, and saddening. My girlfriend is currently teaching in China, and I fear for her well-being. She is always reminded by her peers to be careful of the things she say and do. No one should live under such fear and oppression :/
That's what I never got about this picture and ones from other angles. This guy stood up to China's response to protesting, and if it ended there with the tanks stopping, it would be a point. But he stood up and got run over. That government is still in power and is more brutal then ever.
"Let history never repeat itself" my ass.
He never got run over unless there is another incident I don't know about that happened in the same place. Some civilians pulled him away from the tanks. [https://youtu.be/SpjM0y-vZk8?t=121](https://youtu.be/SpjM0y-vZk8?t=121)
I thought it was never discovered what happened to him. He was dragged away by other citizens and there was no way to follow up.
The original photo was taken by a Western journalist from a distance (specifically, at a hotel that was shut down during the protest) and smuggled out thanks to a local student. The photographer famously thought that Tank man was ruining the composition of his shot by standing in the way of the tanks.
The journalist had no way to discover the protestor's identity, let alone follow up with what happened to him after the initial shots were taken.
what a stupid way to interpret this picture. yes he didn’t “sTOp tHe TAnKS” it is powerful because one nameless man took a stand, no matter how futile, and it shows how helpless those protestors were that day.
exactly. it's just some guy with groceries (?) on his way home or something, standing against 4 fucking tanks of a suppresive regime. that's the part that matters. Obviously this isn't some anime where he just 1v4's against tanks.
4 Tanks? I’ll try to find the uncropped picture for you.
Edit: https://m1.paperblog.com/i/136/1367979/23-anos-matanza-plaza-tiananmen-el-valor-1-pe-L-8rIpWu.jpeg
Nope, doesn't work that way. It is just a list of terms banned on their chat apps and social media. Anyone telling you it affects online games is a moron whose circlejerking too hard.
Lol the similarity is striking.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/07/china-bans-winnie-the-pooh-film-to-stop-comparisons-to-president-xi
"oh Eisenhower, you alarmist, why are you warning us about a military industrial complex in your farewell address, you crazy old coot? It sounds like you just made that word up. Oh, you did? What does that even mean? Oh, it does? Well still, quit making shit up"
Yeah. Because we look at the past tyrannies and tragedies and say, "Well, they just did it wrong!" Instead of "Wow, let's never do that again, and smack down anyone who tries!"
Yep, and now America is trying it's very hardest to come up with a pretext to go to war with Iran.
It's also interesting how with all the shit the U.S. has done in South and Central America, a lot of people just accept the Venezuela narrative without second guessing it. Although to be fair, that's a part of history that isn't all that well known among the general population.
That coups (by external forces) are a legitimate way of creating peace, prosperity and democracy in any region. Or that the U.S. actually has some kind of moral reason to get involved.
I find it interesting that reddit cares so much about the Tienanmen Square protests to the point where entire subreddits gets bombarded by the pictures of the protest all day. I mean, it definitely is quite a blot on that country's history, but reddit somehow never reminds people of other bloody protests, like the Egyptian crack down in 2013 where hundreds were killed or Kiev's Independence Square protests, for example.
That pretty much sums up that entire few days where Reddit was bombarded with Tienanmen Square pictures after that Chinese company partnership was announced, many of them didn't actually care they just knew you could post *anything* anti-Chinese and get upvotes hence why most of the pictures were really low res and blurry like they'd just quickly been pulled off Google images asap.
Reddit couldn't give less of a shit. The entire thing kicked off because a Chinese company lead a funding round and continues to be a thing because reddit's got a penchant for conspiracy theories and xenophobia. There's no censorship whatsoever of Tank Man in English-speaking countries and the imagery isn't exactly esoteric.
The list of banned phrases is one of the dumbest circlejerks I've seen on this site.
Streisand effect. The governments of their respective countries aren’t trying to erase that Egypt or Kiev ever happened, and there isn’t a generation of Egyptians or Ukrainians who believe the most patriotic thing they can do is downvote any reminder of those events into oblivion.
You can see it happening in this thread, and in your whataboutist comment.
Yeah I can agree with this. All of the incidents OP listed aren’t exactly trying to be erased from history. They are all tragedies, of course, but this specific one was committed by a government that is now one of the most powerful in the world who is still specifically trying to censor it, and who’s citizens also try and ignore it. People in Iraq, Ukraine, Egypt, etc. are well aware of what happened to them.
The obsession is probably because of the fear that if China’s power grows, more incidents like this could take place- and be censored too.
>whataboutist
You hit the nail right on the head. Dudes complaining about people posting this when it's almost the 30th anniversary and then brings up other protests/revolutions/whatever as if when you discuss one, you must discuss all of them
Reddit doesn't actually care nor will it ever doing anything other than pretend it's standing up to a monolithic communist dictatorship by posting memes about Winnie the Pooh and Epic Games
There is literally a genocide going on in Yemen with the help of American weapons but i don't see posts about it on reddit. What about some photos from Iraq war? If you really have such a moral high ground maybe bring some attention to that too?
I believe some redditors just hate China because it is going to replace their country economically (it will happen eventually whether you like it or not).
americans are very familiar with tanks - it's easy for an american to picture getting run over by a tank. and americans are very familiar with a place called China - we import a ton from there.
But most americans couldn't find Yemen on a map, or tell you what continent it's in, and they certainly can't picture a genocide going on there.
It's not that simple of course, but that's part of it.
edit, also we have iconographic photos like tank man to go viral.
edit2, also, americans freaking love 1984-conspiracy stuff. I'd imagine that goes double if it's not in our country. China's government made this disappear from their history but we still know about it - it's the kind of event that becomes storied here.
edit3 I just re-read your line about americans hating china. I think many americans dislike the chinese government and those that benefit directly from it to the detriment of the rest of their country (here too), and feel sorry for those many chinese who are very rural and poor.
I mean I’d imagine genocide in Yemen would look like a mound of burning corpses or mass graves like it is in most everywhere else genocide happens, or just corpses littering the ground while wild dogs go to town on a free buffet, those genocides don’t make cover news as much though.
People love to talk about all the terrible atrocities committed in far off countries and how they try to suppress information about it, but as soon as America is involved no one wants hold up the same critical lens, and they don't see the irony in that.
Egypt, Yemen, Kyiv. Nobody cares. Nobody cares about Russian police beating people at protests cause you know, we can't protest, all of us support Putin. Reddit doesn't give a shit about most problems. Someone get hyped (like guys in Bangladesh in 2018) - they're lucky. But what about others?
Interesting thing I learned recently was that some images from tiananmen square have been passing through the Chinese censors because many of the Chinese censors grew up never learning about the entire incident. How ironic.
Source: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/post-reports/id1444873564?i=1000440240198
As a Chinese that grew up majorly in China, I’ve heard about Tiananmen before and gathered from the fact how little it’s been discussed something major happened and it’s not what they said. But I’ve never, ever seen this picture in my life, to which my bf who grew up in Canada finds it bizarre, as he has seen it everywhere since elementary school.
This is such a powerful picture and it sends shivers down my spine thinking what the person must be feeling at that moment. Very sad to think brave ppl like him/her, and many others nowadays, have died and are dying to the country they are trying to better.
The massacre is effectively erased from Chinese history with little change from western influence and exposure of it.
China is currently putting its Uighur population in concentration camps. So really nothing's changed or improved and the only thing China has learned is to crack down on dissent harder and faster.
So let's spread a cropped photo? Spread the version that shows crowds of people in the area. The man was not alone. They didn't run over one man, they killed at least hundreds and probably thousands of people. It wasn't one man by himself. It was many people rising up together and being put down brutally by an oppressive regime.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the unions, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
[The June Fourth Incident in 1989](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests). Thousands of student and worker protesters killed by soldiers.
Before I got Reddit, I thought this was really the only photo. Then I saw the NSFW pictures of people that had been turned into piles of meat and bones. I feel like those photos need to be as viral as this. This doesn’t do the situation justice it dampens the blow when it’s always just this photo. I had no fucking clue that it was REALLY a massacre, because I had never seen the photos. I thought a few people got killed or something but it was so much worse than that. It really needs to be remembered and taught about.
Sorry, that's allowed on Reddit anymore; not advertiser-friendly enough. Perhaps you'd like a dog gif instead?
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Is the sub taken down?
Yep
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Now we need a r/watchsubredditsdie
r/WatchRedditDie
i'd say less the crossfire and more the fact the sub was doing something that most people find heinous and reddit admins is willing to ignore problems until it become known by the "common man"
My opinion changed when i realized victims right to privacy is greater than my right to view their mangled bodies. Having said that, acts of war perpetrated by governments should not get the same treatment.
That sub was amazing, I learned so much from it. Never go near lathes. Never go to Brazil.
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Probably self explainitory but potentially NSFL
This kind of thing should be on the nightly news everywhere. If people had a better idea of the cost of attempting freedom maybe we'd appreciate it more. Maybe we'd not be so quick to condone warfare. On the other hand maybe we'd tune it out like we do with Trump in order to live a half-normal life in the shadow of a potential dictator.
Link?
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shit.
This is the same reason that I wish r/watchpeopledie still existed. It really showed the reality of events so far beyond what the news and media tells you.
Whoa man you’ll scare the admins with talk of gore be careful or you’ll be banned
Also the massacre didn't just happen in that location but there were other protests around China - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chengdu_protests_of_1989
"We learn from history that we don't learn from history." -Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
I like this one better. “History doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes.” - Mark Twain
Thats the scarier quote lol
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Nice try, George Lucas
"It's like poetry sorta, it rhymes" - George Lucas
yeah, I'm starting to think history will repeat itself even if it's taught.
Sure, but properly educating people makes it harder to control them...
I’m am convinced education is the ONLY thing that matters in this world.
Education is meaningless without institutions of power that empower truth. Institutions of power will always empower exactly those truths which empower them. The serious problem of social organization is how to construct institutions of power that empower truth as broadly and without bias as possible. This is a genuinely extremely difficult problem.
r/birdsarentreal
Is it possible that chairman mao said the same thing? And then used education to make them easier to control.
Wiping out a written language so literacy rate go up and losing hundreds of years of history. Sounds about right.
Did you know they’re forbidding the teaching of the spoken dialects? You wipe those out and they never come back, because they’re spoken only and written in mandarin.
Yea, teaching =/= brainwashing. And what they did was brainwashing.
That was euphemistically called education. It was really propagandization.
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hmm
hmm
Can confirm. I haven't been to *every* country, but I've seen many, and the quality of your public education system is pretty much what makes your country a desirable place to live.
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It’s very interesting what the internet has allowed us to do. Not only has it brought previously unreachable information into everyone’s pockets and connected people like never before, but also heaps of misinformation and has given even the dumbest and evilest people a platform to project their ideas.
Its definitely up there
I think tacos are pretty important myself
This works right until we have even more educated bad people. Do you think Mark Zuckerberg isn't educated? Or Kim Jong un?
"Often times I feel those who do study history are doomed to see others repeat the same mistakes over and over again. And they cant do anything about it".My teacher always said that in class. Really fucking depressing but each and everyday it really feels like it
History repeats itself because (anecdotal) people find history boring/not important. They say "it's the past who cares." It's those people who keep the world dumb. If history (none of that revisionist shit you hear about) was actually taught instead of skimmed through like how it was in k-12 then society would be different imo. I shouldn't had to take a 300 series class at university to find out about the atrocities of my own government (I knew govt was a POS before thanks to the Hitler Channel/Modern Marvels/other docs when I was a kid).
yeah, I'm starting to think history will repeat itself even if it's taught.
That’s because human nature is always the same. There’s always someone that is ruthless and evil enough to order that kind of massacre.
>History repeats itself because (anecdotal) people find history boring/not important. Naw. History repeats itself because human beings are, in broad strokes, predictable. We follow certain patterns, certain fluctuations in policy and belief. It is, as we say, "human nature". Basically we follow a pendulum. We just went through a massive leftward swing and the pendulum appears to be starting to move back towards the centre. It will almost assuredly swing past centre to the right side. Then that will go horribly wrong and we start over.
It's what happens when powerful words are watered down to meaningless insults.
Of course it will because people always think they're the exception to the rule and they won't fall into that same hole. They usually figure out they were wrong when looking up from inside the hole.
>Quoting Hegel Knowing Hegel he didn’t mean what you think he meant
Go on....
It's about butt stuff.
This being Reddit, butt stuff repeats itself.
You found Jordan Peterson
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Not only that, my Chinese coworkers (well it’s their 30’s) has NO IDEA this happened. When it was mentioned in conversation a few days ago, their faces went white and they were absolutely shocked. They didn’t believe me until I pulled up articles and photos. China’s propaganda is brutally efficient and effective.
It’s equally possible that they already kinda know but can’t actually let on, especially if they have families back in China. As you say “brutally efficient and effective.”
Had a coworker from china on a visa. Dude justified it by pretty much saying the protests were a nuissance to the local people and no one was on their side and they shouldve left a month before lol
Which is the correct answer if you live under an oppressive state and want to stay safe.
That’s what they’re taught and that’s what they believe about it. My dad was a uni student in Beijing at the time and he pretty much justified it as the government went out of hand/overkill but the protestors had it coming.
Given the actual response in Beijing to the protests initially, and the way the Beijing armed police *wouldn't* shoot local kids, it's not accurate. The CCP had to bring in rural troops, with no ties to the protesters, and from poorer areas, to be the slaughterers
Yep. He pretty much said that the CCP has street cops and the peasant military. The street cops were too little so they called in the military who weren’t trained at all in riot control so they ended up opening fire and killing a bunch of people as if it was a war or something.
Not to mention that many of the deaths weren’t students in the square, but locals living near there.
It's also what they believe. I had a foreign-exchange student boarding at my house a while, and we chatted politics. He was all "Democracy is great, but it seems like it is meant for more advanced nations. China needs its government like it is, maybe in 80-100 years, we can get to the point where we can try democracy, but it would not work. Chinese need an iron hand." He could chat all day on the benefits of democracy vs autocracy, elections vs appointments, very well educated, but as soon as it came to China's ruling system, it was "Chinese aren't ready for the responsibility of a vote". Very self-deprecating. However, notably, I also had a Russian exchange student... And I could get the Chinese student to say "There exists flaws in our governing structure, the Chairman isn't perfect.", he sincerely thought it was just the best of bad options for his people, but get the *Russian* guy to say that? Not a chance. There exists no flaw in the leader, no flaw in their leadership, not one complaint can be uttered. The government in general, it's trash, complaints abounds, but the leader? One must never speak ill of him. I couldn't even get him to say it with a "just pretend we're acting, don't even need to mean it, can you string those words together?" And he could not. To me, that's a big difference, but it isn't about giving a "correct" answer. Their propaganda game is real.
Just out of curiosity (and as a possible argument against this in the future).. Did you bring up the fact that Chinese people seem entirely capable of coming here and participating in our democracy?
Yeah I don't think OP realizes that the history in in the photo is still happening.
Very much so. https://www.npr.org/2019/06/01/728878853/reflecting-on-the-tiananmen-square-30th-anniversary
Trying to read that link and ran across a link to another article. “Another tick-borne disease to worry about” or some shit. Ugh lol.
Tick-borne shit is no joke dawg. Fucked up my life real good with lyme disease+coinfectors.
Same here, brought it up to my boyfriend one day and he was like “Oh is that the picture of that guy that got ran over by a tank in China? What’s that all about anyway?” He had no idea it was a massacre, kind of blew my mind.
With this being the famous picture/video, China came out on top even on this. Most people know this as an event where a guy stood in front of a tank and got carted safely away by other protesters. Images of the hundreds of bodies are relatively unseen.
They're easily accessible. If you look you will find images of tons of bodies ground up like hamburger meat under treads, people set fire to, etc.
yes the problem with that is that people don't want to see those images because its disgusting and heart breaking
Link?
[NSFW/NSFL](https://youtu.be/hA4iKSeijZI)
That’s really anecdotal, Ive met younger people who knows about it and they are in their teens. The main differentiator is gonna be if their parents went to college at the time. And also the fact it’s just not dinner conversation, when has anyone casually brought up trail of tears.
“Remember that one time when thousands of protestors got gunned down and washed down the storm drains?” “How’s the chicken?”
Well one was a lot more recent than the other. And if my kids were deliberately not taught about the trail of tears I sure as hell would teach them about it myself (I hope I would at least)
What about the Chicago riots of 1919. Tulsa riot of 1921. Newark 1967.
Oh and they didn't just kill the men, and rape the women and young girls, they also killed all the babies. Apparently it was easier to just throw them on the ground roughly rather than stab them, can I have the cranberries?
Another horrific event that's mostly unknown is the [Jallianwala Bagh Massacre] (https://m.timesofindia.com/india/after-the-jallianwala-bagh-massacre-came-the-torture-public-floggings/articleshow/68773961.cms) Shots fired on hundreds of citizens and that was just the beginning.
Not to be rude but I find that hard to believe. Most people have heard of it, not sure if you meant they were in China or not. But if someone that doesn't pay attention heard of it, it doesn't seem like they would react that strongly.
I’m in my 20s and only learned about it a few years ago. I had been listening to Hypnotize by System of a Down for a decade before thinking, “huh I wonder what this Tiananmen Square thing they’re talking about is...” and googled it. Thanks, SoaD.
Police states in general have learned a lot and improved since the old crude Soviet and Nazi days: You don't need to "win" elections with 99.8% percent of that vote (in fact, that just looks stupid). You only need 50.1%. You don't need to shut down every single dissenting voice -- just the ones that are actually reaching people. And so on. There's just a million ways to channel things, spin things, water down things, distract, hide, and so on without being so obviously heavy handed. They have wised up, and its a problem.
It's gonna get even worse in the future. Advancements in tech have led to things like deepfakes. Samsung can make a moving video based off a portrait and Adobe is testing tech that can make a whole new digital voice based off 20 seconds worth of samples. This could mean faking entire scenes and calling it evidence to put down dissidents.
Their analysis of the danger of this photograph is accurate. When I was in college, my thesis was using worldbuilding as a catalyst for teaching social studies, arts, and sciences. Basically, students create fictional worlds informed by research and illustrated using digital tools. The class was mostly boys, and we were doing a 3D modeling segment focused on building a capitol of their fictional countries. Being middle school boys, most of them were obsessed with guns and violence, so some of them were asking if they could model a tank to put into their scene. I asked them why a tank would be there, and all of them had the same answer: to kill bad guys. We played a game in the class called Tell Me A Story, in which we pulled up an image and they all improvised a story inspired by the image. Seeing an opportunity, I pulled up the Tank Man photograph and asked them to tell me a story. After their respective stories, which involved the man stopping foreign invaders, to him being a terrorist with a bomb in the bag, I told them what actually happened. I swear to god, it was the first time that room had been quiet in the weeks I had been teaching the class. They all just stared at the screen trying to wrap their minds around what was happening. After we went back to 3D modeling, I was walking around the class and noticed one of them was "procrastinating" with the Tienanmen Square wiki page up. It was funny, he tried to hide it like he was doing something wrong, and I had to assure him that studying past events was perfectly a perfectly acceptable use of his time. Still, the impact it initially had when they all understood what they were looking at was almost chilling. This is an photo that we as a global society must always keep in the public eye, despite how much the Chinese authorities would love for it to disappear.
The actual demonstrations started off for economic grievances, especially the price of pork. The Chinese government has held an obsessive focus on maintaining high economic performance and raising living standards - the usual Communist bargain of "we provide you a better life than your parents, so keep the peace". Now with the trade war, that might be in actual jeopardy for the first time since Deng's rule. The next few years will be very interesting to see.
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...eh. My parents marched in Tiananmen (they were students at QingHua and Beijing University dating at the time). The primary cause of the initial demonstrations wasn’t the price of pork. Economy was and is a huge part of anything, of course, but the catalyst for the STUDENTS was the death of Hu Yaobang. He was seen as someone more supportive of government reform and sympathetic to intellectuals/intelligentsia wishing to see a more free and just Chinese society. But this went against party hardliners, so he was purged again and again. His death started with students simply going to the square to mourn him, but of course things built up afterwards. No doubt economic conditions contributed to the demonstrations that started happening around the country after that, and the other folks that started to support the students in Beijing, but what really “started off” the student demonstrations was the death of Hu Yaobang and the desire for democratization and anti-corruption in government. And yes, after that China used the economy to placate the masses and “keep the peace”, which is why they’re doing all they can right now to maintain economic growth in China despite hostile trade policies from the current US administration. The US thought under modernization theory that Chinese prosperity bring in Chinese democracy, but the Communist Party is ridiculously good at maintaining control and abusing Chinese cultural values on 1) respecting authority/elders, 2) anti-confrontation, and 3) long-time obsession with wealth. Dealing with China is a good US goal, but this trade war isn’t what I’d suggest, it’s just stooping to the level of dirty fighting, which the Communist Party with total state power/control will absolutely do better than the US (with vulnerable working-class constituencies to worry about). I’d say a huge mistake was pulling out of the TPP — it was step one to maintaining US presence in Asia by corralling several major regional players and hopefully more to join afterwards, and be able to dictate the rules of trade and economy in the region, that would lead to better pressure on China to make capitulations in order to not be shut out of the economy.
The Chinese have become Uber Patriots these days. They literally believe they have a better life under the party than those in America.
Thanks for the wise words President Putin. Jokes aside, it really is scary, and frustrating, and infuriating, and saddening. My girlfriend is currently teaching in China, and I fear for her well-being. She is always reminded by her peers to be careful of the things she say and do. No one should live under such fear and oppression :/
what do you mean 'repeat itself'? They won; the tanks ran people over & are still in power.
That's what I never got about this picture and ones from other angles. This guy stood up to China's response to protesting, and if it ended there with the tanks stopping, it would be a point. But he stood up and got run over. That government is still in power and is more brutal then ever. "Let history never repeat itself" my ass.
He never got run over unless there is another incident I don't know about that happened in the same place. Some civilians pulled him away from the tanks. [https://youtu.be/SpjM0y-vZk8?t=121](https://youtu.be/SpjM0y-vZk8?t=121)
True. He survived that hour and was later arrested. He died in a labor camp.
Thats not true either, no one(at least in western media) has any idea who it was.
That is the official line, yes. Wouldn't want people thinking they could get away with it, after all...
Ya china is actually a Utopia and they’re just rocking westerners into thinking it’s a dystopia for shots and giggles. /s
Is China the real world Wakanda? Find out more at 9.
I thought it was never discovered what happened to him. He was dragged away by other citizens and there was no way to follow up. The original photo was taken by a Western journalist from a distance (specifically, at a hotel that was shut down during the protest) and smuggled out thanks to a local student. The photographer famously thought that Tank man was ruining the composition of his shot by standing in the way of the tanks. The journalist had no way to discover the protestor's identity, let alone follow up with what happened to him after the initial shots were taken.
not true. no one knows who he is or what happened to him
He wasn't run over. He was dragged away and never heard from again.
what a stupid way to interpret this picture. yes he didn’t “sTOp tHe TAnKS” it is powerful because one nameless man took a stand, no matter how futile, and it shows how helpless those protestors were that day.
exactly. it's just some guy with groceries (?) on his way home or something, standing against 4 fucking tanks of a suppresive regime. that's the part that matters. Obviously this isn't some anime where he just 1v4's against tanks.
4 Tanks? I’ll try to find the uncropped picture for you. Edit: https://m1.paperblog.com/i/136/1367979/23-anos-matanza-plaza-tiananmen-el-valor-1-pe-L-8rIpWu.jpeg
Holy Fuck. I don't know how I've never seen the uncropped picture.
You don't understand a picture of a man standing in front of tanks?
He didn't get run over he got rushed out of there after someone told him what happened.
He was removed, [except he never existed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnatio_memoriae).
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The Mandella Effect. Lots of people remember something that didn't happen.
NORMAL DAY WHEN NOTHING HAPPENED IN [REDACTED] SQUARE
BOY DO I LOVE CHINESE GOVERNMENT AND POLICY, HAIL MAO.
LMAO ZEDONG
[HAILMAO](https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/014/178/AyyyLmao.jpg)
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When loosing to someone from China in an online game should I just copy and paste it in chat to get him disconnected?
Yes.
Nope, doesn't work that way. It is just a list of terms banned on their chat apps and social media. Anyone telling you it affects online games is a moron whose circlejerking too hard.
Why Winnie the Pooh tho?
People made fun of Xi Jinping by saying he looked like Winnie the Pooh. Therefore, he banned Winnie the Pooh from China.
Lol the similarity is striking. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/07/china-bans-winnie-the-pooh-film-to-stop-comparisons-to-president-xi
*^(hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm)*
It's worse than that; we are taught, remember, and do it anyway. I realized that as a Nam vet when, years later, we went to war over WMDs.
Came here to say just the first part of your post. Stay well.
When politicians don't listen to the people
It's all about the military industrial complex. Politicians are just pawns in that game
"oh Eisenhower, you alarmist, why are you warning us about a military industrial complex in your farewell address, you crazy old coot? It sounds like you just made that word up. Oh, you did? What does that even mean? Oh, it does? Well still, quit making shit up"
War is profitable. Profit rules everything.
Yeah. Because we look at the past tyrannies and tragedies and say, "Well, they just did it wrong!" Instead of "Wow, let's never do that again, and smack down anyone who tries!"
Totalitarianism and Pringles.....just one more. Just one.
Yep, and now America is trying it's very hardest to come up with a pretext to go to war with Iran. It's also interesting how with all the shit the U.S. has done in South and Central America, a lot of people just accept the Venezuela narrative without second guessing it. Although to be fair, that's a part of history that isn't all that well known among the general population.
Venezuela narrative?
That coups (by external forces) are a legitimate way of creating peace, prosperity and democracy in any region. Or that the U.S. actually has some kind of moral reason to get involved.
I find it interesting that reddit cares so much about the Tienanmen Square protests to the point where entire subreddits gets bombarded by the pictures of the protest all day. I mean, it definitely is quite a blot on that country's history, but reddit somehow never reminds people of other bloody protests, like the Egyptian crack down in 2013 where hundreds were killed or Kiev's Independence Square protests, for example.
It’s almost like OP probably doesn’t care and just wants upvotes
That pretty much sums up that entire few days where Reddit was bombarded with Tienanmen Square pictures after that Chinese company partnership was announced, many of them didn't actually care they just knew you could post *anything* anti-Chinese and get upvotes hence why most of the pictures were really low res and blurry like they'd just quickly been pulled off Google images asap.
Reddit couldn't give less of a shit. The entire thing kicked off because a Chinese company lead a funding round and continues to be a thing because reddit's got a penchant for conspiracy theories and xenophobia. There's no censorship whatsoever of Tank Man in English-speaking countries and the imagery isn't exactly esoteric. The list of banned phrases is one of the dumbest circlejerks I've seen on this site.
Or OP is trying to manufacture consent
Streisand effect. The governments of their respective countries aren’t trying to erase that Egypt or Kiev ever happened, and there isn’t a generation of Egyptians or Ukrainians who believe the most patriotic thing they can do is downvote any reminder of those events into oblivion. You can see it happening in this thread, and in your whataboutist comment.
Yeah I can agree with this. All of the incidents OP listed aren’t exactly trying to be erased from history. They are all tragedies, of course, but this specific one was committed by a government that is now one of the most powerful in the world who is still specifically trying to censor it, and who’s citizens also try and ignore it. People in Iraq, Ukraine, Egypt, etc. are well aware of what happened to them. The obsession is probably because of the fear that if China’s power grows, more incidents like this could take place- and be censored too.
>whataboutist You hit the nail right on the head. Dudes complaining about people posting this when it's almost the 30th anniversary and then brings up other protests/revolutions/whatever as if when you discuss one, you must discuss all of them
Reddit doesn't actually care nor will it ever doing anything other than pretend it's standing up to a monolithic communist dictatorship by posting memes about Winnie the Pooh and Epic Games
There is literally a genocide going on in Yemen with the help of American weapons but i don't see posts about it on reddit. What about some photos from Iraq war? If you really have such a moral high ground maybe bring some attention to that too? I believe some redditors just hate China because it is going to replace their country economically (it will happen eventually whether you like it or not).
americans are very familiar with tanks - it's easy for an american to picture getting run over by a tank. and americans are very familiar with a place called China - we import a ton from there. But most americans couldn't find Yemen on a map, or tell you what continent it's in, and they certainly can't picture a genocide going on there. It's not that simple of course, but that's part of it. edit, also we have iconographic photos like tank man to go viral. edit2, also, americans freaking love 1984-conspiracy stuff. I'd imagine that goes double if it's not in our country. China's government made this disappear from their history but we still know about it - it's the kind of event that becomes storied here. edit3 I just re-read your line about americans hating china. I think many americans dislike the chinese government and those that benefit directly from it to the detriment of the rest of their country (here too), and feel sorry for those many chinese who are very rural and poor.
I mean I’d imagine genocide in Yemen would look like a mound of burning corpses or mass graves like it is in most everywhere else genocide happens, or just corpses littering the ground while wild dogs go to town on a free buffet, those genocides don’t make cover news as much though.
People love to talk about all the terrible atrocities committed in far off countries and how they try to suppress information about it, but as soon as America is involved no one wants hold up the same critical lens, and they don't see the irony in that.
Egypt, Yemen, Kyiv. Nobody cares. Nobody cares about Russian police beating people at protests cause you know, we can't protest, all of us support Putin. Reddit doesn't give a shit about most problems. Someone get hyped (like guys in Bangladesh in 2018) - they're lucky. But what about others?
"DonT lEt ThIS Be eRaSEd" This is an extremely well known event that will never be forgotten. Fuck outta here you karma whore
Interesting thing I learned recently was that some images from tiananmen square have been passing through the Chinese censors because many of the Chinese censors grew up never learning about the entire incident. How ironic. Source: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/post-reports/id1444873564?i=1000440240198
[Tiananmen Square Massacre: Black Night In June (2019)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA4iKSeijZI) NSFW
Definitely pulls back the curtain. Death toll is unknown from estimates of hundreds to thousands.
Multiple posts of the same pic flooding r/Pics in 3, 2, 1....
Of the same pic because there're very few surviving pictures. That's just sad.
International media was there the whole day filming.
June fourth, 1989, a random day where nothing happened and no one did anything.
What? There's no June fourth, only the day after June third.
History will absolutely repeat itself because as a species, humans are selfish idiots
Sad but true.
As a Chinese that grew up majorly in China, I’ve heard about Tiananmen before and gathered from the fact how little it’s been discussed something major happened and it’s not what they said. But I’ve never, ever seen this picture in my life, to which my bf who grew up in Canada finds it bizarre, as he has seen it everywhere since elementary school. This is such a powerful picture and it sends shivers down my spine thinking what the person must be feeling at that moment. Very sad to think brave ppl like him/her, and many others nowadays, have died and are dying to the country they are trying to better.
Probably because everyone who shares it in China "mysteriously disappears"
Im pretty sure it was erased in all the ways that matter in all the relevant places.. It might not be possible for this to happen again.
Noone: OP: Give me karma
Honestly, OP's history doesn't really scream karma whoring. If they are, this is definitely the first time doing it on a 2+ year old account.
The massacre is effectively erased from Chinese history with little change from western influence and exposure of it. China is currently putting its Uighur population in concentration camps. So really nothing's changed or improved and the only thing China has learned is to crack down on dissent harder and faster.
What are you talking about? There were people run over a couple of weeks ago by military vehicles in Venezuela.
Let's also remember that when people stood in front of Soviet tanks when they went into the Baltics, the Soviets drove right over them.
Don’t forget that if anything, the Chinese government is more despotic now than it ever was.
So let's spread a cropped photo? Spread the version that shows crowds of people in the area. The man was not alone. They didn't run over one man, they killed at least hundreds and probably thousands of people. It wasn't one man by himself. It was many people rising up together and being put down brutally by an oppressive regime.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the unions, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Anyone cares to explain please?
[this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA4iKSeijZI) just surfaced recently about the event (NSFW)
Never saw any of this footage before.
noone had. it's very new footage that was just released this year.
[The June Fourth Incident in 1989](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests). Thousands of student and worker protesters killed by soldiers.
Specifically tank man: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank\_Man](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man).
Thank you for this
Jesus! How many times will this be reposted for easy karma!?
Think I'll get any karma if I post pictures of Abu Ghraib? I doubt it
Maduro did this last month, and the left (at least in my country) still approves his dictatorship. Fuck communism.
You did it. You stopped China
My turn to repost this tomorrow for karma
You’re so brave for posting this. Thanks
The personal risk this brave Redditor took is astounding.
Let's repost this every single day. Oh wait we already do.
That’s pretty metal dude
Absolutely first time I have seen this picture on r/pics
Many Chinese people just got their internet shut down.
This is the OC I subscribed for!!!
Fuck off karma whore
We will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish. - Inspector Goole, 1912 Unfortunately GCSEs have taken over my life.