To be crystal clear, the PRC does not view Tiananmen Square as a purely domestic affair. The extent to which students were radicalized, or signal-boosted by foreign influence is unclear.
In that sense, a better comparison would be an event in America's history that had significant foreign interference. For example, 9/11. You can talk objectively about 9/11, sure, just like you can talk objectively about Tiananmen Square in China. However, you absolutely cannot publicly glorify 9/11 and side with al-Qaeda. That will put you on watch lists and be socially shunned to the point of never getting hired by any company that can view your online comments.
They machine gunned and steam rolled their own people by the thousands. Used road equipment to make them into a giant “meat pie” (British ambassador’s description) soaked the sea of mangled corpses in gas and lit it on fire. Then they drove over it repeatedly and washes the body parts and ashes down the drain.
This is not a two sides issue. It doesn’t matter if the students were radicalized etc. the Chinese Govt murdered thousands of people who questioned it. Completely barbaric system of govt but in line with their current use of slave labor and concentration camps.
Yes, eye witness accounts. Thousands of families whose children never came home. Widely available photos online. The smoking gun that you aren’t allowed to talk about it.
I have talked to people who saw it. Similar to how we can still talk to holocaust survivors. Maybe they are all lying. But the motive seems unclear and the testimonies are corroborated by others.
That's also against the site guidelines, and actually worse than the GP provocation I replied to, because two piling on is already the seed of a mob. We don't want that dynamic on HN at all. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Any criticism of Xi at all will suffice. And there is mountains of evidence about the thousands of innocent protesters that died that day, despite the attempts of an authoritarian government to prevent the truth from being known.
I'm not sure what to make of this comparison. You're not sure the extent to which foreign influence played a role in radicalizing people leading up to an event where Chinese citizens were massacred by the Chinese state, so it's fair to compare it to a situation where foreign nationals murdered US civilians? This is apples and oranges. Apples and Teslas. Dogs and supercomputers. They're not the same thing.
> just like you can talk objectively about Tiananmen Square in China
Citation needed. Even researching Tiananmen Square in China gets you on watchlists.
There is substantial evidence that Washington was involved in amplifying misinformation and possibly directing student leaders to escalate the violence. Take student leader Chai Ling, for example [1]. She is on record advocating for bloodshed, yet apparently did not take part in the deadly rioting. Instead, she landed at Princeton and Harvard.
The sad truth is that most Americans have no interest in understanding what really happened that week, beyond reinforcing our ideological biases. We accept propagandistic claims of "organized massacre" when "chaotic, deadly riot" is far more accurate. There are pictures of charred government soldier corpses, burned alive in their vehicles. That simply does not happen in a one-sided massacre. Meanwhile, there is a suspicious lack of any photographic evidence of organized executions and other characteristics of a massacre.
In that sense, a better comparison would be an event in America's history that had significant foreign interference. For example, 9/11. You can talk objectively about 9/11, sure, just like you can talk objectively about Tiananmen Square in China. However, you absolutely cannot publicly glorify 9/11 and side with al-Qaeda. That will put you on watch lists and be socially shunned to the point of never getting hired by any company that can view your online comments.