Residents gather next to burnt-out tanks in the aftermath of the crackdown (via CNN)
Last year was the 25th anniversary of the “June 4 Incident,” as it is officially known. State security went full bore over the ultra-sensitive date, harassing journalists and activists, detaining anyone who sneezed on the subject.
They succeeded in maintaining the collective amnesia in-house, earned their bonuses and overtime, but in doing so, trolled foreign media so hard that the blowback was intense. I don’t know how much coverage was originally intended, but several journalist friends indicated they’d been so royally pissed off with the constant intimidation, their editors were all but sounding the bugle on the topic. Coverage was wall to wall, with stories everywhere.
This year, of course, will be much quieter: 26 isn’t as catchy as 25. But Global Times hasn’t forgotten, and duly produces a bungled editorial on the subject, attacking – and casually libeling – a group of overseas students for writing an open letter, requesting transparency over the crackdown. Here’s the closing paragraph:
Chinese society has reached a consensus on not debating the 1989 incident. Students born in the 1980s and 1990s have become the new targets of overseas hostile forces. When China is moving forward, some are trying to drag up history in an attempt to tear apart society. It’s a meaningless attempt and is unlikely to be realized.
Frankly, the rest of the rant isn’t worth the click. Moreover, there is really little point to GT’s article (even less so than usual, that is). No mainstream outlet had even reported on the letter prior to the editorial. The first was the Guardian, which published its article shortly before midnight a day later, referencing GT in the third graf.
If Streisand Effect was the intention of the trolling, so be it. There aren’t any other logical reasons for flagging the date by turning the full glare of the Batshit Signal on this group of 11 Chinese students while accusing them, ad hominem, of being “brainwashed” by a “paranoid minority” in an “attempt to tear society apart.” (Just because they’re “paranoid,” GT, doesn’t mean the government isn’t out to get them.)
It’s telling how an authoritarian apparatus that has engineered a culture of amnesia and self-censorship is, itself, quite incapable of either. Like a sinner with a guilty conscience, GT can’t help running its own mouth. An annual hit-piece on Tiananmen has become almost as symbolic and ritualistic as the candlelit gathering in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park. Rather than memorializing the victims, though, it simply serves to shame the perpetrators.
UPDATE: The shambles continues with an order from the goon squad to “urgently delete the Global Times commentary.” So dignified.
Every year they have a new meme to push out. A couple years ago they were claiming that no one was killed in the incident at all! Guess how that went. Yup, not a one person changed their understanding.
Someone had been able to insert a personal account into a fairly prominent blog (it was like a uni’s media department blog, like Cornell or similar) where the writer said he hadn’t seen any bloodshed while in BJ on those days, so therefore no one was shot, and multiple sockpuppets were pushing out the link. Which is bad logic but what do you want from the propaganda monkeys?
Last year they were claiming that, well, no one was killed in the square itself, which is also a lie and which also got zero traction. So they are getting more realistic apparently, if still deeply, deeply stupid.
Its funny how they constantly say, well no one in China cares about this, while all the time they are urgently working to prevent the history, their history from being seen. Yeah, guess that’s not a hot issue anymore.
What’s really sad is that they continue to harrass the mothers and activists involved, to this day. 25 years of semi-constant harrassment, over an issue no one cares about supposedly. Some people are required to leave BJ, others are prevented from leaving their house, still others are just followed around every day.
This is the best part of the shitty GT “analysis”:
“The open letter claimed that the post-1980s and post-1990s generations in the mainland have been fooled and they couldn’t get to know the “truth” of the 1989 Tiananmen incident until they moved abroad to study, where they can get unlimited access to the Internet. However, it’s well-known that Internet censorship cannot prevent people acquiring sensitive information from overseas websites.”
So, you see, even though we work (admittedly, mind you) actively to repress this info, because vpns (which we have banned) exist and because someone could get this info, in other words, because our efforts are so impractical and impossible to successfully complete, so it means all our efforts are not enough to fool the students and prevent them from knowing…
So, I admittedly don’t want Jonathan to go watch a band. I slash his bike tire, call his boss and try to get him fired, tell some lie to his gf in the hopes she will ask him not to go to the show, and so on, but if there is any possible way he could get there, then my actions cannot be said to “prevent” his attendance.
That’s their argument. Man those fuckers have no brains or balls either.
Who are you?
You don’t know me and I, you. I live in SH and never even heard of you till we got into it here on this blog
“Last year they were claiming that, well, no one was killed in the square itself, which is also a lie”
RhZ, You may want to take a read.http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/the_myth_of_tiananmen.php?page=all
“The problem is this: as far as can be determined from the available evidence, no one died that night in Tiananmen Square.”
I grew up with the idea that the 1989 protests were a group of students who went out one day to demonstrate and got machine-gunned. I was quite surprised to find out that wasn’t true.
Ha you found the *one* link they were pushing, thanks for that!
Yes the one piece of data convinces you, good for you. One guy says he didn’t see anyone killed, therefore no one was killed.
Just don’t read, you know, all the eyewitness accounts that do include murder by the army. Here is a good place to start: http://www.scmp.com/infographics/article/1523692/tiananmen-crackdown-china-eyewitness-accounts?page=all
The evidence of the killings cannot be avoided, only surpressed. And the mothers are still surpressed to this day, 25+ years of harrassment, for what…
Another personal account, there are many many more:
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2014/05/29/eyewitness-views-from-hope-to-horror-in-tiananmen-square/
I suppose they could all be lies! Lies from overseas forces, yes that’s the ticket!
And then you could hang your hat on one account that simply says I didn’t see it so it must not have happened…good luck with that.
There’s also this:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8555142/Wikileaks-no-bloodshed-inside-Tiananmen-Square-cables-claim.html
There are two mistakes in your rebuttal: the first is your assumption that the article I quoted talks solely from a personal perspective about events witnessed by the author. It doesn’t, it talks of how media claims of a massacre inside Tiananmen Square turned out to be factually inaccurate afterwards. The author is one of those who promoted the original version of events.
Your second mistake is in assuming that the sources you’re attempting to ‘rebutt’ with support the claim that a massacre was conducted within Tiananmen Square. They don’t, they support the idea that the killing happened elsewhere in the city for other reasons. Exactly as the article I posted says it did.
The *one* article that seems to support the govt position:
“The problem is this: as far as can be determined from the available evidence, no one died that night in Tiananmen Square.
A few people may have been killed by random shooting on streets near the square…
Many victims were shot by soldiers on stretches of Changan Jie…it should be added, a few soldiers were beaten or burned to death by angry workers.
Most of the hundreds of foreign journalists that night, including me, were in other parts of the city or were removed from the square so that they could not witness the final chapter of the student story.
For example, CBS correspondent Richard Roth’s story of being arrested and removed from the scene refers to “powerful bursts of automatic weapons, raging gunfire for a minute and a half that lasts as long as a nightmare.” Black and Munro quote a Chinese eyewitness who says the gunfire was from army commandos shooting out the student loudspeakers at the top of the monument. A BBC reporter watching from a high floor of the Beijing Hotel said he saw soldiers shooting at students at the monument in the center of the square. But as the many journalists who tried to watch the action from that relatively safe vantage point can attest, the middle of the square is not visible from the hotel.
A common response to this corrective analysis is: So what? The Chinese army killed many innocent people that night.
The problem is not so much putting the murders in the wrong place, but suggesting that most of the victims were students.
Black and Munro say “what took place was the slaughter not of students but of ordinary workers and residents — precisely the target that the Chinese government had intended.”
They argue that the government was out to suppress a rebellion of workers, who were much more numerous and had much more to be angry about than the students. This was the larger story that most of us overlooked or underplayed.”
Just to be clear this last part is the thesis of the paper, that the killed were residents and workers and the nature of the uprising was different.
So, the square was potentially free of the carnage, *based on the available evidence*, but there was carnage within the city. Slaughter, the article states. If that makes you feel better, then great.
I don’t know whether to attack this or praise it. It starts saying, oh maybe just a *few* people were killed randomly…then admits that soldiers killed people, which eventually turns to “slaughter”. It focuses on the lack of evidence, and so I guess we will wait for the holder of the most evidence, the government, to release all the evidence so that the ‘truth can be known’. Right? We all support the government to come clean, or is it just them crazy hostile foreign forces, yet again?
Why this still matters is that the government is still rounding up people left and right. Many TAM mothers are regularly harrassed, they just grabbed an artist from Shanghai the other day and censored his name, and the injustice just mounts and mounts. If nothing happened that night, then there would be no reason for all this censorship and harrassment surrounding those events, now wouldn’t you think?
This article is quite a joke and a bad one at that. The writer literally says, I wasn’t there but I didn’t see anything therefore there is no evidence of it, and even that is just whether the square itself saw murder, hardly the most helpful thesis. The writer couterposes what a foreign journalist reported and then provides a Chinese alternative and simply…expects us to favor one over the other. From a journalistic viewpoint it is incredible to say, ‘I wasn’t there but let me tell you what didn’t happen’.
If you read the TAM papers you would know the students were indeed driven out of the square through intimidation rather than raw violence. But how the square being free of violence helps reduce the guilt of the government is a mystery to me.
You began your contribution by stating as a matter of fact that the government claim no students were killed was a lie. That is untrue and the article is linking various pieces of evidence form someone collated by someone originally involved in promoting that untruth.
It is far from “the one article” that recognises historic facts of June 1989. The PBS documentary Tank Man has eye witness accounts of the clearing of the square, including western journalists present. It’s here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0gD523fwU8 and the relevant ppart is from 25 mins. These were people who were there and saw events unfold.
The article I linked makes the point explicitly (and you’ve quoted the bit that did) that the killings happened but happened elsewhere. It can hardly be accused of covering anything up in that regard, especially not just because it refutes what “everyone knows” about 1989.
The facts about what happened are important, not just for historic reasons (“truth”, if you will) but because failing to grasp *what* happened means the *why* can never be understood. That’s a disservice to those who did die resisting the PLA’s entry to Beijing. They were not “pro-democracy” campaigners, if such a thing ever really existed at that time. They were ordinary people doing an extraordinary thing, made more extraordinary for the fact (there’s that word again) that they were not the scions of Party members or nouveau riche businessmen and were not enjoying a privileged existence in universities.
The version of events that you began by asserting as “fact” is nothing of the sort. It’s a myth peddled on the basis of political expedience, journalistic laziness and a willingness to believe the worst because it just ‘felt’ so true.
Wow you are all over the place. Let’s try to break this down.
1. I am all for a proper accounting of the events. The TAM papers is a good place to start. If the square itself really was not the site of any killing, then great, I don’t know how that really changes things, but whatever. The slaughter was in the streets not the square, according to your author who admits he wasn’t there. “There was no Tiananmen Square massacre, but there was a Beijing massacre”. If that is your point then fine.
Again, the students were pushed out of the square that night, and then when the murder was over (be that of residents or students) the arrests began, and many fled rather than be arrested and possibly tortured and murdered. (Truth is important, right?)
2. The article says nothing that “no students were killed”, and can’t defend your statement in this regard. The TAM mothers exist because some students were killed, and certainly others were arrested and imprisoned for daring to challenge the party. Nothing in the paper supports that statement of yours, not even slightly.
3. I think the huge Goddess of Democracy is pretty strong support that there were democracy campaigners at TAM at that time.
4. You have no cause to claim that the student protestors were simply children of party members and “nouveau riche businessmen” (quite a lot of those in 1989, right). While I am sure given the persistent corruption of the party that indeed many *students* were children of party members, that is not to say the *protesters* had the same makeup. What a sick little way to criticize the students as elites. You do know the elites killed and imprisoned those people for asking for some rights and freedoms, don’t you? So apparently one group of elites are pampered while another are glorious leaders.
Its also funny that you would say a “privileged existence in universities”, wow those students in 1989 had it great, didn’t they. A whole cot to themselves, with only 7 roommates per room! What luxury! I wonder, by comparison, how Li Peng was living back then. Pretty spartan existence, right? No bank accounts in HK building up wealth, right, at least not yet haha. Although I just read that he did have enough wealth to spirit his granddaughter out of the country before the slaughter commenced.
5. You still don’t seem to understand that the author cannot make an argument that he wasn’t there but didn’t see anything so nothing *must* have happened. Yes some press have admitted errors, but still no one believes the government’s claim that only a few hundred died that day.
So, now that we know that the slaughter was mainly of local residents and workers, will you tell us why? Why is important to you, right? So, why did the party slaughter those people? And why did the government arrest many students afterwards? And why does the government harrass these people to this day, 25+ years after the fact? I would like to know your belief about this.
In your original post, you said “Last year they were claiming that, well, no one was killed in the square itself, which is also a lie and which also got zero traction.” This is not accurate, either that it was a lie or that it gained no traction. That those who witnessed the events (see PBS Tank Man above) and those who reported ‘Tiananmen Square bloodbath’ and later recanted that account shows that it was not a lie and that this version did not gain traction.
That the square itself was not the site of any killing changes things in a number of significant ways. Firstly, it demonstrates that “our side” are not dispassionate and disinterested observers whose reporting of events can be relied upon absolutely. Secondly, it demonstrates that the PRC’s government were willing to deal with different parts of their population differently – students allowed to close down the capitol for weeks on end while being treated with kid gloves, workers crushed when they stood up to the army. That’s important to understanding why they acted as they did. They felt a threat to the regime they’d spent their lives building which hadn’t been presented by the students. Thirdly, it shows that the intent of clearing the square was not specifically to do so bloodily. If that had been the intent then the regime wouldn’t have suddenly quailed after sending its troops shooting their way down Chang’an Jie.
“No students were killed” isn’t the same as “no students were killed in Tiananmen Square” which is what both the PRC government and Jay Mathews claim. One claim is accurate the other isn’t. Whether those killed elsewhere in the city had the status of students is not indicative of the government’s intent. Students taking part in the attempts to block the army’s advance were not the ones in the square and were not part of the peaceable group that the army cleared (bloodlessly) from it. They were part of a different group, doing different things at a different place and were therefore different.
I have every right to claim that the student protestors were simply children of party members and “nouveau riche businessmen” since that’s what they were. Look to the CVs of the leadership of the AUS and see where their families were situated. They were from families far better off than normal enjoying a privileged life and status as students beyond what the majority of their countrymen could hope for. They were also astonishingly callous about the lives of their fellows and countrymen as Chai Ling’s final interview with Philip Cunningham shows. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=736ujwndCSQ
The author is not making any argument that he did not witness something and therefore it did not happen. He is making the argument that something was claimed to have happened and widely reported as having happened but that there is no factual evidence it actually did. That ‘something’ is the mass killing of students in Tiananmen Square by soldiers of the PLA on the morning of 4th June 1989. He is at pains to point out that killing did occur, just not there and not under those circumstances. Jay Mathews never claimed to have been present at the events, indeed that’s one of his premises that those who are not reporting first hand should be more careful about what they report. Jay Chin was not present at the events, either – at least according to your Reuters article – and got his information from a Singaporean businessman and doesn’t seem to have confirmed what that source saw first-hand.
Why was the slaughter the slaughter was mainly of local residents and workers? That’s next to impossible to tell without having been there and witnessed it, or having interviewed those soldiers who fired. As you’ve read the Tiananmen Papers, you’ll be familiar with the timescale Nathan and Perry present, including the fact that the column advancing down Chang’An Jie stalled at Muxidi Bridge for several hours before firing live rounds and then took several more hours to cover the 5km to the square. That suggests they were not simply blasting their way down the road or they would have been there faster.
This is important to me because I do not live under an authoritarian system where the government gets to make and remake history as suits its purpose. Things that happened are facts to be understood, not slogans to rally supporters and they should not be treated with that degree of contempt. The PRC government suppresses the Tiananmen incident because it would prefer it was forgotten, at least until the memory has faded and most likely for ever. It doesn’t want the facts known and that’s not a model I’m happy to follow.
Another media person who acknowledges errors in the initial reporting.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8057762.stm
Brido,
Just to counter your 5 mao disinformation campaign, here are several grizzly pictures documenting horrendus wounds and horrific deaths. http://imgur.com/a/q8ZIS
Because of course insisting the PRC government be held accountable for *what actually happened* rather than the commonly-accepted but inaccurate version is the same as wumaoing. It’s all so clear to me now.
Incidentally, the pictures in your link include two incinerated corpses wearing the remains of PLA uniforms. I can’t help but think that would have coloured the opinions of the next batch of soldiers to happen along.
What “actually happened” was that the army killed a lot of people, and the city of Beijing was awash in corpses.
But if you are talking about accountability, which you presumbably wouldn’t as a wumao, let’s make a little list:
The students went back, and the next day people went around to all the schools and made sure all classes were held as scheduled, and told everyone that nothing happened the night before and no questions were to be asked. Anyone not heeding that would have been hauled off and never heard from again (i.e., murdered), without a doubt.
Then, the purges began, and many students fled, while *many* others were seized and thrown into prison and probably treated very horribly. Certainly quite a few died in custody, some of “suicide”, others remained for years and others were released. Some cases may have been formalized by a captive legal process, but many others did not get such treatment.
Then the follow-on suppression of the participants and mothers (angered by this injustice), and now *they* are watched and intimidated and forced to either stay or go somewhere according to the “logic” of their minders. Bao Tong has been held in this way, extra-judicially, for decades. He is in a de-facto prison while the others are still subject to whatever the party feels like throwing at them this month.
And now we have the suppression of follow-on follow-ons, the new generation, and on and on, apparently forever.
That is how its all going to work out, right?
Did I miss anything you would like to add to the list Brido? That list of accountability you wanted?
If you wouldn’t mind taking a moment out of your hot little thrill of righteous indignation you’ll see that far from denying this I’ve stated it as a fact on a couple of occasions.
Take it like a man, for crying out loud. I took you to task on a single factual inaccuracy, I didn’t do your mum doggy-fashion in front of your Cub Scout pack.
Correction, you took me to task for a single fact which is in dispute. There are lots of accounts that include murder within the square, and while a few reporters have backtracked, you have so far found little support for your theory.
Again, let’s hope the government will release all the information it has on the incident so everything can be known, to the extent possible. Did they arrest tankman? They must have gone after him, I would think. Did they torture and murder him as well? He could theoretically still be in prison today. One day we may well know.
It is seemingly not wumao behavior to talk about the government being accountable for its actions, but at the same time you have indicated lots of things that show a lack of objectivity. You to some extent attacked the students as being from rich families, that was quite unfair, and its unclear what that would change anyway. You also indicated that you are unsure whether anyone at that time was pressing for democracy, while in reality a huge statue called the Goddess of Democracy probably puts that issue to rest…but for you its still a debatable point. You tried to move from “no students were killed in the square” to “no students were killed at all”, which is definitely incorrect.
Further you point out that some of the killed were soldiers, and again I just don’t know what point you think you are making. Is the government no longer responsible because several soldiers were killed in the fighting? Are you saying that the soldiers were killed first and this explains the later killing of students and locals? You raise little points that don’t seem particularly useful.
I am not butthurt at all, I have enjoyed this little discussion and learned more about the incident. Seeing as how I started by poking fun at the very article you brought up, it was great to destroy it once again, as I did years ago. Hope you have had as much fun as I have, and don’t forget to pick your battles.
I took you to task on a single point of fact which is not in dispute by any credible witness. Not a single Western observer or journalist who was actually present claims that people were killed in Tiananmen Square that night. That is a consistent series of unambiguous statements on the part of people who actually saw events unfold.
The support I have found for that, and which I’ve presented earlier, includes: the PBS ‘Tank Man’ interview (YouTube link supplied) in which a number of dissidents and journalists state the same thing; Philip Cunningham’s ‘Tiananmen Moon’ in which the Westerner closest to the student leadership gives his first-hand account; and the researched mea culpa by one of those responsible for promoting the original reporting of a massacre.
You interpret my statements on the status of the student as an “attack” when it’s nothing of the sort. It’s another statement of fact which just happens to conflict with your preferred version of The Truth. Students at elite universities overwhelmingly did not come from ordinary worker families, they were from affluence which in the context of the day meant politically-connected. It was one of the grievances of the ordinary folk which prompted the 1986 and 1989 protests, after all.
The Goddess of Democracy statue would only put the issue at rest if there were clear evidence that everyone present understood what was actually meant by the term and were unanimous in being motivated by a desire for it. In reality, most people had a wide range of motives and few seriously intended to challenge the Communist Party. One student, when asked what democracy meant to him, responded, “The ability to choose my own work assignment.” So yes, there is sufficient room to question if any of those participating in the protests were seeking democracy in any meaningful sense.
I have stated consistently that no students were killed in Tiananmen Square as part of the student movement and nothing more. Whether or not students participated in the resistance to the PLA’s entry elsewhere in the city, they were not doing so as organised student bodies. Again, that’s a simple fact undisputed by anyone who was actually there.
Finally, my point on the deaths of soldiers was to illustrate why badly-trained conscripts (who were, after all, only human themselves) would have so readily resorted to lethal force against civilians. The US Embassy in Beijing reported home an eyewitness account that the first sight meeting troops entering the square was the “the beating death of a PLA soldier who was in the first APC to enter Tiananmen Square, in full view of the other waiting PLA troops, appeared to have sparked the shooting that followed.” http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB16/docs/doc15.pdf Page No.8 ‘The Tiananmen Square spark?’
Far from destroying the article, you’ve conceded the truth of it that no massacre took place in Tiananmen Square that night. It’s also interesting to note how the importance of whether or not people were killed there diminished in importance to you when you conceded that they didn’t. If it was important enough as evidence of what the PRC government was like when you thought it damned them, why not as important when it didn’t? I think I already know the answer…
Yes you present a more complicated picture, and one not favorable in my view to the party. But you don’t defend well your many strong opinions of what happened.
And then you accuse me of a lack of objectivity.
The issue of corruption and the possibility that many of the protesting students were from wealthy families should not be used to obscure the fact that many common students ended up in jail or dead, while the wealthier or better connected ones escaped to foreign lands. Also many schools were involved not just elite schools.
There is no need to mention the endemic corruption of the party and its effect on the opportunity to study in elite and not so elite universities, which of course still continues to this day. Shall the government be blamed for this chronic situation?
And it is quite interesting to contemplate a world where it was the children of the connected to be the ones demanding more freedom. But I think that is too simplistic picture, many common students were also involved.
The party definitely must be blamed for the purges of students that happened in the wake of the incident. You seem to prefer to only focus on the events of 1-2 days instead of the big picture. If they weren’t killed in the square, is it better that they were killed in a jail cell or an interrogation room?
If you are arguing that the government considered the square so symbolically important that they took pains to avoid bloodshed within it, that would be interesting and not unreasonable. However maybe the real logic is that not killing the students in public was symbolically important as a tool of propaganda.
The argument about ‘poorly train conscripts” is also relevant, as it gets to the issue of whether there were orders to shoot or whether shooting just happened, and that is true even when the conscripts are well trained. When you send the army into the city, shit can easily happen. So shall we only blame the residents who killed a soldier? Does that make the government less responsible?
Your democracy argument is just weak. Doesn’t meet your definition of ‘meaningful sense”, well ok. A large number of students assisted in making it, they named it. But to you one student who speaks in simple terms negates all that.
Again, the city was awash in corpses that night, at least several hundreds if not several thousands of people were killed. The party then carried out a purge of the students and professors and workers, throwing many more people into jail with little legal process. Many of those people were killed too.
If the square being clean is what you need, then fine. I have consistently said that it doesn’t change the overall picture very much.
The issue of students’ status in Chinese society is important, both in their self-motivations and in why the government treated the student-led protests differently from the worker-led one which followed. Students in China even today are an intellectual elite and that means they came to university from a succession of the best schools from elementary onwards. They were not of ordinary families, which meant that they had family networks reaching into government and the party that the workers didn’t have. Students also traditionally enjoyed a special status in China and governments of all colours have taken pains to treat them differently. It’s why the May 4th Movement resonates so deeply – that a government shot down students was unthinkable to Chinese society.
Whether the students understood what we mean by democracy is important because it’s the motivation ascribed to them and we should be asking if it’s true. After all, we are debating something we were always told about those events that wasn’t actually true so it’s prudent to question the rest of that narrative. If by democracy they really meant “That the Communist Party carries on ruling a one-party state but just does so better and less corruptly” then we have to believe that Xi Jinping is currently pursuing their democratic aims. That’s not really realistic, but enough of the statements made by the students themselves on the day (multiple interview records exist from within the movement) that they didn’t understand democracy in any sense that would be accepted in a constitutional monarchy of representative republic.
You were not so consistent in claiming that the reality of events in the square don’t change the picture very much when you believed they supported your opinion. Then, they mattered enough for you to offer them as evidence that the PRC government was lying. They suddenly didn’t change things very much when it turned out they didn’t actually happen that way.
You are really an idiot. All I said wass the propaganda idiots are always pimping another false theory. Apparently they tricked me by not lying, for once. Mea Culpa.
Here is what I wrote:
“Every year they have a new meme to push out. A couple years ago they were claiming that no one was killed in the incident at all! Guess how that went. Yup, not a one person changed their understanding.”
Wow, I clearly treat the TAM murders as the only reason to blame the government, and gosh if the murders happened 2km away my whole point breaks down.
And guess what? Not one person changed their understanding of the murderous despotic regime in Beijing. Still.
Actually, what you said (and the bit I quoted in my initial response) was “Last year they were claiming that, well, no one was killed in the square itself, which is also a lie and which also got zero traction.”
My whole contention, based on the evidence I’ve presented, is that this statement of yours was not true. The evidence supports that it is not.
Look, you are an idiot who is simply trying to muddy the waters. Yes, I incorrectly stated that.
But everything else you are saying is just stupid. Oh the students didn’t have meaningful knowledge of democracy, and so on and so forth. Quite rubbish, and by no means based on, you know, that actual evidence you are so interested in.
You really prefer focusing on the lack of murder within the square, but you seem unwilling to focus either on the murder happening a couple of clicks away or on the purging and murder of the students after the fact.
Look, propagandists do stupid things, its the nature of the business. The lack of student murder within the square changes nothing and never will, and I never stated otherwise.
Anyway, I am done here. You can have the last word as it seems you need it. You are just trying to muddy the waters anyway, so, congrats on a job, if not well done, then done well enough for your purposes.
If you wish your case to be accepted, make it factually accurate. If you wish your judgement to be respected, don’t throw a tantrum when it’s rebutted. If you wish to be accepted as a grown-up, address the points made, don’t go into wild hyperbole and avoid ad hominem attacks.