Lead Lemmy Developer, Dessalines, denying the Tiananmen Square Massacre and praising the Uyghur Genocide
https://sh.itjust.works/post/8419342
Dessalines AKA “parentis_shotgun” on Reddit, is the main Lemmy dev, also the admin of lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml.
Their post and discussions on Reddit (archive as the original post must have been removed):
Please join the discussions for Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem:
https://lemmy.world/post/16211417
And the discussions for finding/creating alternative communities on other instances:
https://lemmy.world/post/16235541
What is a tankie?
Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to authoritarian communists, especially those who support acts of repression by such regimes or their allies. More specifically, the term has been applied to those who express support for one-party Marxist–Leninist socialist republics, whether contemporary or historical.
Lying about what the other side says does your case no favors. Tankies don’t deny that violence happened on June 4th 1989, what we deny is the Reddit version of the narrative where 10,000 people were literally crushed under the treads of tanks, a narrative which has no evidence whatsoever. The CPC’s version of events, that the square was emptied after a truck carrying PLA soldiers was firebombed and that clashes between violent protestors and police resulted in hundreds of deaths, is on the other hand fully supported by the available evidence.
We do deny the Uyghur genocide, because that never happened. It is 100% a fantasy constructed by a certain evangelical nut. The most realistic critique of the Chinese government you can make on this issue is that some innocent people were swept up by a large-scale police action, which yeah that always happens when there’s a large scale police action, but in this case the results speak for themselves as Xinjiang today is a wealthier, healthier, and totally terrorism-free province compared to how it was ten years ago, despite the fact that it is adjacent to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and that extremist orgs operating in the region have received outside funding.
So you deny that the massacre happend, and you deny that the Uyghur genocide is happening. Both are quite extensively documented by now and denying them is historical revisioning. Denying that there is any evidence whatsoever is not much different from the “intelligent design” movement denying evolution because of lack of evidence. If you keep your fingers in your ears, screaming “LALALLA I CANNOT HEAR YOU”, then yeah, it’s hard to see any evidence.
The “some innocent people were swept up” shows painfully well how much you brush off the work and reeducation camps as an innocent side effect.
Left or right extremist, it doesn’t matter. You’re all a sad bunch funded by governments who want to destabilize the rest of the world. Tell Winnie Pooh I said Hi.
The “Boston Massacre” killed like five people, significantly more died in the June Fourth Incident. If you want to call it a “massacre” that’s your prerogative just as it’s mine to call it an “incident”, which I choose to do because there is significant evidence that the Chinese police and military were peaceful and that it was violent protestors who started the violence.
As for Uyghur genocide, no. There is no evidence. Every time I’ve been presented with “evidence” of this so-called event its been a picture of a barbed wire fence around a building, or a satellite image of some buildings in a desert, or it’s that video of the prisoners being moved that was in a totally different province. No genocide has ever occurred without creating thousands or millions of refugees, mass graves, a mass dehumanizing media campaign, etc - we see all of those things in Gaza, and none of them in Xinjiang.
God I wish I was funded by the Chinese government.
Both of y’all are talking a lot about evidence without posting any sources. I don’t have a side in this debate, but I would like to see some of this evidence you guys keep referencing, just to further my own understanding of these historical events.
Edit: grammar.