On balance, it would be fair to say that while thousands of protestors were most likely not gunned down in the square itself, hundreds were being gunned down around it. So there was a massacre by the PLA, it just didn’t happen in the square itself.
If they were just protestors, why were they gunned down while the ones in the square could all be cleared out with no fatalities? Did the people who incinerated soldiers and strung up their burnt corpses leave peacefully beforehand?
Because the PLA forced themselves through several blockades before they were able to reach the square. It was at these blockades that the strongest resistance was met, and where the majority of the killing occurred.
We don’t know for sure, but the order seems to be that [the PLA] have to get [to the square] by midnight. So by 10:00 p.m. they’re getting desperate. They cannot fight their way through thousands of people with riot shields and billy clubs, so each of these columns coming into the city starts radioing into headquarters, asking for permission to go ahead at any cost. Finally that permission starts coming down sometime between 10:30 p.m. and 11:00 p.m.
The first rounds of fire catch everybody by surprise. The people in the streets don’t expect this to happen. There are a couple of hospitals right near Muxidi, and the casualties start showing up within 10 or 15 minutes of the first round of gunfire. The casualties run very high because people didn’t expect to be shot at with live ammunition. When they start firing, people say, “Oh, it’s rubber bullets.” Even after it becomes clear, even after they realize that the army is going to go ahead at any cost, people still pour into the streets. This is the amazing thing: People were just so angry, so furious at what was happening in their city that they were not going to step back and let the army do what it was doing. This is why the casualties from Muxidi on east towards Tiananmen Square were so high. This is the major military confrontation of the evening.
That account as-presented leaves out the immolating of unarmed soldiers via petrol bombs, which seems necessarily to distort their evaluations of why people behaved how they did. iirc some “protestors” also took the liberty of seizing weapons from an APC that had a catastrophic failure and killed the soldiers inside, and this was still before the crackdown. Remember, a number of soldiers also died, they had to have been killed somehow (though one was killed by friendly fire and like 6 or 7 by the accident I mentioned).
The NYPD are a bunch of jackbooted thugs of a white supremacist administration under the thinnest veneer of “justice”. Equivocating between them and the PLA is absurd.
“As far as I was concerned,” he said, “anybody who’d stand against the cops was all right with me, and that’s why I stayed in…Every time you turn around the cops were pulling some outrage or another.”
Remember that picture of 50,000 uniformed fascists taking over part of the city in a show of force allegedly for a funeral because some pig got got?
That said, my understanding is that relations between the PLA soldiers and the students were positive throughout. Almost all the PLA soldiers in the square had no weapons, including no batons or riot helmets. I believe there were some riot units present but they were a small number relative to the overall PLA presence. There are stories of the PLA soldiers and students singing songs and sharing food. It’s important to remember that most of the students in the square were advocating for a return to Communist economics from the Dengist market liberalization. From what I understand the CPC didn’t really know what to do with them because they didn’t want to start a confrontation with people demanding more communism, and that’s largely why the event was almost entirely peaceful.
Thousands of completely unarmed PLA troops had already been in the square for days. This is nonsense. There’s pictures of them chilling with the students.
So there was a massacre by the PLA, it just didn’t happen in the square itself.
Current research by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation suggests that the massacre occured in the same place Sadaam Hussein would later store his nonexistant WMDs.
On balance, it would be fair to say that while thousands of protestors were most likely not gunned down in the square itself, hundreds were being gunned down around it. So there was a massacre by the PLA, it just didn’t happen in the square itself.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8057762.stm
https://archive.is/20191208232045/https://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/13/world/turmoil-china-tiananmen-crackdown-student-s-account-questioned-major-points.html
https://earnshaw.com/writings/memoirs/tiananmen-story
If they were just protestors, why were they gunned down while the ones in the square could all be cleared out with no fatalities? Did the people who incinerated soldiers and strung up their burnt corpses leave peacefully beforehand?
Because the PLA forced themselves through several blockades before they were able to reach the square. It was at these blockades that the strongest resistance was met, and where the majority of the killing occurred.
Source
That account as-presented leaves out the immolating of unarmed soldiers via petrol bombs, which seems necessarily to distort their evaluations of why people behaved how they did. iirc some “protestors” also took the liberty of seizing weapons from an APC that had a catastrophic failure and killed the soldiers inside, and this was still before the crackdown. Remember, a number of soldiers also died, they had to have been killed somehow (though one was killed by friendly fire and like 6 or 7 by the accident I mentioned).
if new yorkers burned some nypd officers to death and then a bunch of people were killed I’d be on the people’s side
not taking a grand stand on the events I don’t know shit about fuck and don’t rightly care honestly
The NYPD are a bunch of jackbooted thugs of a white supremacist administration under the thinnest veneer of “justice”. Equivocating between them and the PLA is absurd.
again not taking a real stance just saying a thing I noticed, Death to America of course
https://www.villagepreservation.org/2022/06/13/dave-van-ronk-ally-at-the-stonewall-uprising/
Remember that picture of 50,000 uniformed fascists taking over part of the city in a show of force allegedly for a funeral because some pig got got?
That said, my understanding is that relations between the PLA soldiers and the students were positive throughout. Almost all the PLA soldiers in the square had no weapons, including no batons or riot helmets. I believe there were some riot units present but they were a small number relative to the overall PLA presence. There are stories of the PLA soldiers and students singing songs and sharing food. It’s important to remember that most of the students in the square were advocating for a return to Communist economics from the Dengist market liberalization. From what I understand the CPC didn’t really know what to do with them because they didn’t want to start a confrontation with people demanding more communism, and that’s largely why the event was almost entirely peaceful.
Thousands of completely unarmed PLA troops had already been in the square for days. This is nonsense. There’s pictures of them chilling with the students.
Current research by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation suggests that the massacre occured in the same place Sadaam Hussein would later store his nonexistant WMDs.
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