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shitlibs love posting that picture of the guy standing in front of the tank, as some kind of own, when if that happened in the US the cops would have gleefully run him over and then been made into a celebrity for it
Death to America
somebody actually did splice together the video when the Chinese tank goes around the guy, and the footage on the other side is from the BLM protests when a cop car just drives into the crowd
“Han Chinese are racial chauvinists” /r/politics libs, probably
Jeff Widener, an American photographer with the Associated Press, won a pulitzer prize for that photo, precisely because it was a still image. He also took a video, but the video tends not to be shown, because it reveals that the man wasn’t run over. Then you have the fact that all the US press corps showed up right as the protests took off, a lot of dark money from NGOs and western think tanks was floating around, and then deliberate conflation of the worker riots (in which PLA troops were lynched outside the square) being confused with the mostly peaceful events inside the square. Then you have that interview with the protest leader where she was crying and basically saying she was trying to provoke a massacre so that the protesters could be seen as martyrs. She got her wish, even if the massacres didn’t actually occur, since that’s how the west depicts those events. Then there the highly suspicious fact that nobody talks about the fact that you had many different types of protester simultaneously. Some were opposed to liberal reforms, privatization, etc, (the workers rioting outside the square) while other protesters wanted more of that stuff (the student protesters inside the square). Then you have some racist elements mixed in with the student protests I’ve heard, i.e. that there were some Chinese who were protesting because they didn’t like the presence of African exchange students at their universities. I don’t know how true that is, but I’ve heard it a few times.
Agitprop repost from the massive china thread done two months or so ago:
- wikileaks published a private diplomatic cable stating that no one was killed in the square itself, although a smaller number of people did die in clashes elsewhere in Beijing, consistent with China’s own official account. (Here’s a Telegraph article on the cables).
- a spanish film crew was in the square all night and filmed people peacefully leaving the square in the early morning, singing the Internationale, here’s footage of a Hong Kong news report that includes the spanish film crew footage, which never appears in western reporting).
- one of the main organizers of the protest, Hou Dejian, states that no one died in the square and calls out other organizers for lying I Interview where Hou Dejian, a Taiwanese national and one of the leaders of the Tiananmen protests, says he was in the square all night and saw no one killed here is a twitter thread covering testimony by various organizers, including Hou Dejian).
- Numerous western media sources have stated that no massacre occurred in the square. (This article links to multiple western sources, including James Miles, attesting that no one died in the square.).
- various western massacre reports cite wildly different death figures, usually with little or no justification for the number.
- An attempt to collect all the names of the massacre victims ended early when they only found 155.
- CIA and NED goons were known to be present in Beijing and involved in the protests. (Here is an article from the Vancouver Sun in 1992, showing western intelligence involvement was known in the west decades ago).
- during most of the protest, protesters were calling for a return to stricter communism, not for liberal market reforms. These were Marxists. Their signs showed Marxist figures and slogans. (This article shows some images of the protesters displaying Marxist slogans and iconography and discusses it a bit — careful linking this site though, some of the articles are pretty dumb).
- tank man: the tanks in the video are leaving the square (you can see this in the uncropped footage) and it is broad daylight, whereas the main violence occurred at night.
- the first violence was against troops, not civilians. On June 2, 1989, two days before the June 4 incident when the main violence occurred, multiple unarmed Chinese troops were burned alive and their corpses hung from nooses in public. ((CW: gore) here is a thread of photos showing dead and wounded troops, some being rescued by civilians. Multiple men were burned to death, others were beaten. Some protesters stole guns from the army and can be seen brandishing them.).
- the violence against troops was uncharacteristic of the previous tone of interactions between troops and protesters in the preceding weeks. Troops and protesters had peacefully coexisted, singing songs and sharing food together. (Here’s an article that goes into it a bit)
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And the comments would say: He sHoUlD hAVe JuSt CoMpLiEd
sTuPiD gAmEs StUpId PrIzEs
Rachel Corrie tried that in Palestine.
The tank man image is relevant not because of the tanks but because of the dude. He stood up and made the whole line of tanks stop (momentarily). That’s the kind of energy i like in my protesters.
You’re 100% correct the cops in the US would probably just plow into him, though. Hell, they’d swerve to hit him.
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momentarily
no, for several minutes: https://nitter.cz/fedurante/status/1533099332496502786
he even climbs onto the tank, the tanks only keep going after other civilians remove him from the way
Tianamen claims
Reposted from elsewhere.
- wikileaks published a private diplomatic cable stating that no one was killed in the square itself, although a smaller number of people did die in clashes elsewhere in Beijing, consistent with China’s own official account. (Here’s a Telegraph article on the cables).
- a spanish film crew was in the square all night and filmed people peacefully leaving the square in the early morning, singing the Internationale, here’s footage of a Hong Kong news report that includes the spanish film crew footage, which never appears in western reporting).
- one of the main organizers of the protest, Hou Dejian, states that no one died in the square and calls out other organizers for lying I Interview where Hou Dejian, a Taiwanese national and one of the leaders of the Tiananmen protests, says he was in the square all night and saw no one killed here is a twitter thread covering testimony by various organizers, including Hou Dejian).
- Numerous western media sources have stated that no massacre occurred in the square. (This article links to multiple western sources, including James Miles, attesting that no one died in the square.).
- various western massacre reports cite wildly different death figures, usually with little or no justification for the number.
- An attempt to collect all the names of the massacre victims ended early when they only found 155.
- CIA and NED goons were known to be present in Beijing and involved in the protests. (Here is an article from the Vancouver Sun in 1992, showing western intelligence involvement was known in the west decades ago).
- during most of the protest, protesters were calling for a return to stricter communism, not for liberal market reforms. These were Marxists. Their signs showed Marxist figures and slogans. (This article shows some images of the protesters displaying Marxist slogans and iconography and discusses it a bit — careful linking this site though, some of the articles are pretty dumb).
- tank man: the tanks in the video are leaving the square (you can see this in the uncropped footage) and it is broad daylight, whereas the main violence occurred at night.
- the first violence was against troops, not civilians. On June 2, 1989, two days before the June 4 incident when the main violence occurred, multiple unarmed Chinese troops were burned alive and their corpses hung from nooses in public. ((CW: gore) here is a thread of photos showing dead and wounded troops, some being rescued by civilians. Multiple men were burned to death, others were beaten. Some protesters stole guns from the army and can be seen brandishing them.).
- the violence against troops was uncharacteristic of the previous tone of interactions between troops and protesters in the preceding weeks. Troops and protesters had peacefully coexisted, singing songs and sharing food together. (Here’s an article that goes into it a bit)
I didn’t even learn about Fred Hampton till I was in my thirties and it was from the Chapo Trap House subreddit
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How is that they never post pictures of the students killed on Kent State
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Also here in the UK a large majority believe that “Empire” was a nice pleasant good thing that did nothing but good to the countries we merely ’looked after’.
We call the ones that haven’t fully told us to ‘fuck off’ the ‘Commonwealth’ and hold lots of PR events like Olympic-esque games and ‘rich monarch waves at people who’s country has a GDP less than their hat largely because we stole all their resources before they could use them to develop’ tours.
Jesus Christ, do not ever tell an English person that you think Winston Churchill was a monster. Worst mistake of my life. You’d swear I’d shat on his mum’s grave.
The guy who famine’d million of indians? Who wanted to use chemical weapons to put down rebellions in Africa?
There’s been a concerted effort to paint him as a heroic figure so that the blitz can be used as a rallying point for British nationalism.
The Welsh curriculum at least taught me about the time he sent the military in to gun down striking miners in Tonypandy. I don’t think the English education system teaches children about any of the shit he did.
The end result is he’s almost become a secular saint for some English.
I can confirm my English history classes very much did teach me that Churchill never ever set a foot wrong and is an unimpeachable war hero with no flaws, never heard about his opinions on India/Africa, nor what you mention about miners, I honestly never heard a bad thing.
I know some people were taught differently, but I was also taught the Soviet Union was basically useless and Britain was effectively the sole reason for the Allied Win of WW2.
In my US Classes, he was always a hero as well. We were taught that Neville Chamberlain kept concedingnthings to Hitler in hopesntht being nice would sway him, and when it didn’t, Brits got mad and voted in tough guy Churchill who really gave em the business. Stalin was a Nazi ally until the Nazis betrayed him, and that stopped the bleeding, then Roosevelt declared war after Pearl Harbor and the US won the war for the Allies.
voted in tough guy Churchill
Churchill wasn’t even elected. When Chamberlain resigned, Churchill replaced him as prime minister and then elections were stalled until 1945 as part of the emergency wartime powers that a prime minister can enact.
Everyone also thinks the queen was just a passive tourist icon and not an actively supportive participant and cheerleader of that colonialism.
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Lyndon LaRouche has entered the chat.
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I remember that old black and white footage of queen whoeverthefuck (victoria?) tossing little pieces of food to the ground for african toddlers to scramble for in the exact same way you or I would feed pigeons in the park.
Wasnt able to find Victoria doing this (Didnt search very hard), but I did find this link of an English woman doing that with coins in 1899:
The worst part was that she had no dark hour of realization of being a monster while she lived and I have no faith in the afterlife. She just won life. Like it was a video game and we all didn’t matter.
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Am I remembering right where William and Kate tried to visit somewhere with one of these bullshit tours and were told to fuck off pretty much?
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“we sent the convicts to australia, and because we decreed that it was empty, everything turned out fine”
“Uyghur people are being GENOCIDED simply for their culture of having knifes to demonstrate their manliness (which the CIA used to agitate for terrorist attacks)”
vs
“actually US settlers were right to kill natives because they were scary and had sharp obsidian knives” :scared:
On US education I remember in 8th grade the one thing I learned about Marx was one paragraph and was basically just “he wrote the Communist Manifesto and believed that history was a cycle of conflicts between classes.” And I was just like “Well what is communism? Isn’t that going to be important going forward?” I guess it wasn’t and I never learned what Communism/Socialism actually is or what the USSR did beyond “be authoritarian” until I was an adult.You probably didn’t actually learn what capitalism is either until later, given that Marx is the most comprehensive breakdown of how capitalism functions, so much so that even the economics courses at universities use Marx for that part.
The intentional avoidance of teaching how the system works is essential to making sure people don’t question it. You don’t want your workers knowing how it works, merely accepting it. Understanding how it works is reserved for the ruling class.
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and they wonder why young people uniformly hate corporations and what they’ve done to the environment
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I tended to have communism/socialism condescendingly poopooed as “well-meaning” but “never really working because human nature”.
Anyways, time to learn about the french revolution and the reign of terror, which in no way should be viewed as an indictment of liberal revolutions the way the red terror does for socialism.
I remember almost my exact words when I was in high school “communism has a lot of valid criticisms about capitalism but their solutions didn’t work”
When I was in I think 2nd grade I gave a presentation on the Civil War while wearing a costume of a confederate soldier.
I was taught that factory workers in the north had it worse than slaves, that the
Civil WarWar Between the States was about states’ rights, that Confederate generals were noble and honorable while Union ones were incompetent drunks who relied on essentially human wave tactics and burning down cities to win. Gone With the Wind was presented to me as an accurate and unbiased depiction of history.Growing up I definitely had a couple awkward dinner conversations with certain “history buff” relatives where I was like, “Well sure, but still, I mean, obviously we can all agree the South was wrong, right?” and suddenly people start exchanging looks
I actually got a similar reaction once for saying the Crusades were bad, Catholics are fucking wild I tell you.
I was taught that factory workers in the north had it worse than slaves
In Marx’s “Theories of Surplus Value” which he never published while he was alive, but was instead compiled from his notes by Kautsky, and then later Riazanov, he called out 1700s reactionary anti-capitalists like Linguet who made these kinds of arguments.
Linguet however is not a socialist. His polemics against the bourgeois-liberal ideals of the Enlighteners, his contemporaries, against the dominion of the bourgeoisie that was then beginning, are given—half-seriously, half-ironically—a reactionary appearance. He defends […] slavery against wage-labour.
(Linguet was guillotined by the Jacobins lol)
(Linguet was guillotined by the Jacobins lol)
The kind French Jacobins would have guillotined everyone here
“Wage slave” is the modern equivalent. I get the point is to emphasize how deeply exploitative low-wage work is, but my boss can’t cut off my foot if I don’t show up.
yeah the term “wage slave” is certainly an exaggeration that minimizes slavery. I would point out that even Frederick Douglass used the term, but this alone does not legitimize it. It became popular because it’s short, to the point, sounds almost poetic (assonance), and gets at the heart of the coercive element of capitalism (you sell your labor power, or you become homeless and starve). But yes, it’s certainly not the most nuanced or sensitive thing to say.
I actually got a similar reaction once for saying the Crusades were bad, Catholics are fucking wild I tell you.
Papists still getting off from the sack of Constantinople
I actually got a similar reaction once for saying the Crusades were bad, Catholics are fucking wild I tell you.
My convert Catholic dad once told me that all the crusades were “self-defence” against Islam. I guess there must have been a really big threat of an islamic invasion of Europe from the Baltics.
i’m pretty sure at least one of those crusades resulted in christian armies sieging/looting/pillaging/committing atrocities in christian majority cities on their long march to Jerusalem, with most of them starving or dying of dyssentery or deserting along the way. Most effective form of self defense I’ve ever seen. And even when they made it to Jerusalem, surprise surprise, turns out there was a lot of christians and jews coexisting with muslims and they all got treated as muslims by the invading armies.
Tulsa What? Kent State Who?
Manifest Destiny was just a heroic and triumphant settling of new land.
I just read to my parents about the Haymarket tragedy and the origins of Mayday, and how the United States freaked out that people all over the world began recognizing that day and in order to cut it off in the US they made May 1st loyalty day and used red scare shit to make sure nobody would demonstrate or do anything on May 1st here lol. They had never heard of any of it.
US PUBLIC EDUCATION HISTORY CLASS: And today kids, we are going to learn about all of the native indians, the Southwest Indians, the plains indians, AND the forrest indians. Are you excited to learn about all the indians that were here, kids?
“Adobe!”
-Me in fourth grade, demonstrating complete mastery over the curriculum
gold star placed next to your name on the poster of all the kids in the class
Question to American comrades: How are the genocides of native Americans and
Lebensraummanifest destiny being taught in American schools? What does the average American know?I was unequivocally taught that it happened, white colonists were responsible, and that it was genocide. It came up a few times over the years in age-appropriate lessons (they don’t go into detail when teaching third graders ofc) and every time the narrative was about the same.
HOWEVER our classes never dwelled on it much. It was taught with as much gravitas as any other random lesson, i.e. I was bombarded with a litany of names and dates to memorize for a standardized test which I promptly forgot in order to prepare for the next one, and the next one, and the next one…
My classes didn’t distinguish between the indigenous peoples and I never learned about the native tribes that belong to my area. My teachers taught only what colonizers did to them, not who they were and are. And crucially, I was taught that this was all history and not that it is an ongoing genocide. And that the colonizers of the past are, somehow, disconnected from our government of the present.
Also we never made a connection between the Nazis and the colonists, or talked about class and capitalism at all, really.
I remember being taught that it was just their desire to expand to the Pacific Ocean, they believed it was their god given destiny. Big focus on that. I don’t recall a lot of all of emphasis on how it impacted the natives.
every year in elementary school we watched some movies about how the pilgrims and Indians were friends and every year I would get in trouble for screaming “AND THEN THEY MURDERED THEM ALL”. teachers would get mad and say that it was both sides fault. and then we hit middle school and got the full story, but teachers would both sides it. Also most of my peers one year believed that the genocide of the native Americans was good, needed to happen, and that they would do it again. then i went to a super libby highschool and learned even more.
every year I would get in trouble for screaming “AND THEN THEY MURDERED THEM ALL”
Holy fucking based
yeah I had a lot of based moments as a kid, I would like to thank tim and moby for my political education. it sucks republicans are cutting kids access to it. Tim and moby say trans rights
They still bothsided communjsm :( oh well, it’s not like they could’ve openly advocated for communism or anything.
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My school rushed all the events of US history, “manifest destiny” was no exception and was merely a brief footnote, though the trail of tears was mentioned.
I learned Christopher Columbus would chop the hands off of indians that didn’t follow orders, and we wiped out 95% plus of their population
But I went to school in California. Unfortunately, other states can teach their version of history
I got that bad things happened but like, you know it doesn’t do to dwell on it. I got the positiveist version of all that.
I was taught in Jersey and Florida during the 80’s and then 90"s, and manifest destiny was taught as a good thing. Anything resembling truth I got out schooling came from subversive teachers, not the official school curriculum. It wasn’t till I read Zinn and Lowen that I learned how badly I was lied to.
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I’m convinced all the people saying that America doesn’t teach what happens to the Indians (besides the first Thanksgiving) stopped paying attention in history class after elementary school.
Nah it just wasn’t taught.
We (Texans) take 3 years of the history of our own state that just says “spain bad. Mexico bad. We want slaves. Confederacy good”
You think after 3 years they’re just going to mention anything about the natives in the region?
Maybe YOU learned about it sure, maybe we could come to terms with the education system being different in literally every region (all 50) of the states (and each country globally)?
true, i remember slavery being a literal paragraph in texas history textbook. Next to no mention of American indians outised of tejas means friend
My education I got in Ohio was abysmal about this shit. Most of it was just review after elementary. And I say that as someone who would read the textbooks cover to cover.
A people’s history of the US was probably pivotal for me properly turning left, didn’t find it until well afterwards though.
I recommend this to EVERYBODY. Damn people need some true clarity.
“this wasn’t my experience, so it didn’t happen”
or you could listen to the people telling you otherwise, but why do that?
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Yeah, my education didn’t cover who taught whom about corn. It definitely covered reservations and forced marches and murder and sickness. Maybe we can cover all of that in a couple of weeks and forget how much time it took and what was covered?
That is not true in my case. We learned about various massacres and the trail of tears, ect. Of course that was at a time when you actually studied history.
it really depends on what state you live in, and what decade you grew up in. Southern states were particularly prone to whitewashing US history, especially with respect to colonialism and slavery. I did learn about slavery and indigenous genocide in school, but as an adult I still find the public education I received lacking, incomplete, and still somewhat whitewashed, even if it was loads better than the McCarthyist and Daughters-Of-The-Confederacy sponsored shit I would have gotten jammed into my brain in the 1950s.
For example here are some issues I had with my liberal education in the 1990s:
- it was pretended that the civil rights movement was only successful because of peaceful protesters like MLK and was almost ruined by totally unwholesome radicals like the Black Panthers
- it was pretended that only the south had an economic interest in slavery. It was entirely ignored that the North relied economically on slavery indirectly.
- the civil war was depicted as an ideological crusade by the north to end slavery. this is an inversion of the confederate myth that it was about “states rights.” The main objective of the south was to preserve slavery. The main objective of the north was to preserve the union. Neither side was abolitionist, it’s just that abolition became practical in 1863 as the war dragged on. Lincoln issued the emancipation proclamation so he could draft black soldiers and further demoralize the south. he had never been ideologically an abolitionist, though some in his party to his left (like Thaddeus Stevens) were.
- it was pretended that all the problems of capitalism were entirely isolated to the gilded age, and that once we got a semblance of social democratic reforms (8 hour day, overtime pay, etc.) capitalism was now “fair.”
- labor militancy was altogether ignored. it was pretended that social democratic reforms were won entirely because silver-tongued reformists demolished capitalists with logic and reason, not because shit like the battle of blair mountain happened.
- it was depicted that indigenous genocide was mostly a matter of “both sides” being “equally mean.” i.e. that manifest destiny was mostly colonizers just protecting themselves from raids or something
- zero mention of CIA coups or any of the stuff declassified in the church committee
- zero mention of US supporting dictators abroad
it also always ended with “but now we’re in modern times where racism is over, and we are friends with the native americans now =)”
Might be different now that history has restarted, but when I was going through in the obama years, yeah history was taught to me like a long running TV show that had just had its series finale and all is well
In my history classes, it was like black folks were a footnote until you get to the lead up to the Civil War. Then after the Civil War they disappear from the stage again until the civil rights movement.
I did have a lib teacher who thought it was super important to teach us about Native American society and culture, even if he didn’t cover the genocide part as much as he could have.
Texas dictates what most states’ textbooks are. Every American child grows up learning a lot of bullshit.
That’s exactly what I was taught too.
Live in a red shithole, rural public education. Still learned the horrifics of slavery, trail of tears, black panthers, etc.
who must go?
One way to look at this is comparing the western media blitz every year around the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square incident to annual western coverage of any of our many, many domestic atrocities.
We get an annual top-line reminder of how irredeemably evil China is because of a 30-year-old event that even U.S. journalism schools admit we misrepresent. But besides token coverage of “it’s X holiday,” or maybe some stories about “should we even recognize X as a holiday” (see the Columbus Day/Indigenous People’s Day discourse), there is precious little media reminding us of any of our own original sins. Instead, as you note, it’s relegated to history classes, which many Americans never seriously engage with and most Americans never revisit again.
Just gonna use this post as an opportunity to link this piece from one of my favorite writers of all time, since it’s an article which covers the absolute state of both public education and homeschooling in the American South in depth (CW for extreme racism and general bigotry)
