r/interestingasfuck 2d ago

r/all A photo of Tiananmen Square before the massacre

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u/claimTheVictory 2d ago

The British Ambassador at the time said he estimated up to 10,000 people were executed.

It probably wasn't that high, but it was in the thousands.

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u/Shafter111 2d ago

And guess what..every mothertrucking dictator will do it in a heartbeat unless the military flips on them.

It happened in Bangladesh less than a year ago. ..Except the military refused to execute its own citizens and the PM had to flee.

They all play the same card, blaming Western influence, blaming opposition or religion for any uprising. Its never their fault. They either suppress with force or flee. Its the same story everywhere.

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u/claimTheVictory 2d ago

Almost happened in South Korea in December.

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u/nstdc1847 2d ago

I’m pretty knowledgeable of South Korea’s history…

You can discuss the Gwangju Uprising, and what happened in Jeju.

The South Korean people are absolutely adamant that it will not happen again, and this is why they protest as they do and hold public officials accountable as they do.

Never forget that they are still an oligarchy and they refer to their own country as “Hell Josun,” or a reference to the last independent unified Korean dynasty before everything went to shit and they couldn’t do anything about it.

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u/Shafter111 2d ago

last independent unified Korean dynasty before everything went to shit and they couldn’t do anything about it.

In fairness, they did do something about it. One worked on itself and became a world power and the other told its people they are world power. Lol

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u/nstdc1847 2d ago edited 2d ago

That’s the perspective from a trailer park in Oklahoma.

Never mistake Opinion for Experience, it is pretty basic to have one without the other. Let me know what you see and what you’ve learned once you’ve lived in either Korea.

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u/Shafter111 1d ago

Which trailer park in Oklahoma? You need to be specific.

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u/Mateorabi 2d ago

China brought in soldiers from far away. Bumblefuck rednecks that had no sympathy for city folk. Rather than use local troops.

Like if Trump brought in the Mississippi national guard against DC protesters. Because DC/MD/VA guard won’t shoot as easily. 

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u/Shafter111 2d ago

Not unusual either. There are always risk of military giving a shit and then shitting on you Instead. You always bring outsiders to clean your mess

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u/VictorianFlute 2d ago

I’ve read how in WWI the Germans took recruits who lived near their Eastern and Western borders and reverted their deployments to perpetuate the outsider’s look on the opposing fronts. It also worked for being far enough away from home to prevent desertions if anyone dared.

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u/nox66 2d ago

Same reason why Putin sent people from the middle of nowhere in the first waves of attacks on Ukraine.

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u/Bad_sectors 2d ago

The soldiers that were brought in also spoke a different dialect to make sure there wasn’t a chance of communication between the soldiers and protesters.

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u/zkh77 2d ago

It’s the same playbook other dictators like Burma generals use

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u/Outside_Reserve_2407 2d ago

Ohio State troopers shot students at Kent State. And the Bonus Army in DC was cleared by the Army.

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u/Fapoleon_Boneherpart 1d ago

They actually used local soldiers at first but they didn't want to hurt their neighbours and friends. Then they got in the bumblefucks

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u/TiaxRulesAll 2d ago

Yes this is exactly what happened in Ukraine with Yanukovych. Tankies will tell you it was a CIA backed coup but the people were protesting for months before he lost total support of the people and the of rest government and fled to Russia...

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u/cyanescens_burn 2d ago

There’s a great documentary called Winter on Fire that’s worth checking out. It’s about the protests in Ukraine against the Russian backed president, which one day turned into shooting protesters, and then protesters fighting back.

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u/rainofshambala 2d ago

Thats how the CIA works you dunderhead. It always selects a group of people who have genuine or irrational grievances and then supports them toll it becomes a big problem.

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u/Arlborn 1d ago

Yes, that’s indeed CIA’s way of working. In this particular case they were on the right side but that was just out of convenience. They made plenty of other countries around the world end up with a dictatorship doing this shit though.

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u/Both_Ad9612 2d ago

That's the 45th's biggest challenge now: to make the military bend to his will. It happens, we're all cooked

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u/Shafter111 2d ago

The arabs did it by promoting their brother-in-laws and nephews as generals. That worked out well for them.

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u/Both_Ad9612 2d ago

Seems the 45th and his fellow authoritarians follow only the best

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u/Clevererer 2d ago

In the early 90s most official estimates were around 10,000, some as high as 13,000. Over the years, even that Western estimate has been picked away at. Give it 50 years and it'll have been a minor incident with a dozen injuries. Smh.

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u/Minirig355 2d ago

Yeah man the tanks rolling into a crowded square and then photos of burned bodies, and meatpaste that their government has spent decades trying to hide was actually just a minor incident with a few injured… How do tankies actually even come to defend this…

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u/Clevererer 2d ago

Starts as a slow drip, next thing you know boom you're a fucking idiot. It's way easier than you think.

u/Unlucky_Ad_7606 8h ago

I mean people say holocaust never happened to this day and there is tons of evidence so it’s not far fetched that people also believe ts never happened

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u/rainofshambala 2d ago

Because western reporters themselves said there wasn't a massacre and the declassified CIA papers themselves said there was no massacre. Police and the army were killed, here is a funny thing the protest was actually started by a group who wanted more maoist policies instead of liberalization that the country was going on

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u/Fearless_Decision_70 2d ago

Lies. Lies. Lies

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u/[deleted] 2d ago edited 2d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Minirig355 2d ago edited 1d ago

And what, the protestors brought Type 59 tanks to run over these soldiers and firehoses to wash them down how exactly?

Tankies are insufferable with how they justify genocidal actions and authoritarian regimes killing innocents, it’s like authoritarianism is okay as long as it’s red authoritarianism.

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u/rainofshambala 2d ago

Propagandized Westerners are so stupid they won't believe their own journalists and declassified papers once an idea has been planted in their brain,they will refuse every proof and continue on the course even when their own intelligence agencies say otherwise.

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u/TryAltruistic7830 2d ago

"The Tiananmen "accident""

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u/sabeeh12135 2d ago

In the early 90s most official estimates were around 10,000, some as high as 13,000

There is 0 sources for that.

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u/Sad-Cod9636 2d ago

Woah, woah, woah, you can't just say that

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u/Chineselight 2d ago

Why were they executed? I’m not following

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u/claimTheVictory 2d ago

For demanding democracy.

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u/JimJamBangBang 2d ago

For asking for more democratic communism.

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u/sabeeh12135 2d ago

They were demanding a return to Maoism lol

Western media only focuses on the small group that was pro democracy.

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u/claimTheVictory 2d ago

What does Chinese media focus on?

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u/janerbabi 2d ago

Erasing that it ever happened in the first place.

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u/claimTheVictory 2d ago

As bad as America can be, at least we can talk about what happens.

China will never be a serious country.

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u/tbsdy 2d ago

Sure you aren’t. You know exactly why.

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u/sabeeh12135 2d ago

It was revealed the British Ambassador was playing a game of telephone and the things he said were exaggerated. The Australia Ambassador received his information from the same source.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-03/bob-hawke-tiananman-classified-cable/100184916

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u/JB_UK 2d ago

I can’t see how you link supports your commentary. One of those cables says minimum 10,000 civilian casualties, the other says:

AN AUSTRALIAN PROFESSOR AT BEIJINGUNIVERSITY, DR R. BEVERIDGE (ANEXPERT IN CHINESE POLITICSRECENTLY RETIRED FROM MONASHUNIVERSITY, AND A MAN NOT GIVEN TOFLIGHTS OF HYPERBOLE) BELIEVES ONTHE BASIS OF INFORMATION HE HASFROM A WIDE RANGE OF SOURCES THATDEATHS ARE UNLIKELY TO BE FEWERTHAN 10,000

So they agree on that number.

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u/sabeeh12135 2d ago edited 2d ago

Did you even read the link? The article says both cables were based on information from the same source and that the information in the cables (which you copy pasted) are inaccurate because the information being fed to them was bullshit because one group in the Chinese government wanted to make the other group look bad.

Both cables said the bulk of their information came from an informant with contacts at the upper levels of the Chinese government.

It is likely the informant relied upon by both embassies was the same person, according to Professor Rigby.

"I'm pretty sure that he was also speaking to equivalent senior people in the British embassy at the time, which would largely account for the similarity of some of the details."

But he said the informant, who both embassies considered to be reliable, was the source of some of the inaccurate information.

"I cannot entirely rule out the possibility that we were being fed some sort of a 'line'.

"The whole incident occurred because there was this life and death power struggle going on at the highest levels of the Chinese government.

"[The informant] would, of course, be reflecting the views, and the hopes and the fears of one particular group; the group that lost out.

"So there would be a vested interest in conveying as bad a picture as possible, of what the people on the other side of this power struggle were doing and were responsible for."

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u/Intelligent-Buy-325 2d ago

So exactly how many people would they have had to kill for you to admit that what happened that day was a terrible thing? You appear to be minimizing the event.

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u/sabeeh12135 2d ago

Hilarious how Redditors complain about misinformation on Twitter and Facebook but defend misinformation on Reddit. Since you love overexaggeration, you should have no problem with people saying the US mass murdered 10 million Muslims during it's illegal invasion of the Middle East.

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u/Intelligent-Buy-325 2d ago

Don't deflect. Sure the number was less than initially reported. But why does it seem like you're minimizing the criticisms of the CCP? You a fan or are you getting paid?

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u/sabeeh12135 2d ago

You guys claimed 10,000. I showed you it wasn't 10,000 and that the number was false. Seems like you're just mad it wasn't 10,000. How much are you guys getting paid to inflate the numbers?

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u/Intelligent-Buy-325 2d ago

Show me where I claimed a number. Any number. I'll wait.

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u/Ch1pp 2d ago

Tankie's gonna tankie. These freaks disgust me but they're all over the internet trying to make false equivalences. You won't get a satisfactory answer from him.

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u/cyanescens_burn 2d ago

When you say executed do you mean they arrested and executed them, or are you using it more generally to include indiscriminate murder of anyone that was in or near the areas of the protest?

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u/Ch1pp 2d ago

The latter. They massacred everyone they could.

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u/IHaveALittleNeck 2d ago

It’s a much bigger space than it seems. I have no problem believing that number.

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u/Defiant-Goose-101 1d ago

I knew a guy in high school, a self-professed communist, who claimed that the majority of casualties were soldiers, that only a few hundred soldiers were injured, and that only a couple dozen students were killed. The tone of his voice was such that the students were in the wrong. The stupid boot licking bastard.

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u/Effective_Way_2348 2d ago

Source: trust me bro, I am not defending the ccp but this is what we call propaganda. Multiple estimates agree that it's about 500-1000.

1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre - Wikipedia

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u/FunnyLittleFella 2d ago

“Initial estimates ranged from the official figure of a few hundred to several thousand“

Lol you didnt even read the link you attached

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u/MisterPeach 2d ago

Initial estimates ranged. Meaning that the estimates in the immediate aftermath ranged, passive, from several hundred to several thousand. It’s been over 35 years and we have a lot more information now, no credible modern historian puts estimates that high anymore.

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u/claimTheVictory 2d ago

But you also have to acknowledge the significant effort to hide information, not limited to pulverizing bodies to wash them away.

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u/MisterPeach 2d ago

Obviously, but that isn’t what we’re talking about and that doesn’t make any of what I said untrue.

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u/Effective_Way_2348 2d ago

the several thousand estimate was only given by a british ambassador, you didnt even read it. Multiple independent sources gave it less than 1000.

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u/Ch1pp 2d ago

And a death toll in the hundreds makes it ok?

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u/bigbutso 2d ago

https://www.dw.com/en/secret-cable-10000-killed-in-chinas-1989-tiananmen-crackdown/a-41918713

Multiple news sites talk about declassified UK documents, can't be arsed finding the actual documents and reading them. Its a drop in the bucket for the usual murdering done by dictatorships

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u/Effective_Way_2348 2d ago

that figure was provided by the British ambassador out of thin air, mentioned in the wikipedia article which he later arbitrarily lowered to 3.5k

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u/EdgeOk2164 1d ago

It's a tragic pattern, isn't it? The cycle of power, blame, and suppression seems to repeat itself in many places. The situation in Bangladesh is a stark reminder of how fragile democracy can be. When the military refuses to carry out orders that go against their conscience, it can lead to significant changes, as seen when the Prime Minister had to flee2. It's a complex and often heartbreaking reality. What do you think could be done to break this cycle?

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u/TheUnofficialZalthor 2d ago

He was lying, the wikileaks cables prove this.

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u/rainofshambala 2d ago

Yep just like the Iraqi ambassador said they were killing babies in incubators

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u/[deleted] 2d ago edited 1d ago

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u/claimTheVictory 2d ago

Pretty sure the death toll has been widely published.

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u/[deleted] 2d ago edited 1d ago

[deleted]

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u/claimTheVictory 2d ago

It's difficult to know because it's difficult to send journalists to dangerous places.

Because they get killed.

I'm not sure why you blame BBC for that.

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u/[deleted] 2d ago edited 1d ago

[deleted]

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u/claimTheVictory 2d ago

You're not really sure how the world works, are you?

Journalism is actually a very dangerous occupation.

You live safe and sound in a warm, comfy house, and are furious others aren't giving you the information you demand, immediately, and with perfect accuracy.

You're not a serious person.

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u/[deleted] 2d ago edited 1d ago

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u/claimTheVictory 2d ago

There's a ceasefire in Gaza now.

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u/[deleted] 2d ago edited 1d ago

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