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World won’t forget Tiananmen Square, US and Taiwan say on 36th anniversary of massacre
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2025
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The point isn't to distract, it's to provide context so the accuser can't create an inaccurate framing. The atomic unit of propaganda isn't lies, it's emphesis.
If every week, a right-wing German posted about how many gays Britain murdered, imprisoned, or castrated during the 40s, it would be borderline deceitful for other lemmy users not to provide the full context of what Germany was doing to gays at that time (and what West Germany continued to do until the 1970s).
Same deal when we get the occasional zionist talking about the plight of gay Palestinians. Yes, they have their own struggle, but there is a very specific and obvious purpose behind a zionist bringing it up.
You're being dishonest. You didn't provide any context or made any remark regarding framing or context. In fact, you made no argument at all. You just brought up an entirely irrelevant subject for the sole purpose to distract from the original issues and dismiss the criticism being brought up by appealing to hypocrisy. It's literally the textbook definition of the fallacy.
This is a good example, you're exactly like them in this case.
The subject is "whataboutism", or when people bring up similar, but far worse things done by liberal institutions in response to supporters of liberal institutions accusing communists of doing bad things to show that the supporter of the liberal institution doesn't actually give a shit about the event they're crying about and is simply using it as a pretext to justify hostility against that communist state, victims included.
That's a wild assumption you just made up based on literally nothing. But the fact that you need to make up such assumptions is ironic, because it shows that yourself are a hypocrite. You support these atrocities and the regimes who committed them and so you perceive people calling out these acts as unjustified "hostility" rather warranted criticism. Since you're admitting that you don't actually care about the atrocities being committed, that means the only purpose you would bring up anything to do with "liberal institutions" is to be fallacious, which is exactly the case here.
The entire purpose of bringing up entirely irrelevant subjects is to distract from the original issue and dismiss criticism. There's no context, there's no argument, there's no point. You're simply mad that the regime you support is being criticized and as a desperate attempt to divert attention away from the criticism, you bring up irrelevant topics and accuse people of being hypocrites for their criticism of the original topic... even that doesn't negate the validity of their criticism whatsoever.
When people call you out on your fallacious argumentation, they're telling that the logic you're using is inconsistent. If you're actually ignorant enough to not understand what the fallacies are or why they're bad then that's a different issue, but if you're aware what they are and why they're bad and still choose to be annoyed then that means you're disingenuous. It means you're arguing in bad faith from the get go, which is an indication that the beliefs you are trying to defend are flawed to the point where you can't defend them on their own merits.
Given the total lack of knowledge surrounding any of the events in question or the people affected, it is blatantly obvious that the "criticism" begins and ends with " bad!"
The average ML has studied how/why such actions occurred and the response beyond the childish "dey did it coz authoritarianism!" that libs end their analysis at, because our interest isnt limited to its utility as hostile evidence.
When a country does a bad thing, then that thing is indeed bad. It's fairly straight forward. Your persecution fetish isn't going to change the reality. You're not a victim, neither are the communist countries who committed these atrocities. Just because you're soulless ghoul who supports these atrocities, that doesn't means others do as well. This might be shocking to you, but most people don't have ideological brainrot. They call out bad things when they see them. That's called consistency.
But that's something you lack, because if you had consistency then you wouldn't need to use fallacies. You would just defend your positions by their own merits, but you can't do that so you become dishonest. Even now, instead of just taking the high road and saying "these events were atrocities and I condemn them" like a decent human being, you do the opposite by still defending them. You don't seem to understand there is no justification for them. The fact that you are trying to justify them is direct evidence of your ignorance.
At no point did I try to justify any atrocity, I simply supplied context that pissed off liberals because it required more nuance to interpret than their thought-terminating clichés supplied. Which really was rude, feel free to ignore me and go back to "china ran 100,000 people over with tanks for peacefully asking for freedom like we have, because thats just what ~~terrorists~~ authoritarians do."
What fucking context lmao? You literally provided nothing. There's no sources, no arguments, no explanations, no points, absolutely zero context was provided. The only things you did do was make false assumptions and use fallacious reasoning to justify using logical fallacies. That's not context, that's trying to justify poor critical thinking skills.
The context that the reason this is promoted multiple times a year as opposed to any particular atrocities committed by western media that this can be used to justify further hostile action against a foreign nation.
If you still use the word "authoritarian", You're not ready to have a meaningful discussion on the event anymore than a zionist screeching about "terrorists" is capable of discussing Oct 6th.
Here you are at again, this is NOT context. Context is when you add relevant information to a topic in a discussion. What you're doing here is the tu quoue fallacy. Do you understand why the fallacy you're using is just that? Do you even understand why fallacies are considered bad to begin with? We can't have an honest discussion if you can't comprehend this.
What other word would you use to describe it? You have a very big government that tries to control every aspect of society at the expense of the freedoms and rights of its citizens, it places a lot overbearing rules that are enforced very strictly, and those who break these rules receive punishments that disproportionately exceed the crime. In this case, the CCP is a tyrannical government that ordered soldiers to kill students for the crime of peacefully protesting. That's the textbook definition of what authoritarianism is. How am I, or anyone, supposed to take you seriously, when you can't even admit a basic fact like the CCP is authoritarian? Even they don't deny it.
The term is pointless because it is only used to describe foreign countries. What freedom does someone working for minimum wage, barely able to afford rent, and at the mercy of their employer to even be able to do that much experience? But also it's impossible to separate any actual freedom in the west from the hyperexploitation of the global south; you are able to buy bananas or coffee with less than 10 minutes of labor because the dictators the US keeps in place in countries that produce them keep the price of labor and resources low.
I'm from a country with 2% of its population in prison or homeless. To call any other country (except maybe Saudi Arabia, Iran, some gulf states, and Russia)'s rules disproportionate is laughable. Hell here in SK leading a socialist org is technically punishable by death, though the law isn't enforced as written, in the lead up to the election I saw a demonstration with LGBT+ communist-like and anarchist flags that weren't shut down. It's like a fish accusing another fish of being wet.
Read the wikipedia article. You only accept such cartoonish logic of the evil communists needing to control everything and sending in troops to murder everyone who tries to ask for freedom because you have a cartoonish understanding of a real place with real people. You see the same short-circuiting of logic when you try to explain to a zionist why Oct 7th happened and they just go "They did it because they're terrorists!" over and over. The CPC sent police and soldiers in unarmed, several got lynched (don't look the pics up, they're very graphic), they sent them back with weapons and a battle ensued, involving cops shooting indiscriminately in the area surrounding the square.
See, the next step is where you go "well it's still bad cpp ebil" instead of developing any nuance or researching the political impact within China or doing further research into the various student factions and how it got to lynchings and how the other factions reacted (there's quite a few contemporary interviews by students whose positions lead them to have different biases), and then I realize I've wasted my time.
The mental gymnastics of tankies knows no bounds, you get a gold medal for your disingenuous efforts. There's nothing that you can do to twist the reality. By every single measurable and observable metric, China is an authoritarian country by the purest definition of the word. The word "authoritarian" has a very clear, well defined, and straightforward definition that is objective and is applied universally. If you are really trying to sit here and argue that China of all places is NOT authoritarian then you're either too dishonest or too stupid to have this discussion.
Three things:
You simply cannot argue in good faith that China today, under the rule of the CCP, is not authoritarian or is less authoritarian the US or the rest of the West. Doubling down on this take means that you're arguing against actual facts, and that's when you start crossing into clown territory.
Are you really that dumb or are you actually going to argue that poverty and crime = authoritarianism? If you don't understand what the word means then look it up and actually try to grasp the concept. I mean I literally spelled out the definition for you multiple times, but if you don't believe me, you can look it up.
If you hold up a giant sign in the heart of Seoul that says "Lee Jae-myung is a pig", nothing will happen. If you hold up a giant sign in the heart of DC that says "Trump is a pig" nothing will happen. If you hold up a giant sign in the heart of Paris that says "Macron is a pig" nothing will happen. If you hold up a giant sign in the heart of Beijing that says "Xi is a pig" you're going to be arrested and punished. They are not at all the same thing, this is a false equivalency.
Did you read the article? Because it doesn't all say what you claim it says, in fact, it's details are pretty in line with I and everybody else have been saying.
This is exactly what the article you posted says. Adding words to make sound absurd doesn't change what actually happened. It seems like you don't even know what happened.
You're using the same moronic logic as them, actually yours is worse because you seem to lack the self awareness to recognize it. What Hamas did on Oct 7th are indeed terrorist attacks that are entirely unjustifiable. With that being said, what Israel is doing now is also unjustifiable. You know what this is called? Consistency. The idiots that try to pretend that the Hamas terrorist attacks were justifiable are evil parasites, and the idiots that say that defend what Israel is doing by saying that all Gazans are terrorists are also evil parasites. Multiple things can be true at once.
In your case, the CCP killed a bunch of people in a massacre in 1989. This is an objective fact that is undeniable. Instead of condemning this event for what it was like a decent human being with the bare minimum level of moral consistency, you choose to repeatedly try to justify it like the idiots described above by repeatedly droning about "MUH CONTEXT"... without actually providing real sourced context that supports your claims. In fact, your own source shows you're full of shit. It's like you don't seem to understand that baseless accusing ignorance doesn't make something wrong or you right, nor does it invalidate the objective facts.
Those facts show that the CCP on June 4th 1989 committed an atrocity against it's own people. You can either be a normal, condemn it, and move on or you can be a scumbag who admits that you just straight up supports the atrocity, at least you'll be honest that way. You can't have it both ways where you pretending you're against the atrocity while defending it.
Ah, there it is. You did the thing again. You made another baseless accusation of ignorance while providing absolutely nothing... you know other than you either showcasing your own ignorance or dishonesty. How can someone take you seriously when you're detached from reality? How can somebody have a meaningful discussion with someone who thinks this atrocity is justified? How can somebody give you the benefit of the doubt that you're arguing in good faith when you're repeatedly dishonest about basic facts? The answer is that you can't, and you're clearly just a troll.