It's because "Tiananmen Square" has become a ritual stripped of all its meaning and has just become a way to say lol china bad

It's so bizarre how focused they are on body counts, yet they also don't give a shit about body counts?

Tankies are tankies because they support the evil godless Soviets who clamped down on the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. How many people were killed? 3000 according to Radio Free Europe. Highly Inflated VoC numbers say 20 thousand.

Around the same time one of the many colonial wars, the Algerian War of Independence— a million dead? 1.5 million? They don't even know exactly.

All this was committed by the "democratic" West. (Just look at the Atrocities and war crimes section on Wikipedia. Genuine Waffen-SS level war crimes.)

The difference is in magnitudes.

And this is just Algeria.

Most of it is just successful propaganda. Most people are not media literate and don't read and so are easily misled. You can provide them with information and many will change their views.

But many also will not change their views. They will start throwing a tantrum instead. Sometimes the tantrum is external and you can see how upset they are. Sometimes it's internal and the only thing you can observe is how absurd and defensive their claims become.

These are the liberals who have invested some of their personal identity into being a "good person" that cares about "human rights", both of which are now, in their minds, inextricable from "Western democracy" and its propaganda machine. Through their mental transitive property, being a good person means believing and repeating the "China bad" narratives they have been provided by the US State Department and associated and right wing think tanks, all laundered through a willing capitalist press and literal entertainment media that they treat like gospel.

When you contradict this false narrative, they don't accept it and they are not humbled by the facts. They desperately seek out confirmation of their beliefs. It doesn't even have to be about the exact topic you're discussing. They'll cling to anything "China bad", revealing that they didn't care avout the actual subject at all, just the thesis of who they're told is the official Boogeyman or lesser. And they will have no trouble confirming that belief system whatsoever, as there are always many stories, some of them even true or partially true, that have been hyped up and promoted about the designated enemy via the government and media propaganda apparatus. You can repeat this process several times in a single conversation, with a liberal changing the subject over and over again, and they don't even notice because they have also been taught that political discussions happen in bad faith. They're a fight between competitors, not an opportunity for learning and self-criticism.

So, yes you are correct it's very Western chauvinist. Even accepting the false narrative, their own countries do far worse on a regular basis and even more recently but liberals don't do a yearly commemoration of the War on the Iraqi people, The War on Afghani people, the constant and deliberate economic violence (even just homelessness) that takes far more lives, the prison system, the suppression of George Floyd protests and liberal betrayals thereof, the unconditional US support for genocidal Israeli settler colonialism (you can even pick from 10+ events just in the last decade to commemorate), etc etc.

At the same time, it is an even more fundamental inability to think that has been ingrained into liberals by a very successful propaganda apparatus. I cannot stress enough that they literally don't know how to sit and listen to and process contradiction of their own beliefs. They cannot handle it. The only tool in their toolbox is to act like babies and they think it's the smart and right thing to do. This is something they have learned, it's not inborn, and it can be changed, but it requires a dedicated struggle and a competing set of narratives that are resilient to censorship.

Hilariously, once you start getting too successful at contradicting Western chauvinist claims on online platforms, you have marked you and your community for a good banning - most of the platforms work closely with government agencies, lobbying groups, advertisers associated with these topics, etc etc. This is why irl work in an organization is just as important as having correct narratives more generally. Direct human-to-human communication is more difficult and expensive to censor and there is a multiplier effect to taking action in unison.

Too many people believe western media uncritically when it comes to international stuff. The contradictory part is they'll sometimes have skepticism, distrust, or even hatred for one or more major news sources that's focused on their own country's affairs. But when it comes to news about other countries, the same skepticism can be missing.

Before I learned about ML and all that, I was in that place to some extent, I think. But now that I have some idea of what to look for and know a bit more about international affairs and history, it's really obvious how western media narratives about "human rights" are just narratives of convenience. The formula goes something like: "Is X country somewhere we want to prop up against Y country? If yes, X country is a bastion of human rights and Y country eats babies. Does X country actively oppose us? If yes, X country eats turbo evil cereal as mandatory breakfast meals in every citizen's state-mandated bowl."

It's very cartoonish. And I mean I'm not even exaggerating to say it's cartoonish. I think of this video, which was from decades ago, yet is still so on point for the style of propaganda: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK1tfkESPVY

But one thing I'm not sure how to contend with is when people are deep in paranoia about "foreign agents" and "foreign propaganda" kind of thing. I recall one time online trying to show someone that video to make a point about western propaganda and they straight up refused to watch it. IIRC, they were also someone who had come into the convo thinking I was a Chinese shill or something, but weren't open about thinking that right away, so I naively attempted some good faith stuff at first.

The kind of thinking where anything that contradicts the existing narrative must be coming from "the enemy" "in secret" is such a disturbing thing. I think, would hope, most of us here don't fall into that trap of thinking. For example, even something as straightforward as anti-imperialism is not binary good/evil; there can be countries run by factions that are not empowering the working class, the marginalized among their people as a system of power, but are nevertheless an important force of opposition against the western empire, against foreign capital and its exploitation.

3/3 terrible comments from federated instances so far.

They don't give a fuck about anyone. Even the fucking onion is doing posts about "uyghur genocide" right now because of white supremacist anxieties about a nation that is powerful enough not to cause any harm to the empire but powerful enought to not be exploited by them. As an exercise, I went back to look at their Gaza genocide posts and it's like 1 in the last few weeks.

Sakai was right. Not sorry.

They will never forgive China for stopping their colour revolution.

In commemoration of the massacre at Tiananmen square on the Fourth of June 1989, I shall now repeat the names of all the brave freedom fighters who died there:

One question, about something that I always found strange, why are most of the photos of this event in black and white, given that it took place in the 80s?

Dang libs are flooding already

all that they hate in communism is precisely what they're "enjoying" in capitalism, that's the indoctrination that they ironically fear