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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   37693 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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That said, DeepSeek seem to not be very sold on socialism as a universal principle

Neither is China.

"Socialism" would be a code word for "whatever the Chinese government wants", not for actual socialism. The results wouldn't be very socialist, but probably wouldn't tell you about the Tienanmen Square massacre either.

'Tianamen square massacre' was like the 'October revolution (which took place in november)'. It didn't take place on Tianamen square, but mostly elsewhere. And it was precipitated by some faction of protesters burning alive a whole bunch of soldiers in buses (party admits to a dozen), outside of the square. (see end for an excerpt from a book by a westerner involved).

They managed this because soldiers in the square - who have been there for weeks- who were only armed with truncheons, and overall live ammunition and weapons was not something commonly had by soldiers keeping watch on the protesters.

According to anti-US sources, the protest movement was taken over by CIA types, the violent attack was done by a small unknown group. Gene Sharp, the guy who invented color revolutions was involved too.

Hard to say what really happened, except apparently, at the same time there was a more violent workers' uprising outside of the square, a violent attack on riot control troops that resulted in a dozen dead with consequent reaction all these events got conflated and made into the 'Chinese massacred hundreds to thousands of unarmed protesters at Tianamen square'.

What we actually are hoping for is bloodshed, the moment when the government is ready to brazenly butcher the people. Only when the Square is awash with blood will the people of China open their eyes.

(one of the protest leaders)

It's a good playbook. Either you humiliate the government and exploit its unwillingness to stand up to protesters to get what you want, or it gets violent and then you can paint them as monsters even though the 'death toll' is less than the needless deaths in one progressive western city in a year..

Whole bunch of photos here.

Whatever happened, as someone who for obvious reasons appreciates diversity in political governance structures, I applaud CPC for not getting snookered like so many others. The mysterious 'Swiss Propaganda Research' has a write-up on it.. I say 'mysterious' because they're accused of not being anonymous Swiss journalist(s) but a front for Russians or Chinese.

Excerpt from 'Tianamen Moon' by a not-CPC sympathizing guy.

The May Fourth spirit was gone, replaced by something murky and malevolent. There was a new element I hadn’t noticed much of before, young punks decidedly less than studentlike in appearance. In the place of headbands and signed shirts with university pins they wore cheap, ill-fitting polyester clothes and loose windbreakers. Under our lights, their eyes gleaming with mischief, they brazenly revealed hidden Molotov cocktails. The unsung heroes who had kept the peace for over a month could retroactively be appreciated by their disconcerting absence; at best, student types were in scant evidence this night. Instead there were warriors with agendas unknown pressing in on us. No overt hostility was directed at the crew per se, but the anger and seething lust for violence was palpable. Our lights, in this dark and troubling hour, seemed to attract all species of insect. “Turn off the lights!” I yelled at Wang Li. “This isn’t working, turn off the lights! We better get out of here!” Who were these punks in shorts and

I watched from twenty to thirty feet away as the students tried to extract from the burning vehicle the driver who had nearly killed them. He had trouble walking. He appeared to be injured and in serious pain, but the quality of crowd mercy was uneven. Eve of Destruction 273 “He’s not a person, he’s a thing, kill him!” voices continued to shout out. Hotheads were deliberately instigating violence, putting them at odds with conscientious demonstrators who had no intention of hurting anyone. The assembly surrounding the armored vehicle shared a paroxysm of joy in stopping it, but was of more than one mind about what to do next. At least one surrendering soldier was safely evacuated to a waiting ambulance, but then the ambulance itself was attacked, the back door almost ripped off by protesters determined to punish the man in uniform. Up until now, the volunteer ambulances were symbols of the movement’s caring side, carting collapsed hunger strikers away from Tiananmen to hospitals for physical restoration. Until this night, city ambulances, plying slowly through the pack with that familiar, almost reassuring up-and-down wail, had been sacrosanct and untouchable. A man with a metal pipe smashed the rear of the ambulance, breaking the taillight. Two or three other men pounded on the back door demanding that the limp body of the soldier be handed over. T

/images/17208161920475774.webp

I am kinda fine with the 3T approach china takes to freedom of speech and knowledge compared to the cancel culture wokeness and DEI that rule(d) the west.

What does 3T mean in this context?

Taiwan, Tibet and Tiannamen

Tiananmen, Tibet, Taiwan. The (inaccurate) idea being that China lets people say whatever they want online, except for a narrow set of topics which are clearly verboten but also consistent and legible.

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