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Tiananmen Square 1989 death toll was at least 10,000 according to UK documents

(www.bbc.co.uk)
362 points ComputerGuru | 5 comments | 23 Dec 17 12:36 UTC | HN request time: 1.315s | source
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votepaunchy ◴[23 Dec 17 13:20 UTC] No.15994045[source]▶
What did they do with all the bodies?

"Students linked arms but were mown down including soldiers. APCs then ran over bodies time and time again to make 'pie' and remains collected by bulldozer. Remains incinerated and then hosed down drains.“

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bartread ◴[23 Dec 17 13:26 UTC] No.15994065[source]▶
Reading that made me feel physically sick, and then the line afterwards about the girls begging for their lives who were bayonetted. Just awful.

I have, and probably always will, find Chinese culture somewhat fascinating but I have no love for their political regime.

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hux_[dead post] ◴[23 Dec 17 13:59 UTC] No.15994173[source]▶
Yup in contrast the American regime has about 1000x [1] the death toll but at least those people weren't bulldozed and it didn't make you and me feel too bad. Calling the other side evil is easy. Spotting hypocrisy is easy. Doing something about hyprocisy is much harder. It involves admitting to ourselves that all of us are capable of doing dumb shit.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes

1. rayiner ◴[23 Dec 17 14:18 UTC] No.15994226[source]▶
The difference is that we're trying to do something about it. Kids learn about many of the bad things America did (slavery, extermination of the native Americans, Vietnam war atrocities, nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki, etc.). They're taking down civil war monuments all over the country. The same will happen with Columbus soon--Los Angeles has already renamed Columbus Day in favor of the indigenous people he exterminated, and there are proposals to do the same/take down Columbus monuments in Baltimore, D.C., New York, etc.
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2. intro-b ◴[23 Dec 17 16:33 UTC] No.15994828[source]▶
Exactly - part of America's heritage of a free, unusually aggressive, and intellectually combative free press (on both sides of the political spectrum) is that criticism of our government, history, and society is widely studied and disseminated, both domestically and abroad. Knowledge of American human rights injustices, ranging from slavery to Guantanamo Bay, is promoted, shared, taught in schools.
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3. ceejayoz ◴[23 Dec 17 17:16 UTC] No.15995079[source]▶
It should be noted that American schools teach plenty of revisionist history or gloss over the worst excesses.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/22/opinion/how-texas-teaches...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/150-years-lat...

https://jezebel.com/heres-how-new-texas-public-school-textbo...

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4. junkscience2017 ◴[23 Dec 17 17:59 UTC] No.15995328{3}[source]▶
not just America. growing up in Canada, exactly 0 minutes were dedicated to discussing treatment of First Nations peoples...noteworthy given that government's exceptionally awful history in that regard
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5. fartcannon ◴[24 Dec 17 00:47 UTC] No.15997234{4}[source]▶
Huh. I went to public school in Ontario between 1987 and 2000 and all I ever learned about first nations people was how shitty they were treated. It was so often the point of our geography and canadian history lessons that I feel like the only thing I know about Canada's history is that they treated first nations poorly. It was so heavily reenforced that a lot of my schoolmates got empathy fatigue.

Where and when did you go to school in Canada?