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755 points MedadNewman | 10 comments | | HN request time: 0.321s | source | bottom
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kelseyfrog ◴[] No.42891543[source]
Tiananmen Square has become a litmus test for Chinese censorship, but in a way, it's revealing. The assumption is that access to this information could influence Chinese public opinion — that if people knew more, something might change. At the very least, there's a belief in that possibility.

Meanwhile, I can ask ChatGPT, "Tell me about the MOVE bombing of 1985," and get a detailed answer, yet nothing changes. Here in the US, we don’t even hold onto the hope that knowing the truth could make a difference. Unlike the Chinese, we're hopeless.

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1. akdev1l ◴[] No.42891615[source]
I don’t know about comparing what was apparently an armed standoff were only Six adults and five children were killed in the attack - vs Tiananmen Square where the Chinese send their own soldiers to kill peaceful protesters and flush them down the drains as human goo.

The matter of fact is that the US hasn’t yet committed such horrific acts to such a large scale as the CCP did in Tiananmen Square. (Not that I agree with whatever they did in that bombing but it seems truly incomparable)

Reference from wiki:

> the bombing and destruction of residential homes in the Cobbs Creek neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, by the Philadelphia Police Department during an armed standoff with MOVE, a black liberation organization.

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2. Cpoll ◴[] No.42891782[source]
> apparently an armed standoff

You could look to the Kent State shootings for a perhaps better comparison.

3. skyyler ◴[] No.42891820[source]
They're not comparing the brutality of the event, they're comparing different approaches to informational / ideological hygeine.

CCP suppresses 1989 by banning discussion of it.

USA doesn't have to suppress 1989 MOVE bombing, or the Tulsa racist uprising, or the atrocities that went down in gitmo, or the friendship between Jeffrey Epstein and previous and current presidents, or My Lai or Abu Ghraib or Haditha or Kunduz or Nangar Khel or Maywand District or Baghuz because the citizens just don't care.

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4. akdev1l ◴[] No.42891968[source]
Citizens don’t care because if you show them an armed standoff where the police brutalized some people then they will say:

1. I’m not in armed standoff often so this is not impacting me at all. 2. The brutality seems to have come from city police authorities and I don’t live in that city.

Similarly all of those things you mentioned are not impacting people’s lives at all. No one will start any revolution over these things.

However the possibility of being forced down some drains as goo because you don’t like the government moves people more because: some people actually don’t like the government and they don’t want to become human goo

The comparable equivalent would be Donald Trump deploying the army to kill people at peaceful Democrat gathering or something.

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5. poincaredisk ◴[] No.42892011[source]
USA doesn't have to suppress 1985 mistakes, because it acknowledges them and allows itself to be criticized. Claiming that censorship is somehow better because it's a proof that people care is absolutely ridiculous.
6. titanomachy ◴[] No.42892072[source]
> the US hasn’t yet committed such horrific acts to such a large scale as the CCP did in Tiananmen Square

At least, not against their own citizens

7. skyyler ◴[] No.42892912{3}[source]
>The comparable equivalent would be Donald Trump deploying the army to kill people at peaceful Democrat gathering or something

You mean like what happened at Kent State?

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8. akdev1l ◴[] No.42893835{4}[source]
1. This is called “changing goalposts” 2. The US isn’t censoring anything about that event 3. According to Wikipedia: There was no order to fire, and no guardsmen requested permission, though several guardsmen later claimed they heard some sort of command to fire. - the government wasn’t even the ones who ordered anything. In Tiananmen Square the Chinese ordered their soldiers to kill and mush their own citizens.

This discussion isn’t intellectually honest so I am going to disengage.

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9. skyyler ◴[] No.42895229{5}[source]
> In Tiananmen Square the Chinese ordered their soldiers to kill and mush their own citizens.

Surely the Americans have never done this before :(

10. vkou ◴[] No.42896043{5}[source]
> The US isn’t censoring anything about that event

Because it doesn't have to. And that's not a compliment.

As it turns out, it doesn't need to censor it, because it is perfectly fine with it. Not a single person was held accountable. And nobody will be held accountable when it happens again. And it will happen again, because fundamentally, nothing about the equation has changed.

A China that was so confident in its security that it didn't feel the need to censor 4/15 would not actually be a better place.