On balance, it would be fair to say that while thousands of protestors were most likely not gunned down in the square itself, hundreds were being gunned down around it. So there was a massacre by the PLA, it just didn’t happen in the square itself.
So there was a massacre by the PLA, it just didn’t happen in the square itself.
Current research by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation suggests that the massacre occured in the same place Sadaam Hussein would later store his nonexistant WMDs.
If they were just protestors, why were they gunned down while the ones in the square could all be cleared out with no fatalities? Did the people who incinerated soldiers and strung up their burnt corpses leave peacefully beforehand?
Because the PLA forced themselves through several blockades before they were able to reach the square. It was at these blockades that the strongest resistance was met, and where the majority of the killing occurred.
We don’t know for sure, but the order seems to be that [the PLA] have to get [to the square] by midnight. So by 10:00 p.m. they’re getting desperate. They cannot fight their way through thousands of people with riot shields and billy clubs, so each of these columns coming into the city starts radioing into headquarters, asking for permission to go ahead at any cost. Finally that permission starts coming down sometime between 10:30 p.m. and 11:00 p.m.
The first rounds of fire catch everybody by surprise. The people in the streets don’t expect this to happen. There are a couple of hospitals right near Muxidi, and the casualties start showing up within 10 or 15 minutes of the first round of gunfire. The casualties run very high because people didn’t expect to be shot at with live ammunition. When they start firing, people say, “Oh, it’s rubber bullets.” Even after it becomes clear, even after they realize that the army is going to go ahead at any cost, people still pour into the streets. This is the amazing thing: People were just so angry, so furious at what was happening in their city that they were not going to step back and let the army do what it was doing. This is why the casualties from Muxidi on east towards Tiananmen Square were so high. This is the major military confrontation of the evening.
That account as-presented leaves out the immolating of unarmed soldiers via petrol bombs, which seems necessarily to distort their evaluations of why people behaved how they did. iirc some “protestors” also took the liberty of seizing weapons from an APC that had a catastrophic failure and killed the soldiers inside, and this was still before the crackdown. Remember, a number of soldiers also died, they had to have been killed somehow (though one was killed by friendly fire and like 6 or 7 by the accident I mentioned).
The NYPD are a bunch of jackbooted thugs of a white supremacist administration under the thinnest veneer of “justice”. Equivocating between them and the PLA is absurd.
“As far as I was concerned,” he said, “anybody who’d stand against the cops was all right with me, and that’s why I stayed in…Every time you turn around the cops were pulling some outrage or another.”
Remember that picture of 50,000 uniformed fascists taking over part of the city in a show of force allegedly for a funeral because some pig got got?
That said, my understanding is that relations between the PLA soldiers and the students were positive throughout. Almost all the PLA soldiers in the square had no weapons, including no batons or riot helmets. I believe there were some riot units present but they were a small number relative to the overall PLA presence. There are stories of the PLA soldiers and students singing songs and sharing food. It’s important to remember that most of the students in the square were advocating for a return to Communist economics from the Dengist market liberalization. From what I understand the CPC didn’t really know what to do with them because they didn’t want to start a confrontation with people demanding more communism, and that’s largely why the event was almost entirely peaceful.
Thousands of completely unarmed PLA troops had already been in the square for days. This is nonsense. There’s pictures of them chilling with the students.
Let’s play “Actually Read Your Sources.” We’ll start with the BBC one.
I was one of the foreign journalists who witnessed the events that night.
Our author starts off by saying he was not just on the ground in Beijing, but “witnessed the events.”
Towards midday on 4 June, amid reports of widespread casualties, I wrote in another draft that “many of the deaths occurred at Tiananmen Square, not only from gunshots, but also from being crushed by tanks, which ploughed relentlessly through any obstacle in their way.”
Our reporter does not claim to have witnessed any of this, despite earlier saying he “witnessed the events.” Instead, his in-the-moment story is that there are “reports” of salacious details like tanks running people over. Reports from whom? It’s understandable not to name names if these were ordinary people, but were they students, residents, police…? Did they claim to have personally witnessed the events, or are they too telling a story based on “reports”? And if anything was done to verify these reports (again, our author was there while this was happening, his whole job is ostensibly to do this type of groundwork), it didn’t make the article.
On the morning of 4 June, reporters in the Beijing Hotel close to the square saw troops open fire indiscriminately at unarmed citizens on Chang’an Boulevard who were too far away from the soldiers to pose any real threat.
Here it is inexcusable not to name which reporters claim to have witnessed this key event. They presumably put there name on the same story so there’s no one to protect, especially in 2009 when this article was written. It’s also poor professional ethics to cite someone’s scoop and give them (and whatever outlet they report to) zero credit. At best this is a rumor, at worst it’s obvious bullshit, fatally undermined by no credible journalist would write a “20 year retrospective/let’s get the truth right” article and omit such a crucial detail.
Thirty or 40 bodies lay, apparently lifeless, on the road afterwards.
Of course there are no pictures of any of this, despite unnamed “reporters” claiming to have witnessed it. This is again inexcusable – this is a career-making story for a journalist, their whole job is to record important events, and not only do we not have a name of any journalist who says they actually saw 40 dead bodies on the ground, we don’t even have a photo.
The government said 200 citizens died (from stray bullets and shootings by thugs), in addition to dozens of troops… Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, who did some admirable detective work in Beijing hospitals in the weeks after the massacre, said in a report published on 21 June 1989 that “it seems plausible that about a dozen soldiers and policemen were killed, along with 400 to 800 civilians”.
Ahh, so it is possible to name a reporter who actually saw something! We finally have a named person who apparently witnessed something important (still nothing on the author’s own observations, despite his initial claim that he “witnessed the events”), and he even gives some basic detail on how he verified his claims (visiting hospitals, albeit weeks later). And… his claims are only slightly different from the government’s story.
The standard line now used by foreign journalists is that “hundreds, possibly thousands” died.
The Chinese government was quick to exploit the weaknesses in our reporting.
The audacity of the Chinese government to take issue with hostile press reporting things their own reporters dispute!
But it is not uncommon to find Chinese who believe the Communist Party’s fiction that there was a riot in Beijing on 3 June that warranted intervention.
On balance, it would be fair to say that while thousands of protestors were most likely not gunned down in the square itself, hundreds were being gunned down around it. So there was a massacre by the PLA, it just didn’t happen in the square itself.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8057762.stm
https://archive.is/20191208232045/https://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/13/world/turmoil-china-tiananmen-crackdown-student-s-account-questioned-major-points.html
https://earnshaw.com/writings/memoirs/tiananmen-story
Current research by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation suggests that the massacre occured in the same place Sadaam Hussein would later store his nonexistant WMDs.
If they were just protestors, why were they gunned down while the ones in the square could all be cleared out with no fatalities? Did the people who incinerated soldiers and strung up their burnt corpses leave peacefully beforehand?
Because the PLA forced themselves through several blockades before they were able to reach the square. It was at these blockades that the strongest resistance was met, and where the majority of the killing occurred.
Source
That account as-presented leaves out the immolating of unarmed soldiers via petrol bombs, which seems necessarily to distort their evaluations of why people behaved how they did. iirc some “protestors” also took the liberty of seizing weapons from an APC that had a catastrophic failure and killed the soldiers inside, and this was still before the crackdown. Remember, a number of soldiers also died, they had to have been killed somehow (though one was killed by friendly fire and like 6 or 7 by the accident I mentioned).
if new yorkers burned some nypd officers to death and then a bunch of people were killed I’d be on the people’s side
not taking a grand stand on the events I don’t know shit about fuck and don’t rightly care honestly
The NYPD are a bunch of jackbooted thugs of a white supremacist administration under the thinnest veneer of “justice”. Equivocating between them and the PLA is absurd.
again not taking a real stance just saying a thing I noticed, Death to America of course
https://www.villagepreservation.org/2022/06/13/dave-van-ronk-ally-at-the-stonewall-uprising/
Remember that picture of 50,000 uniformed fascists taking over part of the city in a show of force allegedly for a funeral because some pig got got?
That said, my understanding is that relations between the PLA soldiers and the students were positive throughout. Almost all the PLA soldiers in the square had no weapons, including no batons or riot helmets. I believe there were some riot units present but they were a small number relative to the overall PLA presence. There are stories of the PLA soldiers and students singing songs and sharing food. It’s important to remember that most of the students in the square were advocating for a return to Communist economics from the Dengist market liberalization. From what I understand the CPC didn’t really know what to do with them because they didn’t want to start a confrontation with people demanding more communism, and that’s largely why the event was almost entirely peaceful.
Thousands of completely unarmed PLA troops had already been in the square for days. This is nonsense. There’s pictures of them chilling with the students.
Let’s play “Actually Read Your Sources.” We’ll start with the BBC one.
Our author starts off by saying he was not just on the ground in Beijing, but “witnessed the events.”
Our reporter does not claim to have witnessed any of this, despite earlier saying he “witnessed the events.” Instead, his in-the-moment story is that there are “reports” of salacious details like tanks running people over. Reports from whom? It’s understandable not to name names if these were ordinary people, but were they students, residents, police…? Did they claim to have personally witnessed the events, or are they too telling a story based on “reports”? And if anything was done to verify these reports (again, our author was there while this was happening, his whole job is ostensibly to do this type of groundwork), it didn’t make the article.
Here it is inexcusable not to name which reporters claim to have witnessed this key event. They presumably put there name on the same story so there’s no one to protect, especially in 2009 when this article was written. It’s also poor professional ethics to cite someone’s scoop and give them (and whatever outlet they report to) zero credit. At best this is a rumor, at worst it’s obvious bullshit, fatally undermined by no credible journalist would write a “20 year retrospective/let’s get the truth right” article and omit such a crucial detail.
Of course there are no pictures of any of this, despite unnamed “reporters” claiming to have witnessed it. This is again inexcusable – this is a career-making story for a journalist, their whole job is to record important events, and not only do we not have a name of any journalist who says they actually saw 40 dead bodies on the ground, we don’t even have a photo.
Ahh, so it is possible to name a reporter who actually saw something! We finally have a named person who apparently witnessed something important (still nothing on the author’s own observations, despite his initial claim that he “witnessed the events”), and he even gives some basic detail on how he verified his claims (visiting hospitals, albeit weeks later). And… his claims are only slightly different from the government’s story.
The audacity of the Chinese government to take issue with hostile press reporting things their own reporters dispute!
You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me