• 2Password2Remember [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    2 years ago

    shitlibs love posting that picture of the guy standing in front of the tank, as some kind of own, when if that happened in the US the cops would have gleefully run him over and then been made into a celebrity for it

    Death to America

  • sshff@lemmy.sdf.org
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    2 years ago

    Also here in the UK a large majority believe that “Empire” was a nice pleasant good thing that did nothing but good to the countries we merely ’looked after’.

    We call the ones that haven’t fully told us to ‘fuck off’ the ‘Commonwealth’ and hold lots of PR events like Olympic-esque games and ‘rich monarch waves at people who’s country has a GDP less than their hat largely because we stole all their resources before they could use them to develop’ tours.

    • WittyProfileName2 [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      2 years ago

      Jesus Christ, do not ever tell an English person that you think Winston Churchill was a monster. Worst mistake of my life. You’d swear I’d shat on his mum’s grave.

        • WittyProfileName2 [she/her]@hexbear.net
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          2 years ago

          There’s been a concerted effort to paint him as a heroic figure so that the blitz can be used as a rallying point for British nationalism.

          The Welsh curriculum at least taught me about the time he sent the military in to gun down striking miners in Tonypandy. I don’t think the English education system teaches children about any of the shit he did.

          The end result is he’s almost become a secular saint for some English.

    • ShimmeringKoi [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      2 years ago

      I remember that old black and white footage of queen whoeverthefuck (victoria?) tossing little pieces of food to the ground for african toddlers to scramble for in the exact same way you or I would feed pigeons in the park.

  • privatized_sun [none/use name]@hexbear.netBanned
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    2 years ago

    “Uyghur people are being GENOCIDED simply for their culture of having knifes to demonstrate their manliness (which the CIA used to agitate for terrorist attacks)”

    vs

    “actually US settlers were right to kill natives because they were scary and had sharp obsidian knives” :scared:

  • RedundantClam [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    2 years ago

    thinkin-lenin On US education I remember in 8th grade the one thing I learned about Marx was one paragraph and was basically just “he wrote the Communist Manifesto and believed that history was a cycle of conflicts between classes.” And I was just like “Well what is communism? Isn’t that going to be important going forward?” I guess it wasn’t and I never learned what Communism/Socialism actually is or what the USSR did beyond “be authoritarian” until I was an adult.

    • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      2 years ago

      You probably didn’t actually learn what capitalism is either until later, given that Marx is the most comprehensive breakdown of how capitalism functions, so much so that even the economics courses at universities use Marx for that part.

      The intentional avoidance of teaching how the system works is essential to making sure people don’t question it. You don’t want your workers knowing how it works, merely accepting it. Understanding how it works is reserved for the ruling class.

      • MCU_H8ER2 [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        2 years ago

        I remember I took economics 101 in college. The professor was explaining how growth is required for capitalism. Even as clueless I was back then, I raised my hand and said well nothing can keep growing forever, what happens then? He told me that would be a long time from now and to not worry about it.

    • I tended to have communism/socialism condescendingly poopooed as “well-meaning” but “never really working because human nature”.

      Anyways, time to learn about the french revolution and the reign of terror, which in no way should be viewed as an indictment of liberal revolutions the way the red terror does for socialism.

      • AntiOutsideAktion [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        2 years ago

        I remember almost my exact words when I was in high school “communism has a lot of valid criticisms about capitalism but their solutions didn’t work”

  • Averagemaoist [none/use name]@hexbear.netBanned
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    2 years ago

    I’m convinced all the people saying that America doesn’t teach what happens to the Indians (besides the first Thanksgiving) stopped paying attention in history class after elementary school.

    • MrSqueezles@lemm.ee
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      2 years ago

      Yeah, my education didn’t cover who taught whom about corn. It definitely covered reservations and forced marches and murder and sickness. Maybe we can cover all of that in a couple of weeks and forget how much time it took and what was covered?

    • Kuori [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      2 years ago

      “this wasn’t my experience, so it didn’t happen”

      or you could listen to the people telling you otherwise, but why do that?

    • CabbageRelish@midwest.social
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      2 years ago

      My education I got in Ohio was abysmal about this shit. Most of it was just review after elementary. And I say that as someone who would read the textbooks cover to cover.

      A people’s history of the US was probably pivotal for me properly turning left, didn’t find it until well afterwards though.

  • D61 [any]@hexbear.net
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    2 years ago

    US PUBLIC EDUCATION HISTORY CLASS: And today kids, we are going to learn about all of the native indians, the Southwest Indians, the plains indians, AND the forrest indians. Are you excited to learn about all the indians that were here, kids?

  • RedDawn [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    2 years ago

    I just read to my parents about the Haymarket tragedy and the origins of Mayday, and how the United States freaked out that people all over the world began recognizing that day and in order to cut it off in the US they made May 1st loyalty day and used red scare shit to make sure nobody would demonstrate or do anything on May 1st here lol. They had never heard of any of it.

      • AcidSmiley [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        2 years ago

        Look it’s important that Western countries don’t show the full vid, otherwise their citizens would think they can do the same to cops in the US, can you imagine what they’d do to a guy walking around on one of their armored vehicles?

        • I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.ml
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          2 years ago

          So that’s why China allows open conversation about the incident right? If it’s all just a big misunderstanding, they should be happy to allow their citizens to share the facts. Certainly they wouldn’t take steps to ban all mention of the incident as if there was something terrible there they wanted to hide.

          • AcidSmiley [she/her]@hexbear.net
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            2 years ago

            So that’s why China allows open conversation about the incident right?

            This actually gets discussed in Chinese state media. The idea that people get -500 social credit score when they barely mention Tiananmen Square is mostly Western propaganda. Maybe somebody else will link you articles about this from China, i’m not gonna bother because they’ve already been linked ITT and you liberals don’t read them anyway. But of course they’re around.

            Your post also shows a vast ignorance about how propaganda even works in the first place, whether we’re talking China or the USA or any other country. That’s because you get your ideas about politics from idiots like the antisemitic snitch and cousin r*pist George Orwell and then you think dictatorships work like 1984 and completely miss that you’re living in a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Propaganda is not about hiding things from the public, that simply doesn’t work well enough. You can downplay the truth, but you’ll never get rid of it entirely. We’re one example of that, existing and driving you nuts in spite of the largest propaganda and surveilance apparatus in the world working against us. And the same applies for the smaller, less overarching, less well funded Chinese “intelligence community”, as you’d call their spies and snitches and secret police if they were Western spies and snitches and secret police. For example, anybody in China can install a VPN and look at Western news sources if they care, and a lot of younger people actually do that, just as you can come here and get exposed to facts that counter Western narratives.This is why propaganda works by emphasizing what you want the people to hear to the point were the noise drowns out what you do not want them to hear. By establishing counter-narratives to the truth. For example, you get flooded with the still image of the guy standing in front of the tank instead of the full video. You get fed the story about China somehow wafflestomping 10.000 corpses down the sewer drains by rolling over them with tanks until they’re mush, as if that could even work, even though the only source for this is something 1 (in words: ONE) British diplomat has allegedly heard from somebody in Beijing. But because people like you never actually check their sources, you think there’s hundreds of accounts of that incident just because there’s hundreds of articles citing that one unnamed British diplomat or each other, and that’s all over reddit, that site that has not only ruined your sense of humor and your ability to ever have a good faith discussion with another human being again, but that has also turned you into a mindless drone lashing out at anybody questioning the racist, national chauvinist narratives that have been blared into your ears until you came here 3 months because the pedophile spez threatened to take away the apps that allowed you to more conveniently doomscroll that hellsite on your mobile phone.

            What you usually do not get to see in Western media are the Chinese cop strung up on a lamppost and set on fire by the protesters, or that many of the counterrevolutionaries where, what a surprise, reactionaries that earlier the same year took part in riots against African exchange students at Chinese universities.

            Anyway, it was fun yelling at you, have a nice day.

      • KarlBarqs [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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        2 years ago

        My favourite bit about the video is that the tank column is leaving Tiananmen when this guy stops them, and I always get the impression he’s essentially asking the tankers to go back to the Square.

        Naturally the lib framing is that he’s blocking them from entering the Square

        • YuccaMan [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          2 years ago

          https://www.liberationnews.org/tiananmen-the-massacre-that-wasnt-2/

          Edit: the other source I was looking for

          https://archives.cjr.org/behind_the_news/the_myth_of_tiananmen.php

          The thing to get is that there was no massacre on the square, and in fact there’s no verifiable evidence that anybody died there at all that day. Many people did die elsewhere, in street clashes with soldiers, after demonstrators killed and burned a few of them.

          I would like to note also that bringing up events like Tiananmen Square, especially heavily propagandized and warped versions of them, without an understanding of the complex political context which led up to them, is not a gotcha, it’s just ignorant. Not saying you’re doing that or that you would do that, but it’s something others do frequently when they invoke it round here.

          • sanpedropeddler@sh.itjust.works
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            2 years ago

            With no actual evidence, it just seems like China’s word against the US’s. Neither are sources I trust, and both have motives to lie. I’m just going to assume nothing.

            • PosadistInevitablity [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              2 years ago

              Can you possibly explain why the western diplomats stationed there told their home countries nothing happened in diplomatic cables?

              Why would they do that if it was real?

            • YuccaMan [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              2 years ago

              I said there was no evidence that a massacre took place in Tiananmen Square. What actually took place there is well evidenced by eyewitness testimony, a fair bit of which is contained in the two sources I linked.

              Edit: I also take issue with the assertion that both the US and China are equally untrustworthy, particularly when the Chinese government freely admits that violent clashes between civilians and PLA personnel took place that day, something they would certainly have incentive to lie about if they were as untrustworthy as all that.

              • sanpedropeddler@sh.itjust.works
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                2 years ago

                I recall seeing eyewitness testimony supporting both sides. Although, its possible the testimonies I saw were about the clashes that China admits to, and were simply framed as being about a massacre. They didn’t seem very specific or definitive.

                Even though the Chinese government admits to those violent clashes, its still very plausible they would lie about a massacre. Its much easier to justify that than it would be an actual massacre, especially when the civilians act violently. Its also possible that admitting some aspect of it would benefit them more than complete denial.

                • YuccaMan [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  2 years ago

                  You’d have a point there, if there wasn’t ample photographic evidence which also suggests that no concerted massacre took place, in the square or elsewhere. All available photographic evidence that I’ve seen supports the Chinese government’s version of events: scattered street clashes which unfortunately featured some quite heavy duty violence, but no mass formation of tanks coming in and deliberately schwacking everybody in sight.