chapotraphouse

so the evidence for this claim ("people were run over with tanks, and their remains hosed down the street drains") is literally just someone said that someone else said hearsay passed through a game of telephone.

I went down an internet rabbit hole the other night trying to find the true source of the g*re images most commonly attributed to events in Tiananmen Square. I made like no progress after an hour, but one thread that stuck out to me was on the subreddit /r/MorbidReality, where a mod said the images were proven true by a reliable source, but their source was just a link to the search results from typing "Tiananmen Square" into gettyimages lol Like not even a specific image, just the landing page for searching a keyword on a stock image site...

If the proof of burden is on those alleging a massacre of (tens of) thousands of civilians, you would think they would do more than share like a small handful of images, most of which come with no easily accessible or verifiable context/explanation. it's so weird.

edit cause the thread is still new-ish: if a user can shed light on the original source(s) of the images I'm describing can you please share so i can find intellectual closure on them?

And the evidence that this didn't happen, in addition to the accounts of western reporters physically present in the square who said no one died and there wasn't much violence in the square, is the like thousands of people who were students in the square at the time and don't understand why Americans are so obsessive about it.

~~Chinese~~ British Whispers.

https://www.amnesty.org.uk/china-1989-tiananmen-square-protests-demonstration-massacre

As long as the Chinese government censors the topic, it's hard to know what exactly happened and what didnt. We are left with political statements and third-hand "knowledge". Which isnt ideal.

Although the uprising is still taboo in China, everyone who was there on the square remembers. At the end of Beijing Coma, the protagonist Dai Wei recalls returning to the place where, a few hours before, his friend had been mown down by a tank. He remembers seeing her flattened corpse in the distance and noticing that: “As if refusing to be crushed, the flesh and bones had risen a fraction from the tarmac.”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/30/ma-jian-tiananmen-square-remembered