The thing that irritates me about this comment and the ideology your subreddit represents (well, the pertinent thing) is that the popular world “polarization” obfuscates the massive difference there is between radicalism and dogmatism. That is to say, when two people disagree politically, some people like to imagine for various reasons that their level of animosity is a function of how different their political views are plus some ability to compartmentalize. These things are factors, but ones that lead to political illiteracy on their own.

Dogmatism is the common word for having a circumscribed set of “correct beliefs” and being hostile to any deviation from that set. Radicalism is the sheer extremity of one’s views. It’s entirely possible to be a radical and to be accepting of people, and it’s quite easy to be both a centrist and a dogmatist. We know that second one because that describes a huge portion of the Democratic base! They are people with very little commitment to progressivism who nonetheless are deeply hostile to people on both their left as well as their right.

Of course, sometimes the two traits coincide, like in the Republicans, which have a massive portion of their base that is both pretty radical and pretty dogmatic – though ironically they could be said to be accepting in an extraordinarily cynical way, what with how Evangelicals supported Trump, who is literally the fakest Christian to ever be President (“Two Corinthians”).

Anyway, my point for saying this is that hucksters, useful idiots, and some who I’m sure are good people like to characterize American politics as a situation where there has been a sizable shift towards radicalism. There are new radical (QAnon) and “radical” (Bernie socdem) movements today as there are in any age, but overwhelmingly the Democrats have been getting more conservative if you look past their lip-service, while the Republicans have mostly also become more conservative. The world doesn’t need more centrists, the Democratic Party has plenty! When Obama said he’s “less liberal in a lot of ways” than Richard Nixon, that wasn’t his attempt at absurdist humor!

What would actually be useful is functional empathy and – god forbid – a political ideology that has some ability to explain why people have political differences beyond some puritanical insinuation about moral failings. That does not mean we need to be nihilistic or appeasing with our actual political ideology as though nothing is true or else the truth is the median of whatever everyone happens to believe right now.

Paraphrasing Lafayette, “If the world is divided between people who say 2 + 2 is 6 and those who say 2 + 2 is 4, that does not make it the most reasonable position that 2 + 2 is 5.”

If I was writing it, I’d probably say that the camps in America are “4+4 is 44” and “4+4 is 64”, with “4+4 is 54” being the Enlightened Centrist answer (and ironically perhaps the most deeply irrational).

People knock lemmygrad.ml but I think it’s the best site for people who were nauseated by r/worldnews 🤷

The militants among the protestors did have petrol bombs and they took guns from at least one flamed-out APC, and the soldiers didn’t know what else they had. Beyond that, the soldiers still weren’t firing blindly into groups of protestors, read the links I posted, even just the brief report from the Latin American diplomat.

No one, myself included, said that soldiers didn’t shoot civilians. Soldiers did shoot civilians. The purpose of the photos is to establish that there was killing of soldiers prior to that point that was evidence of a (likely small) group of very aggressive militants among a faction of the protestors, ones who seemed to be intent on instigating violence. The event was much more complicated than soldiers firing into a crowd in cold blood, and as internal reporting that I linked above mentioned, many people repudiated the image painted in westerners’ minds of soldiers wantonly firing into a crowd of huddled protestors. Their aim plainly was not to kill the peaceful protestors but to capture or kill militants who demonstrated a willingness to kill in cold blood. The civilians who were killed were caught up in that crossfire.

The photos are helpful, but beyond that I think the strongest source are those reports from the US embassy and LA diplomat and the interviews with the student leaders themselves. I would encourage you to look at those.

Sorry, I must have missed this one. Was it a question that you discovered was answered in one of the sources?

lmao those damned “statists”. Did I ever say you advocated for racism? What do slur filters have to do with communism? This is reply seems to be very confused.

If you’ve got a problem, you can just say it directly instead of presenting this non-sequitur like it’s an own. If anti-racism is “tankie” to you then I’m a T-90.

That’s the spirit! I don’t think there are many Russians here, but if there are any, I hope you get some people to queue with!

That people were killed in Tiananmen Square itself, that the soldiers were the first ones to kill, and that the death toll was something like 10,000. It gets played up on Reddit because of red scare propaganda and plain old chauvinism.

I wasn’t going to say that at first [simply because it’s a bit obnoxious] but since other people are courting drama and I was collecting links from another conversation so it’s convenient to do, so I’ll repost them here:

There was a great deal of violence and many students (along with other protestors, as well as the militants and soldiers) died, so I’ll mark each link with an appropriate content warning, though that’s mostly because the last one is rough, while the ones before it are unlikely to cause people issues.

First, here are video interviews with some of the former student leaders, the first one with Chai Ling actually being before the incident took place. There is some gunfire and yelling that a western news program uses for “ambience”, but nothing is shown. Chai Ling describes a bloody scene, though that specific scene is patently fictional (this is established by the others who are interviewed).

Next is an article which discusses the subject, partly quoting student leaders above. It describes violence in broad strokes but doesn’t have any pictures. It also talks about statements made by a British reporter who was there.

Third, here is secondary reporting leaked on documents from the US Embassy in Beijing and the actual report from a Latin American diplomat that was leaked. The latter revealing contains in its summary: “ALTHOUGH THEIR ACCOUNT GENERALLY FOLLOWS THOSE PREVIOUSLY REPORTED, THEIR UNIQUE EXPERIENCES PROVIDE ADDITIONAL INSIGHT AND CORROBORATION OF EVENTS IN THE SQUARE.” (source text is all caps). There is very little description of violence, just mention of gunfire being present, people being wounded, etc.

{Caution} Lastly, here’s an article written arguing that the event is misrepresented in mass media. I link it mainly because it includes photographic evidence that is very difficult to argue with for reasons beyond it being difficult to look at. Graphic depiction of stripped corpses of soldiers that were strung up after death.

Obviously there’s more than this, but these were the links I collected recently. Chai Ling says things that are even more unhinged in footage I think they excluded from that excerpt of the interview.

Go set up your own instance and never raise this subject here again

No. Like I said before, I hope that your comment stays up, so reporting you would be bad for that. That said, in other communities “shill” (which insinuates the person is being paid to say what they are saying) is considered a form of “jacketing,” which is internet slang for baselessly assigning someone an identity for the purpose of discrediting them, just like calling someone a “fed” when you have no evidence that they work for the government. If it is within the rules, it shouldn’t be based on what they say, and that goes just as much for if I called you a “State Department shill,” which I would never do even if I could because I have no doubt that you’re doing this on your own time. Whether that reflects positively or negatively on you, I will leave as an open question.

I’m still very curious about my original question, by the way.

Apparently they are naive, since that claim that the death toll was 10,000 was refuted even by the person who first gave it down to a fraction of what it was, which brings it still closer, but still far above, other estimates even from other western journalists.

Also I think calling me a “shill” is breaking the rules, though I hope your comment stays up to demonstrate that you believed what you posted to be a home run.

The MLs I know don’t believe in a dictatorship [i.e. rule without constraint] of a party, but the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e. the rule without constraint of the working class over the bourgeoisie, something approaching genuine democracy instead of the truncated version slanted towards capitalists that was deliberately created by people like America’s Founders. Republicanism (representation with some day-to-day autonomy given to the representatives) is still logistically necessary for large democracies, but prioritizing the votes of large landholders is not.

Beyond that, I still haven’t heard a very compelling argument for the use of having multiple parties at the top level (the PRC has many parties, though they are excluded from high office). I will not slander you as necessarily supporting the American system, but we can use it as a comparison point: In America, the power of two parties is mostly used as a negation of democracy, and we see this within the Democratic Party every election cycle. Aside from internal chicanery, there are routinely these bizarre arguments about “electability” used to undermine popular candidates and push a centrist to the nomination, even when that centrist has no hope of winning the general election (see Kerry in 2004). Even if this centrist is able to win (see Biden in 2020), his policy agenda is clearly deeply out of step with most Americans (would veto M4A, would veto pot legalization, constantly capitulates to Republicans, etc.). These occurrences aren’t by accident, they are the modern system working as intended.

If people have differences in ideology, that doesn’t seem like it really needs its own party when they can be hashed out within a single party and thereby remove a level of formalistic bullshit manipulating the terms of the disagreement (see above). There have been massive swings in the policy put forward by the CPC for just this reason, as various wings grew more or less favorable. It’s been much more varied in policy than many multi-party states in liberal republics, which I venture is because of the above along with the more general issue of those republics being owned by capitalists.

Now, I’m not asking you to agree with this position or to even refute it (though you are welcome to). What I am interested in is why you would think that someone with the ideas described above is unworthy of conversation about political ideas, as you put it?

You think that it’s equivalent to saying the Earth is flat to wonder about the logic of complaining about “Russians” on this website? I was pretty careful about my inferences, though I invited you to show me my error and still would be interested to see where my mistake was!

It sure sounds like you do as well

I was on Hexbear and I forgot how much I missed having a mixed crowd, as it was. Conversations are so much more fun that way!

Those Russians, they sure do seem to be everywhere! Tell me, even if there were a lot of Russians – which I don’t think is actually true – what would your problem be with that?

If we take as an axiom, as many in the west regularly do, that the Russian government is fundamentally undemocratic and disconnected from the will of its people, then what worry should we have about Russians, who themselves thereby probably aren’t interested in advancing the interests of their government? Or do you believe that the accounts you don’t agree with are paid agents on this tiny website? That would be very unreasonable of me to assume as a belief you hold, but I am struggling to infer another one. Could you help me to understand?

Comrade is gender neutral!

Sounds like a win-win to me. You can get your porn and your neoliberal ideology from nearly every inch of the internet, so why not have a space that leans otherwise?

I love when anticommunist concern-trolls step on rakes like that.