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Hard to compare these two scenarios. Look, I’m not arguing that US officials throughout the course of history have been perfect. Kent State was an atrocity, no

Hard to compare these two scenarios. Look, I’m not arguing that US officials throughout the course of history have been perfect. Kent State was an atrocity, no question. But anyone with a gun can pull the trigger. It takes an enormous amount of coordination to uniformly run over people with tanks, burn their bodies, and flush them down drains. The incidents you’ve linked are undoubtedly dark chapters, but they are not comparable to what we’ve seen in China.

claudeganon 6y ago
I would never say that the US is an authoritarian state on par with the vileness of the PRC. But your specific claim was that we’ve never done to our own citizens what happened to the protesters at Tiananmen, which I now guess hinges on how coordinated the killings were. I think this is historically inaccurate, absent engaging in this kind of special pleading.
- save_ferris 6y ago
  Think about it. You had troops in China that were ready and willing to not only kill their countrymen, but also desecrate their dead bodies and discard them in an unimaginably cold manner. Contrast that with Kent State, Jackson State, and other places where troops were deployed and the situation escalated. The ultimate difference here is that it’s perfectly legal and acceptable for us to talk about what happened at Kent state. The events are not in dispute. China, on the other hand, jails people for talking about Tiananmen Square. To acknowledge the existence of such heinous acts is itself a crime in that country. The fact that we can sit here and argue about this without fear of going to prison is itself proof that these situations, and countries, are incomparable.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    It’s not even just that. It’s that the government indicted five guardsman at the times, but couldn’t secure convictions. A civil trial ended in settlement. Fifty years later, we’re still talking about four deaths.
- Chiba-City 6y ago
  Our USA runs a larger prison labor colony far larger than any real or imaginary Soviet Gulag. Get real real. Brits are filthy racist losers who deserve every harm that comes their way. Narcotics peddlers. They would be wise to behead their landed "royalty" and catch up to "modernity."

claudeganon 6y ago

I would never say that the US is an authoritarian state on par with the vileness of the PRC. But your specific claim was that we’ve never done to our own citizens what happened to the protesters at Tiananmen, which I now guess hinges on how coordinated the killings were. I think this is historically inaccurate, absent engaging in this kind of special pleading.

save_ferris 6y ago
Think about it. You had troops in China that were ready and willing to not only kill their countrymen, but also desecrate their dead bodies and discard them in an unimaginably cold manner. Contrast that with Kent State, Jackson State, and other places where troops were deployed and the situation escalated. The ultimate difference here is that it’s perfectly legal and acceptable for us to talk about what happened at Kent state. The events are not in dispute. China, on the other hand, jails people for talking about Tiananmen Square. To acknowledge the existence of such heinous acts is itself a crime in that country. The fact that we can sit here and argue about this without fear of going to prison is itself proof that these situations, and countries, are incomparable.
- rayiner 6y ago
  It’s not even just that. It’s that the government indicted five guardsman at the times, but couldn’t secure convictions. A civil trial ended in settlement. Fifty years later, we’re still talking about four deaths.
Chiba-City 6y ago
Our USA runs a larger prison labor colony far larger than any real or imaginary Soviet Gulag. Get real real. Brits are filthy racist losers who deserve every harm that comes their way. Narcotics peddlers. They would be wise to behead their landed "royalty" and catch up to "modernity."