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Many of us (worldwide, I'm not American) watched China massacre thousands of its own children at Tiananmen Square. The US is descending into totalitarianism, bu
by rfrey 5mo ago
Many of us (worldwide, I'm not American) watched China massacre thousands of its own children at Tiananmen Square. The US is descending into totalitarianism, but it hasn't reached that level yet.
And China may have changed in some ways but there have been no signals it would not repeat that event if it thought circumstances warranted.
- kolinko 5mo agoAlso, many of us have lived in countries actually freed thanks to the west’s (mustly us) intervention, and we felt the support during the Russian occupation pre 1989
- yaakushi 5mo agoMany of us have lived or live in countries that are constantly affected and destabilized by past and even modern interventions from the U.S. (the only blame the rest of the "West" bears here is just watching without ever acknowledging the harm done). Just look at Latin America. edit: Not trying to say "US bad, China good." Just there is perspective to everything.
- 1234letshaveatw 5mo agoUs? wow, tell us your story
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- glenstein 5mo agoAnd some of us have a sore lower back after playing tennis, while some of us have terminal stage four cancer. Who is to say which is worse? I think right now there's a kind of global propaganda competition playing out and the thing that does the most damage is false equivalences that encourage loss of perspective.
- mlnj 5mo agoThe only instance of false equivalence I see is the mention of lower back pain vs cancer.
- meowkit 5mo agoYou cant compare qualia of suffering. At least not with our current technology. Thats the point - they both involve suffering but that doesn’t mean one is inherently worse than the other. The details and experience matter which got glossed over in these stupid debates- hence loss of perspective. Honestly I had to read the wiki page of false equivalence and you’re not asserting the fallacy correctly.
- DoctorOetker 5mo agowe don't need machinery or a mechanism to compare it, natural selection works just fine for 99% of all species on earth.
- CuriouslyC 5mo agoThe US committed massive treaty violations and genocide, on top of huge imperialist destabilization of many sovereign nations. Tianmen square and the Uyghers are bad, but we're straight up evil.
- blackqueeriroh 5mo agoThe Chinese government regularly kidnaps its own citizens, who have no due process rights, and is currently engaged in a mass genocide of a racial group they consider “inferior.” Additionally, they have supported Russia consistently during their occupation of Ukraine, and just install leaders for life. I’m confused how you think the US is worse. I say this as an Afroindigenous person who is very clear about the harms white supremacy has inflicted upon the cultures I am a part of.
- CuriouslyC 5mo ago
- meloyc 5mo agotell us your story
- xtracto 5mo agoThis is important. Just a couple of days ago we found out that 4 undercover CIA agents were operating here in Mexico: https://www.infobae.com/mexico/2026/04/22/no-eran-dos-eran-cuatro-agentes-de-la-cia-periodista-destapa-presencia-duplicada-en-chihuahua/ https://www.infobae.com/mexico/2026/04/22/no-eran-dos-eran-c... It has been knokwn that US government operatives provide weapons to Mexican cartels ( https://grothman.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=333 https://grothman.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?Document... ). So, yeah, the US is no "blanca palomita" at all. And those of us suffering from their actions have learned that all powerful nations have good and bad things. Here in Mexico, we've got BYD cars, and they are AMAZING. Also being able to use DeepSeek is so cool.
- wayeq 5mo ago> Just a couple of days ago we found out that 4 undercover CIA agents were operating here in Mexico was that a surprise? i'd be more surprised if it were only 4.
- xtracto 5mo agoThey were actually 10 haha, according to the article.
- DoctorOetker 5mo agoIf your government refuses to stop the flow of drugs into the US by addressing cartels don't be surprised if the US delivers weapons to said cartels so they can have some infighting going on. If the mexican government would actually make work of dismantling the organized trade, there would be no incentive to deliver them weapons to shoot each other.
- kolkov 5mo agoHow many not-so-smart and not-so-intelligent people can claim Russia occupied you? Never mind, your liberation by the West will come back to haunt you, mark my words... and very soon! You'll remember how well you lived during the years of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact!
- andriy_koval 5mo agothose countries were liberated 35 years ago, GDP and other essential metrics increased significantly. How longer they should wait to start feeling remorse?
- randomname93857 5mo agoI remember constant grocery deficits, no meat, no cheese, etc in groceries. and all other kind of deficits. But there were rotten potatoes, and 2 types of bread! Glory to our leaders! fun times, you say.
- Scroll_Swe 5mo ago[flagged]
- jicko 5mo agoChina hasn't been communist for a really long time. It didn't truly stay communist for a long time either, it was more of an authoritarian autarky run by a nutjob. What is is today is state sponsored capitalism. You have cronyism, nepotism, lobbying and rent seeking. All of which are also found in the US. China's social spending is far lower than many other developed nations.
- tensor 5mo agoI see young people advocating for socialism a lot in Canada, but rarely communism as in communist Russia and communist China. As others have said, old style communism isn't even around anymore. Russia is a fake democracy and China is a strange blend of one party rule and capitalism. I don't think it does anyone any good to throw around naive and simple terms like communism. Focus on issues like public healthcare, breaking monopolies, basic incomes, and so on. We'll get along a lot better that way.
- 8note 5mo agocanada has our own history of socialism in the form of crown corps and healthcare. why wouldnt we lean into our own successful practices?
- roenxi 5mo agoBecause they'll make you worse off the more you scale them up. It's like pointing out that a drink of alcohol with a friend led to positive results so why not lean heavily into drinking? And the answer is because it is something that people enjoy that can be tolerated in small amounts but isn't much of a strategy if the goal is a happy, healthy outcome.
- tensor 5mo agoThat's ridiculous. The countries with the highest quality of living all have strong social programs. If you want an analogy for alcoholism look at the US. Capitalism works here, so let's use it everywhere!
- 0x737368 5mo agoAnd which countries are those?
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- singularity2001 5mo agoThe US has massacred millions of people of other countries, is that better?
- code_for_monkey 5mo agoYou dont even have to look abroad, the USA kills its own citizens all the time. Police brutality is a huge issue here, we had some large protests here and the country ended those with the realization that nothing can be done about it. Kids get shot in school all the time in the US and once again, nothing gets done about it ever. The USA has a gigantic prison population and you guessed it: nothing gets done about it.
- OtomotO 5mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- nz 5mo agoAnd the US massacred four _million_ people in South East Asia, during the Vietnam war. That is 2/3rds of a holocaust. The Iraq War (second one), cost between half a million and a million lives (estimates vary, and it only includes violent deaths directly caused by American troops -- the war itself caused an increase in crime and murder and out-migration). I could go on, but Tienanmen does not compare to most of the things the US has done outside of its own borders from 1946 to the present. And no, we (I am American) cannot justify a body count in the millions, just because our victims are communist/authoritarian/theocratic. Note also that we only number 5% of the world's population, and that if we compared body-counts as percentage of populations, instead of as absolute numbers, I doubt we even have enough people to settle that debt. Even worse, if the world internalizes that it is fine to murder millions of foreigners, just because they are oddballs that their citizens cannot empathize with, the _we_ are going to have a big problem -- we appear much more odd to the world than the world does to us. I am surprised that our shenanigans have been tolerated for nearly a century.
- FpUser 5mo agoHypocrisy meter just exploded after being fed the message
- chrischen 5mo agoWhether a country massacres its own people is not really a good litmus test since there are countries that treat its own citizens well but foreigners really badly. One such country is… oh the US!
- spwa4 5mo agoAre you implying China treats foreigners well?
- platinumrad 5mo agoHow many schools has it bombed recently?
- spwa4 5mo agoIn it's entire existence? I believe it shot up a couple tens of thousands of schools during the cultural revolution, and not by mistake. But yeah, I guess that's not bombing. China clearly prefers shooting the students, keeping the building. Why are you changing the subject?
- platinumrad 5mo agoAm I changing the subject? I thought we were discussing treatment of foreigners and I am detailing a very recent example of how the US treated foreigners.
- spwa4 5mo agoYes, the question was if you want to claim China treats foreignors well, and was a reference to that China 1) conquers places, e.g. Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjang, ... 2) kills, "disappears", ... the people there https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbSypV2ixjE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbSypV2ixjE 3) China's CCP has been pushing out immigrants, and fostering racist sentiment
- noah_buddy 5mo agoDon’t you think that it’s a signal that the last major event you can point to is decades old? Others may say “what about Uighurs?” or “what about Hong Kong?” but I think that the rest of the world is not doing all that much better on terms of civil repression. In the UK, you can be arrested for voicing disagreement with the rationale for another person’s arrest (not generally, but on a specific hot button issue they’d rather not anyone talk about). French politicians are attempting to make illegal criticism of Israel, carte blanche. Don’t even get me started on Germany, which is so self-shamed from the last century they have overcorrected into legitimating an external state above all else. Across the pond, you hardly even have to convince anyone that it’s on the downtrend, unless they’re 30% of the population who believe the Don is christ alive (but don’t like if he says it). The world is very unstable at this point and China is a country that strongly values and incentivizes stability, at the expense of individual rights. This is contra a lot of the west which is both unstable and actively undermining individual rights.
- msabalau 5mo agoOh, sure, putting a million or more Uyghurs in internment camps, sterilizing people, and trying to systematically erase a culture and a religion is "just as repressive" as the what is happening in Europe, as long you one is willing to ignore nearly everything relevant about the scale, recourse, and consequence of the PRCs atrocities. Also, reducing Germany’s complex, decade-long process of grappling with the Holocaust as "self-shame" is... a choice.
- hirvi74 5mo agoThere is no such thing as individual rights. In our universe, there are only privileges. What a government gives, a government can take.
- riskd 5mo agoCan you share the video where thousands of children were massacred in Tiananmen Square? I haven’t seen it yet and am very curious!
- idiotsecant 5mo agoMake your claim directly, without weasel language. This is a tiresome way to communicate.
- riskd 5mo agoThat doesn’t seem to be a valid URL?
- idiotsecant 5mo agoI'm not who you were originally talking to, champ.
- riskd 5mo agoStill not a resolvable URL, sadly. Thanks for your input, little buddy.
- platinumrad 5mo agoTiananmen Square was obviously horrible but not even 10% as bad as the current war against Iran or 1% bad as the Second Gulf War, and those are both very recent conflicts.
- maxglute 5mo ago> no signals it would not repeat that event Of course there is, there's anti riot gear now when there wasn't before.
- 45qyqy45 5mo agoBush sacrificed a few thousand Americans on 9/11 so that they could get away with killing a million or so Muslims.
- LeFantome 5mo ago> China massacre thousands of its own > China massacre thousands Is the first one worse to you? > massacre thousands Does the second automatically seem worse than the third? The one not called China has shot and killed multiple of its own citizens on the street recently. Perhaps that triggers your morality. Which one of them has killed thousands of civilians just in the last month or so including hundreds of school aged girls (confirmed)? And can they even articulate a reason for doing so? Which one decided, made the choice, to kill hundreds of thousands of children by dismantling USAID? And the reason for that was? I mean, they both have concentration camps where they detain their own citizens without due process. So, I guess a tie there. And, they both enabled Russia after Russia stole tens of thousands of children from their parents. So, ya, maybe no clear winner. Neither are the good guys. But China is losing the death count battle in 2026 at least. If you are trying to say that China is worse because of an event 37 years ago, I am not sure I agree.
- nz 5mo agoJust to add some perspective to this comparison: the US massacred four _million_ people in South East Asia, during the Vietnam war. That is 2/3rds of a holocaust. The Iraq War (second one), cost between half a million and a million lives (estimates vary, and it only includes violent deaths directly caused by American troops -- the war itself caused an increase in crime and murder and out-migration). I could go on, but Tienanmen does not compare to most of the things the US has done outside of its own borders from 1946 to the present. And no, we (I am American) cannot justify a body count in the millions, just because our victims are communist/authoritarian/theocratic. Note also that we only number 5% of the world's population, and that if we compared body-counts as percentage of populations, instead of as absolute numbers, I doubt we even have enough people to settle that debt. Even worse, if the world internalizes that it is fine to murder millions of foreigners, just because they are oddballs that their citizens cannot empathize with, the _we_ are going to have a big problem -- we appear much more odd to the world than the world does to us. I am surprised that our shenanigans have been tolerated for nearly a century.
- neves 5mo agoChina is a peaceful country. They don't interfere with other countries politics. They look more trustworthy than countries that kidnapped chiefs of state they don't like.
- roenxi 5mo ago> They don't interfere with other countries politics. They look more trustworthy than countries that kidnapped chiefs of state they don't like. On the one hand, anyone who believes this is the sort of person who buys bridges from shady individuals in backstreets. On the other, China will literally sell people quality bridges at good prices. I feel lost for a metaphor. I like the Chinese military policy a lot more than the US one (China's policy is actually making them more prosperous which makes it stand out). But as a nation they're not trustworthy and they're absolutely going to interfere with other people's politics. The network of spies and influencers they manage is actually pretty sophisticated once you look at things like the Confucius institute and their international web of spies/law enforcement tracking people down.
- neves 5mo agoCan you cite real examples not based in American propaganda?
- worik 5mo ago> children at Tiananmen Square. The US is descending into totalitarianism, but it hasn't reached that level yet. Ask that question of the American Indians the USA genocided. I do not see why USAnians killing Iranians is better than being killed by other Iranians. Dead is dead The bombs that implemented the genocide in Gaza were dropped by the IDF but supplied, paid for and profited from USAnians Not really so clear
- thiagoharry 5mo ago> Many of us (worldwide, I'm not American) watched China massacre thousands of its own children at Tiananmen Square. The US is descending into totalitarianism, but it hasn't reached that level yet. Wasn't the US bombing its own children just 4 years earlier in Philadelphia?