Do the army support the president even if his orders are against your constitution? How is the overll clima and feeling today?
Just asking because I’m curious, I have no horse in this race :)
Edited to Armed forces since thats exactly what I ment
Do the army support the president even if his orders are against your constitution? How is the overll clima and feeling today?
Just asking because I’m curious, I have no horse in this race :)
Edited to Armed forces since thats exactly what I ment
Since that’s organized under each state they probably feel good about their own states.
You’d be surprised, also regarding federalization for immigration enforcement and protest control. Who’s to say that the courts don’t weigh in on the side of CA and limit the use of CA-NG by the POTUS, and then he brings in a neighbor state’s NG instead? These are wild times, they even activated the Marines… on top of NG. This is crazy stuff.
Remember when the Chinese protests in Tianmen square happened the regime was afraid that sending in local troops to deal with the protestors would run the risk on them joining in or refusing to follow orders because they were familiar with people in the crowds. They instead sent troops from other regions that didn’t have the same issues and we all know how that ended.
If Trump ends up sending the NG from a red state where people think California is some dangerous “third world country” as some representative said not long ago there is a chance it would end up the same as Tianmen. I really hope that doesn’t come to pass, people don’t deserve to be massacred for speaking their minds.
China gave orders to massacre, so it’s no surprise they got a massacre.
That’s not what happened.
The only source I would trust here that you linked is the famous 1998 CJR article. It just points out the misnomer caused by what we call the incident to point out that mass killings happened elsewhere while students were peacefully evacuated from the square itself. Of course I also trust the photos you linked are real. But just like the aforementioned myth (also explored by the CJR article), you perpetuate the myth of the crackdown being on primarily student protests when far far more of the dead were of the inspired workers’ protest, especially those killed as the army was heading into Tiananmen. Such violent crackdowns made it so Deng could not recover his influence until 1992.
Yes, students did stone and kill soldiers and Molotov APCs, including the lynching of (just) one soldier as depicted in the photos. But that does not justify the hundreds of protestors killed with live ammunition. Yes, there was no carnage in the square during the Tiananmen square massacres. Misnomers abound. But as a person I try to get others to understand me in communication. Yes, the “Tiananmen square” part is a misnomer. But who’s gonna understand me if I go about every day saying “June Fourth Incident”? Not to mention a lot of the killings were also committed around 11 PM the previous day.
I also did a bit of a misnomer: It’s dubious whether you could define the mass killings as massacres. My point was that China ordered the army to do what they did. It sounds to me like Kirp was characterizing the other regions’ hatred to blame for what happened around Tiananmen, which hopefully we can agree was not what happened.
What’s your source for this? Had they been ordered to shoot a bunch of protesters, why would they have let protesters in the square leave peacefully?
The much more likely scenario is soldiers were met with deadly violence at some point and – as most armed people who face deadly violence will do – opened fire.
I’m not making an argument about what violence was justified and what wasn’t. I’m pointing out that the facts we agree on contradict your claim that there was some top-down order to massacre people, and that you haven’t provided any support for that claim in the first place.
this surprised me. from what I can tell from your sources and Wikipedia:
✅ the tanks were indeed leaving the square.
✅ Tank Man stopped them, climbed onto the top of a tank and talked briefly with the soldiers inside, then was quickly shepherded away by two people. it’s unclear whether the people were PLA or concerned bystanders. nothing is known of the man.
🤔 sources disagree on whether civilians were killed in the Square itself. some supposed witnesses were shown to have left or been elsewhere.
❌ at least 300 people, mostly civilians, were killed that night, according to the PRC itself. most of the casualties were likely students surrounding the square. from what I can tell it was likely a Kent State situation, where students were throwing rocks and setting fires, and the PLA overreacted with lethal force.
China’s suppression of the media didn’t do them any favors. the Tank Man photo wouldn’t be so infamous but for the Streisand effect caused by PRC’s heavy-handed censorship. rumors of a massacre in the Square would be easy to dispel if foreign journalists were allowed to stay and film. but protests were an embarrassment to China, and China sweeps embarrassments under the rug.
We don’t know how many people U.S. police kill every year, and you could fill volumes with all the other horrible stuff our government does that only leaks out decades later. Governments being shy about publicizing embarrassments is a government thing, not a Chinese thing.
The specifics of the incident are murky overwhelmingly due to one reason: the western world decided to mythologize it. The vast majority of western discussion on it now falls into two camps: right-wingers who deliberately spread the most lurid campfire stores imaginable (10,000 deaths! Tanks ground people into paste!), and liberals who lazily repeat inaccuracies and falsehoods that are occasionally more plausible (e.g., the legacy media doing this in the Columbia Journalism Review article). Some academics and leftists will try to sort through all this garbage, but they are the distinct minority.
Columbia Journalism Review: