There’s some good replies and trolling here and there but god damn do I hate reddit brained people.
No it was an uprising in Hungary in the 1950s.
The narrative in the west is those brave Hungarians just wanted their freedom, and they only lynched a few Jewish people, as a treat.
The tankie / historically accurate account is that Hungary was one of the more enthusiastic Nazi allys in WW2 and it was mostly the fascist element, mostly ethno-nationalists, mostly the same people who fought in WW2 in most cases, running riot murdering socialists and having another pogrom. Yes they wanted independence from the Soviets but they wanted to restore the far right ethnonationalist government of the 40s so it’s good they were crushed. The “freedom” they were after was the “freedom” to reimpose fascism.
Another fun fact re Tiananmen Square is that those tanks were actually leaving the city center when tank man stood in front of them.
The cia internally estimated 150-500 casualties, which coincides with the Chinese account which states 300 were killed in over 200 locations. Which stands in contrast to what the BBC still reports to this day of 10,000 being killed in the square, descriptions of piles of bodies of which for some reason there is not a single photo or eye witness account, and this claim is all sourced to a British diplomat who says “a friend told me” and that’s what the public account rests on. A trust me bro.
Edit: fuck i can go on too. It’s the Tiananmen Square protests were actually mostly a protest against market liberalization because it sent food prices high which makes people angry. Some student movement which was simply one element of the protests were neoliberals wanting “western style democracy” but nationwide the movement was actually mostly inspired by people pissed off that price controls were being removed from food which affected their cost of living. It wasn’t exactly an anti-capitalist protest since it was really more specific to the price of food and anger about corruption but the way it is portrayed as “please we just want western style capitalism” followed by authoritarian mass murder is a near total fabrication.
I can’t remember the name of the BBC reporter right now who was there, but he maintained for years that he did not see a massacre in the square but a massive, occassionally rowdy and physical, protest. He only started changing his story to the accepted Western narrative of a massacre many years later when he became very much part of the BBC and British establishment.
(My tired insomnia-ridden brain wants to say it was an Attonbrough or Dimbleby, but I’m not sure that’s right and you can’t google anything mentioning TS without just getting fifty pages of recent propaganda articles from the Atlantic or whatever)
IMPORTANT EDIT: Yeah, I muddled some of the details (I really need a good night’s sleep, this week’s been awful for it) but I remembered and doubled checked online and with a friend who used to be a journo so here it is…
John Simpson is the veteran BBC journalist who was there with a camera and film crew. They shot a good deal of what went on to be in the BBC report edit that you see whenever it comes up (some is from AP and CBS I believe). And while he never denied there were deaths his reporting at the time was very different from the accepted story he tacitly supports or at least doesn’t feel the need to correct now (10k killed, driven over by tanks etc).
In earlier talks and writing on it his focus used to be on a large protest that turned very ugly and violent due to a small number of student protestors attacking soldiers, using indiscriminate beatings, and throwing firebombs until finally Chinese soldiers responded and opened fire. As recently as 2013 he’s talked about stepping in to try and stop the violent student protestors killing the injured soldiers they dragged from the famous burning armoured car.
The crowd was a very rough lot, not nice students, and they wanted blood. They smashed the head of one of the soldiers in, and then they started to smash another one in and I thought, ‘I can’t stand by and just let this happen,’ and so I waded in.
The numbers he gives have varied a bit over the years but even as recent as a couple of years ago on Twitter he said he estimated about 40 deaths that he saw or could tell from the aftermath. Even now he doesn’t paint the picture that’s constantly pushed by the West of an indiscriminate massacre of peaceful protestors and massive casualties, although definitely has a ‘go along to get along’ attitude towards not refuting or calling it out when he’s been asked to talk about it, unlike when he was a younger man.
Interestingly, his original assessment seems to also be supported to this day by Jeff Widener, the photo journalist who took the Tank Man picture. He talks about the violence of the mob and barely escaping alive from them himself (to some quietly shocked CBS News anchors) in this modern interview piece. And as good sense and the latter part of the segment shows, he’s not exactly pro-China back then or today.
What’s striking to me is just the straightforward, uncontroversial relaying of the facts at the time, by the Western journalists there, compared to the absurd propaganda fantasies presented even by journalists now.
These two men aren’t even particularly determined to correct the record, push back against the narrative, or give broader context. They’re just defending the work they did and what they saw amongst the swirl of disinfo for the sake of their own reputations.
Also the British story is literally that the square is so clean because the tanks just ran over people so many times that they turned into goop and were hosed down into the sewers, and presumably then they just hosed down the tanks also without any trace left.
Edit: Also theres no sign of water on the tanks or square the very morning after because the Chinese CCP are just that tricky and sneaky.
Just clicked “save” for this comment, top notch stuff. Would you happen to know where that fact that the CIA briefed the president and congress came from? I’m sure it’s true but I’ve been arguing China-stuff with friends over the last couple days and a good chance Tiananmen comes up today.
It’s from the Secretary of states intel briefing
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB16/docs/doc13.pdf
I was going from memory and so I need to correct myself, they estimate those casualties in the square. My memory was this was in the associated protests across the country but they estimate those in the square.
Also notable that all western sources reporting from the square at that time reported at most a few hundred casualties and none of them were students in the square. The students all left peacefully at the request of the PLA. By that point the protests had been hijacked by literal CIA agents trying to incite a massacre, a far cry from the original Student demands of a more permissive social atmosphere (things like couples being able to show affection in public without judgement, not even necessarily government.) There was also a large communist faction who wanted the government to move it’s policies back towards communism instead of liberal reforms. And again, they weren’t asking for anything drastic, nor were they trying to overthrow the government. The whole mood in the square, for the most part, was pretty chill. The Students were singing songs together with the PLA troops, getting them food, talking with them. The PLA troops were totally unarmed. No batons, no riot gear. Just hanging out in their uniforms.
Afaik what finally drove the PLA to clear out the square was that anti-communist paramilitaries were attacking PLA troops with fire bombs and stolen guns. A lot of PLA soldiers burned to death when their trucks or APCs got firebombed, and it lead to street fighting while the PLA tried to get soldiers with weapons in to the area to fight the insurgents. But even then, it was only a few hundred, maybe a thousand insurgents. All the fighting happened blocks away from the square.
And while my details may be incorrect there isn’t really any disagreement about what happened outside of the absurdly sensationalized propaganda story. All the western journalists who were present at the time reported - No one was killed in the square, fighting outside the square, a few hundred dead at most. The western contemporary accounts line up almost exactly with the official Chinese accounts. And afaik there was no crack down or anything afterwards. The protestors, for the most part, conducted themselves well and had a legitimate grievance, and left peacefully when asked, so the government didn’t really feel threatened by the movement and felt it was better to let things settle down than escalate.
Edit: Believe it or not, the last time I checked the Wiki on Tiennemen square it pretty straightforwardly reported the real, non-sensationalized version, complete with sources. idk how good the details are, but the version on wikipedia right now (or at least last year, when I read it) is not the 10,000 run over by tanks BS.
