The Tiananmen Square "Massacre" Never Happened

There is something deeply fucking funny about him doing a sponsored bit for MyHeritage at the start of this video.

They are not going to be happy at all lmaoooooooooo

- yugo is albanian confirmed

oh no the libs are gonna get so pissed

No no they love goalpost shifting, it's so much fun!

Yeah, I've heard reports from a person who is part of the Palestinian diaspora who took a genetic test and was unaware that the company they did it with was Israeli. They got back results stating that they were approximately 50% in a broad Arab category.
They redid their genetic test with a non-Israeli company and got a much more accurate Levantine result.
Make of that whatever you will. Maybe there's differences in how they analyse the data but I would be wholly unsurprised if an Israeli genetic testing company was making a concerted effort to erase Palestinian identity by fudging results to skew the interpretation.
That's funny because dna tests are banned in isntreal
- "I'm 90% Brooklynite, wtf!?"
Need money to live ig. Probably the only company that wanted to sponsor a video this bold. Unfortunate that it's israeli though...
- Would be hilarious if they weren't told what kind of video the sponsor section would be in. Doubt any of Hakim's viewers will click on that.
It is a pretty good bit
for me, it's giving the same vibes as the military running ads on hasan's twitch stream. that's just a donation at that point, you don't really have to worry about hakim's audience being susceptible to this i think.
If you're actually seeing sponsor spots on YouTube that's kinda a you problem
He didn't know it was an Israeli company and apologized in the comments
@YaBoiHakim 1 hour ago
I had no idea, I'll cancel the planned integrations. The contact person that gets these ad integrations knows I don't accept Israeli sponsors, so I assumed they checked. I'll be sure to talk to them too, thanks for letting me know!
He says in the comments that he didn't know and will adress this.

Video titles that I would upvote instantly for 100, please.

Bold title, great video

Bold isn't the goal though, getting people to change their minds is the goal.
This type of title sets us up to get lost in a semantic debate (is the incident a "massacre" or does a better word fit?) or argue a technicality ("no one died in the square itself"). These are the worst ways to convince people of anything: a skeptical person has endless outs, pinning down an objective answer to semantics is almost impossible, and by the time you get to more meaningful points you've wasted a lot of time, attention, and credibility.

I haven't watched it yet but let me guess, it was a conflict and not a massacre, and the weird lib thing about people being squished and washed down drains is just absolute nonsense and insanity. Death rolls are far smaller than usually implied by westerners because again it clearly was not a "massacre" and the protesters were killing military personnel and destroying vehicles so some deaths would be expected.

How'd I do?

Got the gist yeah. Missed specifics like the liberal protestors being urban citizens and weirdly racist and pro-colonialist, US outlets spreading misinfo to escalate protests, the leaders of the student protests getting cushy jobs in the US afterwards, etc
eh pretty good
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Gtt2JxmQtg
Heres an ancient remanant of what libs used to think was a damning indictment of china. Before the myths about Tiananmen became parodies of themselves.
- I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
  yewtu.be
  inv.nadeko.net
  yt.artemislena.eu
  piped.video

I'm especially excited for this one. I did a deep dive into this awhile back and I'm curious as to what matches and what else I may have missed.

I've only been learning a little bit here and there about how everything I've been told about china has been false. It's actually really surprising to me
- The "Redpill me on China" post over a year ago is pretty helpful
- I think I might have an old post somewhere with more info, but I remember the highlights on the protests being:
  Multiple credible witnesses saw no massacre within the square
  There are wikileaks cables that contradict what the US later claimed happened
  There was violence happening elsewhere, but at least some of that violence was confirmed to have been done by rioters (not peaceful protestors) and casualty numbers are nowhere near what was later claimed
  It was documented that the CIA was assisting the protestors. I believe I first saw this on the Qiao Collective page, then found the actual clipping from a newspaper archive website:
  CIA also assisted in helping the protest leaders later flee China
  This Qiao Collective page is by far the best single source I found on information related to the protests: https://www.qiaocollective.com/education/tiananmenreadinglist
  US Army Psyops actually put out a recruitment video bragging about manipulating media coverage of the event: https://youtu.be/VA4e0NqyYMw Not sure if that particular group would have been involved back then but it is still interesting they chose to include that.

I like the way he ties it back to how the media is covering Gaza. The image of Tankman and his role as a propaganda symbol is genuinely fascinating to me.

Somehow... without ever showing it or even stating it as a direct lie: they actually created a mandela effect which has multiple generations of people convinced to this day that he was viciously turned into hamburger without a second thought despite having video showing the exact opposite. Of course if you call this out there will be apologists who say "lol, we never said he was run over" and indeed that's technically true...but clearly the idea he was is so heavily implied in so much discourse around it. Its enough to send you down a dangerous rabbit hole wondering how much of what you just assume is true everyday is all manufactured. Keeps me up at night.

How do I expand and watch here so I don't have youtube doing what it does best and suddenly deciding to recommend me a bunch of anti-China and chud videos

Anyways oooooh very spicy title, might get under the right peoples' skins.

- Damn I apologize to the bot for always thinking "nerd" in my head whenever I see it post.
  I never said it out loud, but I thought it.

Just in the past week when I pointed out how the guy never got run over, and that it was always deceptively presented in a a thread about video manipulation using AI creating false narratives I had a bunch of .worlders jumping down my throat.

At the time I had one claiming that it's "just a symbol of defiance, nobody actually thinks that.

Then like a few days later in an entirely different thread I had someone make a "lemmy.ml admins support running over protestors with tanks" 🙃 I'm going to get whiplash

Alright i feel like I have a good handle on the left counter-narrative about Tiananmen. But I've also seen a lot of content, including from scholars who don't seem to be knee-jerk anti-China, that says that a shameful atrocity was committed.

Can someone who knows more than me play Devil's Advocate here? What nuance is missing from the left response to the standard lib narrative?

I'm sure that if the CPC could do it again, they would have handled it differently. I don't think it's a particularly proud moment, even if it wasn't the 'massacre" it is portrayed as. The reason we can tell this is because they have clearly changed what their response to semi-large pro-colonialist Western-backed demonstrations are (see the Hong-Kong protests where there were only two confirmed deaths of protestors, which for the sake of argument we'll attribute to the police).
For one, there is clearly a lot more pre-emptive work going on from a surveillance level that didn't go on before, especially tracking guns, and two, they are getting pretty good at isolating protestor demands and accommodating demands that are considered 'reasonable' (ones that were considered an ongoing issue in the party already), which fractures the protest movement, mostly leaving the truly ideologically radical sections, of whom the Western-backed ones aren't actually willing to risk their skins, since they can make money as anti-China grifters in Western academia and Western media. That just leaves the ultra-leftists, who are broadly unpopular (because they are considered too Western-brained) in China and therefore do not really have any leverage.

I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: