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.

“It’s the voters who are wrong, not my genocidal policies”

“Hey why aren’t people voting for me, wait, come back”

I have extreme anxiety talking to people I find attractive and have a very hard time reading people’s body language as to when they’re sexually interested, the only time I’ve ever managed to pick up a random person has been basically when I acted like a pick up artist.

Just ask them, word for word, “do you want to go on a date sometime?” It’s no more anxiety-inducing than anything else, and you don’t have to do any weird pick up artist stuff.

If they are actually interested in you, they’ll say yes.

My point was that China ordered the army to do what they did.

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.

Columbia Journalism Review:

A few people may have been killed by random shooting on streets near the square, but all verified eyewitness accounts say that the students who remained in the square when troops arrived were allowed to leave peacefully. Hundreds of people, most of them workers and passersby, did die that night, but in a different place and under different circumstances.

The Chinese government estimates more than 300 fatalities. Western estimates are somewhat higher. Many victims were shot by soldiers on stretches of Changan Jie, the Avenue of Eternal Peace, about a mile west of the square, and in scattered confrontations in other parts of the city, where, it should be added, a few soldiers were beaten or burned to death by angry workers.

The resilient tale of an early morning Tiananmen massacre stems from several false eyewitness accounts in the confused hours and days after the crackdown. Human rights experts George Black and Robin Munro, both outspoken critics of the Chinese government, trace many of the rumor’s roots in their 1993 book, Black Hands of Beijing: Lives of Defiance in China’s Democracy Movement. Probably the most widely disseminated account appeared first in the Hong Kong press: a Qinghua University student described machine guns mowing down students in front of the Monument to the People’s Heroes in the middle of the square. The New York Times gave this version prominent display on June 12, just a week after the event, but no evidence was ever found to confirm the account or verify the existence of the alleged witness. Times reporter Nicholas Kristof challenged the report the next day, in an article that ran on the bottom of an inside page; the myth lived on. Student leader Wu’er Kaixi said he had seen 200 students cut down by gunfire, but it was later proven that he left the square several hours before the events he described allegedly occurred.

I’m certainly not getting my hopes up, but this being in LA instead of Kabul might have a significant effect on how willingly the rank-and-file will just open up on a crowd.

There’s a big Navy base in San Diego; some of the Marines are probably coming from there. Some probably grew up in California, more probably visited LA at some point. Going a few hours to a place where people speak your language and there an In-and-Out Burger down the street is very different from going halfway across the world to a place where you recognize little and understand far less.