How Much Longer Do We Need to Propagate Lies About Tiananmen Square?
As the evergreen tensions between the People’s Republic of China and the Corporate States of America reach their annual fever pitch, one can’t help but be bombarded by snide, self-assured jabs at the “totalitarian” nature of China’s government from the Western press. Capitalist rags like Business Insider and Forbes are excused for these slights — to suggest someone should do better implies they could do better, and those mindless robots are only able to regurgitate whatever line their bullish, centaur-stanced dictator spews into their open gullet.
However, even the supposedly unbiased sources presenting bare facts such as the Associated Press or Reuters can’t help but drop diminutive, opinionated phraseology describing a democratic nation as “totalitarian”, “dictatorial”, or whatever liberalized snarl-word that these white supremacist elite typically vomit before their next racist invasion. They’ll pull whoever they can off the streets and give them an interview as long as they complain about extradition. They’ll say whatever the fuck they want, and cite an “unnamed source familiar with the topic”.
We exist in a world of made-up “facts” that are leveraged towards very real consequences. We exist in a world where the established “facts” say that China killed 75 million of its own people from 1950 to today. Demographic and census data from this time period proves this is false, as China has demonstrated consistent population growth which would certainly have been noticeably affected by the deaths of tens of millions. This plays into racist caricatures of Chinese people and other Asian groups “breeding out of control”, a trope stemming from their large populations. This is the domain of the conversations thus far — utter slander directed, conveniently enough, at socialist states specifically, making sure to deem the deaths due to malnutrition in a socialist state equal to the deaths due to gas chambers in Nazi Germany, the crimes of which are always conveniently minimized by this discourse.
For the record, were this same methodology to apply to capitalist states — this notion that the state is responsible for the deaths due to malnutrition — then they would find themselves responsible for some 9 million deaths annually. What about preventable deaths due to a lack of healthcare? These deaths of omission would qualify another few million every year. What about the instances where deaths are caused for the extraction of profit, such as through cigarettes and alcohol? What about diamond mining? What about rationing insulin?
What about COVID-19, where — as of writing — there are over 80,000 deaths and a mortality rate of 1 in 5 in the “richest country in the world”? Why are the dipshit liberal stinkpieces not written about this dynamic? Is it because they have a vested financial interest in ignoring it, or is it because of a racist trope that it’s only bad when “they” do it? Our colonial violence extends across the world and commits a genocide every day. The world is robbed of lives like a tide robs a beach of grains of sand. The United States Empire steals them away. The White Supremacist, Klan-Led Government makes them disappear into the murky darkness.
Our academics are hogs who gorge themselves on easy, fast “facts”. One of them says something in one book, suddenly there’s a Citable Fact for everyone else to uncritically absorb into their complex web of anti-China, anti-Communist chaff. You find a claim that 100,000 people were killed in Tiananmen Square, and follow their citation. It ends up they got it wrong by a factor of 10, and their source only claims 10,000 deaths. Their source, in turn, mentions in vague, hand-waving terms that “hundreds, perhaps thousands” died, and finally, their source, the ultimate source, the Final Witness, is a BBC journalist who by his own admission stayed hunkered inside on June 4th and 5th. There are no pictures, only words that connect Tiananmen Square with an alleged “violent crackdown”. The evidence stems from “journalists” who were financed by Western intelligence agencies — if not outright controlled by them, such as with Radio Free Asia, a favorite source for citations on Tiananmen Square.
We like to complain in the colonizer world about “fake news” and “alternative facts”, but our entire material condition is built upon such. We were built on the lie that the land we stole wasn’t being used, and that the people we butchered along the way were uncivilized. We were built on the lie that melanin makes someone less of a human being, something to be traded and sold. In fact, fuck the past tense — these lies are still, today, the bedrock of American politics, economics, and identity. Our country — “our” country — is built inextricably upon the genocide and robbery of every group we decided was less than us. The indigenous, the black, the asian, the gay. We have profited from and continue to profit from this blatant exploitation and mass murder.
It’s for this reason that I find it almost laughable when those same complaining colonizers balk at the idea of China’s approach to their media. Their media is regulated, much like our media. The difference is, our media is regulated towards the maximum extraction of profit whereas their media is regulated towards the building of socialism. They don’t let people just publish bullshit lies that hurt and kill people — meanwhile, our vaunted “free speech” in the U.S. lets us make money by advertising that people should shoot up bleach to cure their autistic or gay kids. We have a right to factual, accurate, clear information to make informed decisions off of. That is what is required for democracy — an informed populace is a necessary condition for democracy. China recognizes this right. The United States does not.
China is more democratic than the United States, not that that’s saying much. Although largely a one-party state, that one party just happens to have a robust, dynamic internal democratic process. We also have a one-party state, the property party, the party of capital, and it has as many faces as it needs to consolidate legitimacy. Our lawmakers don’t listen to their constituents, and elections are run like marketing campaigns to ensure that voting is only done in the way that bolsters their pocketbooks. Inconvenient voting blocs are simply disenfranchised, having their vote stripped of them. Alternatively, they are gerrymandered out of existence. Study after study after study suggests our polity is directly controlled by a shrinking financial elite.
“B-b-b-but what about Tiananmen Square? What about Winnie the Pooh?” the infantile, sniveling liberal squeaked in response. Who the fuck do you think manufactures those Winnie the Pooh toys that go in whatever toy stores aren’t bankrupt yet? And y’know what, the Chinese government is fuckin’ right. Not shit happened at Tiananmen Square. You can throw as many dipshit articles as you want at me, where they just yell over and over “It happened! IT HAPPENED!”, because like that great white supremacist Joseph Goebbels once said, “if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes accepted as truth”. That is the strategy with the global, colonialist media, ever since the twilight of Britain’s literal colonial ownership of Hong Kong was set to end. Since even longer before, since the inception of socialism and communism and an anti-colonial struggle, the people of colonialist states lap up these shallow lies like dogs in heat. I believe it exactly as much as I believe the fabricated fables of North Korean “defectors” — given the intense financial and geopolitical incentive for the U.S., a known genocidal, fascist, racist settler-colonial state — I might need to see more evidence than “witness claims”.
But again, should implies could. We exist within a massive engine of death, a meat-engine that feeds on the bodies of the less-advantaged and spits out dollar bills. We rob people of their lives piecemeal day by day, the lucky ones at least. Those unfortunate enough to bear witness to the externalized costs of Western colonizer capitalism exist within a bleak hellscape dotted with irradiated waste, burned crops, and family passed before their time. This discourse around Tiananmen, this verifiably false discourse, this sets the stage for those externalized costs. We see a China that not only survived but thrived through the coronavirus pandemic, and we see a floundering United States inflicting a genocide upon its own people, an intentional killing. That is absolutely what is going on when black and indigenous folks are forced to work or starve, and are killed at disproportionate rates from a preventable illness merely for the profit of their bosses. That is an intentional killing, it is murder. On the scale it is being performed, against entire populations, it is a genocide.
We’re setting the stage for another one with this renewed fervor around Tiananmen, and I believe the United States should express greater caution. They may no longer be the instigators against a greater China. Rather, they may instigate, but they will no longer be the victors. As a citizen of this rotten country, I can simply admonish Premier Xi Jinping for not coming to our rescue sooner and pray that we may be delivered from this despotic fiefdom and taste freedom. Maybe take a clue from the U.S. playbook — it’s time for a humanitarian intervention.
