Date of 4 June remains one of China’s strictest taboos, with government using increasingly sophisticated tools to censor its discussion
There is no official death toll but activists believe hundreds, possibly thousands, were killed by China’s People’s Liberation Army in the streets around Tiananmen Square, Beijing’s central plaza, on 4 June 1989.
The date of 4 June remains one of China’s strictest taboos, and the Chinese government employs extensive and increasingly sophisticated resources to censor any discussion or acknowledgment of it inside China. Internet censors scrub even the most obscure references to the date from online spaces, and activists in China are often put under increased surveillance or sent on enforced “holidays” away from Beijing.
New research from human rights workers has found that the sensitive date also sees heightened transnational repression of Chinese government critics overseas by the government and its proxies.
You say whataboutism, I say hypocrisy.
Whataboutism is literally the appeal to hypocrisy fallacy. It’s a fallacy because the appeal is done in place of a proper argument that addresses the original issue. The very purpose of this fallacy is to distract from the original issue and to dismiss criticism without ever addressing it by bringing up something irrelevant to the topic at hand and accusing others of hypocrisy.
The point isn’t to distract, it’s to provide context so the accuser can’t create an inaccurate framing. The atomic unit of propaganda isn’t lies, it’s emphesis.
If every week, a right-wing German posted about how many gays Britain murdered, imprisoned, or castrated during the 40s, it would be borderline deceitful for other lemmy users not to provide the full context of what Germany was doing to gays at that time (and what West Germany continued to do until the 1970s).
Same deal when we get the occasional zionist talking about the plight of gay Palestinians. Yes, they have their own struggle, but there is a very specific and obvious purpose behind a zionist bringing it up.
You’re being dishonest. You didn’t provide any context or made any remark regarding framing or context. In fact, you made no argument at all. You just brought up an entirely irrelevant subject for the sole purpose to distract from the original issues and dismiss the criticism being brought up by appealing to hypocrisy. It’s literally the textbook definition of the fallacy.
This is a good example, you’re exactly like them in this case.
The subject is “whataboutism”, or when people bring up similar, but far worse things done by liberal institutions in response to supporters of liberal institutions accusing communists of doing bad things to show that the supporter of the liberal institution doesn’t actually give a shit about the event they’re crying about and is simply using it as a pretext to justify hostility against that communist state, victims included.
That’s a wild assumption you just made up based on literally nothing. But the fact that you need to make up such assumptions is ironic, because it shows that yourself are a hypocrite. You support these atrocities and the regimes who committed them and so you perceive people calling out these acts as unjustified “hostility” rather warranted criticism. Since you’re admitting that you don’t actually care about the atrocities being committed, that means the only purpose you would bring up anything to do with “liberal institutions” is to be fallacious, which is exactly the case here.
The entire purpose of bringing up entirely irrelevant subjects is to distract from the original issue and dismiss criticism. There’s no context, there’s no argument, there’s no point. You’re simply mad that the regime you support is being criticized and as a desperate attempt to divert attention away from the criticism, you bring up irrelevant topics and accuse people of being hypocrites for their criticism of the original topic… even that doesn’t negate the validity of their criticism whatsoever.
When people call you out on your fallacious argumentation, they’re telling that the logic you’re using is inconsistent. If you’re actually ignorant enough to not understand what the fallacies are or why they’re bad then that’s a different issue, but if you’re aware what they are and why they’re bad and still choose to be annoyed then that means you’re disingenuous. It means you’re arguing in bad faith from the get go, which is an indication that the beliefs you are trying to defend are flawed to the point where you can’t defend them on their own merits.
Given the total lack of knowledge surrounding any of the events in question or the people affected, it is blatantly obvious that the “criticism” begins and ends with “<insert communist country> bad!”
The average ML has studied how/why such actions occurred and the response beyond the childish “dey did it coz authoritarianism!” that libs end their analysis at, because our interest isnt limited to its utility as hostile evidence.
When a country does a bad thing, then that thing is indeed bad. It’s fairly straight forward. Your persecution fetish isn’t going to change the reality. You’re not a victim, neither are the communist countries who committed these atrocities. Just because you’re soulless ghoul who supports these atrocities, that doesn’t means others do as well. This might be shocking to you, but most people don’t have ideological brainrot. They call out bad things when they see them. That’s called consistency.
But that’s something you lack, because if you had consistency then you wouldn’t need to use fallacies. You would just defend your positions by their own merits, but you can’t do that so you become dishonest. Even now, instead of just taking the high road and saying “these events were atrocities and I condemn them” like a decent human being, you do the opposite by still defending them. You don’t seem to understand there is no justification for them. The fact that you are trying to justify them is direct evidence of your ignorance.
At no point did I try to justify any atrocity, I simply supplied context that pissed off liberals because it required more nuance to interpret than their thought-terminating clichés supplied. Which really was rude, feel free to ignore me and go back to “china ran 100,000 people over with tanks for peacefully asking for freedom like we have, because thats just what
terroristsauthoritarians do.”I say, why not both?