• Star Wars Enjoyer A
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    3 years ago

    There’s still fragrant anti-communism in every single article about communism, communists, or marxism in general. But I guess getting rid of the article on mass killings is a small win for historical accuracy.

  • CriticalResist8A
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    3 years ago

    Wikipedia editors have too much time on their hands is what I’m gathering lol. Look at this page and imagine this is the average amount of discussion they have between themselves to determine if they should ban you, if they should delete a page, if they should revert an edit, if they should… And they do it all for free! You might think it’s neat that they care so much, but really mediawiki is not meant for such long discussions and the obfuscation is playing in their favour. If you don’t know how wikipedia works, you can’t defend yourself when they want to ban you. You’re gonna get dragged in days-long discussions over the privilege of keeping your account and get shouted down if you raise your voice because you have to be civil.

    I actually wrote about Wikipedia for prolewiki: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia. tl;dr the editors are ~90% white men and the admins are handpicked by other admins. Wikipedia is a tool of US imperialism and Jimmy Wales lies about the success of his “encyclopedia” to make his weird libertarian ideas seem like they work in real life.

  • peeonyou@lemmy.ml
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    3 years ago

    I used to donate to wikipedia every year and I felt good about it.

    Then someone pointed out all the evidence that Wikipedia has a few editors that inject their bias in all sorts of things and they control the message.

    No more donations from me.

      • Thann@lemmy.ml
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        3 years ago

        Thanks for the suggestion, that’s basically what I’ve been doing, but it seems like the only reason ppl are bringing up are around categorizing the incidents differently, e.g. renaming it to Mass_killings_under_totalitarian_regimes. But I don’t see anything about “propaganda” or inaccuracies.

        • linearperk@lemmy.ml
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          3 years ago

          There’s a main heading that says the claims are a synthesis of unverified/unverifiable stories.

          Just for discussion’s sake in the case of the Chinese famine it strategically manages to ignore the fact that the US embargoed grain shipments to China during this time. Somewhat famously Canada broke ranks and did sell grain to China during the famine.

          I think you have to have shallow historical knowledge or contextual knowledge to take any of the articles on the page seriously.

          It’s … A long way from scholarly. In this case better uniformed than misinformed. A good candidate for deletion.

          • Thann@lemmy.ml
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            3 years ago

            I see, and I’m not claiming to have any knowledge, but rather asking for some.

            I would advocate to add this information into the article rather than delete it.

            If we waited for the CCP to “verify” the info on tiananmen square, we would have no info at all. So it’s expected to have some unverified information in controversial topics.

            • CriticalResist8A
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              3 years ago

              The CPC put out several documents about the protests at and around the square. They even published parliament papers since there was a debriefing about it right after they cleared the square: http://www.gov.cn/zwgk/2011-11/09/content_1989024.htm (I always forget which document it is exactly though, I would think 5 or 6 since they’re dated by day).

              What they pushed against was the obvious lies like the british diplomat in HK who said the protestors were funnelled and mowed down by machine guns – he is the only person in the world making that claim (no protestors, no journalists, nobody else validates his diplomatic cable made from hk about “what he heard”). That’s what they censored, and it got turned into “nothing happened at tiananmen” by our media.

            • ttmrichter@lemmy.ml
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              3 years ago

              See, the fact that you believe there was a massacre in Tiananmen Square tells me you haven’t done even the most basic research.

              There was no massacre in Tiananmen Square on or about June 4, 1989.

              Note, I didn’t say there was no massacre on or about June 4, 1989. I said there was no massacre in Tiananmen Square. This may sound like I’m splitting hairs, but the distinction is important because it points out something important: the western press, fostered by western government, flatly lied to you both for reasons of sloth, and for darker propaganda purposes.

              So why did they lie?

              Well, you see, aside from journalistic laziness (the source of a whole lot of world misinformation), there’s also the issue that kiddies cosplaying democratic reformists is far more photogenic than worker uprisings that were scattered all over the country. (And it had the added benefit of dehumanizing the leadership of the country. I’ll get more into that later.)

              Kiddies cosplaying revolutionary—D’AW! they made a copy of Lady Liberty!—looks good on the cameras. And having them supposedly ruthlessly slaughtered is great TV. It didn’t happen, but that’s a small price to pay for great ratings! Hey, we’ll even put up pictures and video that suggest tanks just drove over a guy who stood in front of them. We’ll suppress the full footage (now trivial to find courtesy of the Internet) showing that he wasn’t. (Yes, I’m saying Tank Man didn’t happen the way you remember it.)

              No, the real massacre was a few km away from Tiananmen Square. It was a full-on clash between fed-up workers and, in a series of escalations, even the PLA. (You’re not in China, and again you’ve not done even the most elementary research, so you don’t know how shocking it is that those last three initials are involved!) So why wasn’t this reported upon at the time? Well, journalistic sloth is a huge factor (who wants to travel several km in a dangerous battle zone when you can cower in a hotel and make shit up?), but a darker reason is that the powers that be in the west didn’t want stories of workers’ revolts where the workers revolting are the hero … because the conditions they were revolting against are not that far from the conditions western workers of the time were contending with. No, let the photogenic kiddy cosplayers be the lede while quietly burying the nation-wide worker protests that culminated in that horrific massacre in which, finally, of all institutions, the bloody PLA was brought in to quell it.

              Now on to the dehumanization angle. Consider this: the protesters in Tiananmen were from the top universities in China. They were the bloody scions of the nation’s top leadership. They were the children of the very people who supposedly ordered their massacre! Do you genuinely believe that the Chinese are so inhuman that they’ll order their own God-damned children to be bloodily put down? Really!? Take a few moments and really think that through. Does this make even a lick of sense to you?

              Again, the press reports, beyond journalistic sloth and incompetence, are the result of a calculated narrative in which the Chinese leadership are painted to be inhuman. This is just raw propaganda and you’re falling for it hook, line, and sinker. (It’s not entirely your fault, of course. You’ve been drowning in corporate and government propaganda narratives from birth, as have the people in China, in Germany, in Russia, in Zimbabwe … wherever. You do bear some culpability, however, for not even thinking through how likely it is that Party leadership would order the mass execution of their own children.)

              So what does it matter? Well, part of the problem is that when you spout things that people know are false, it puts anything else you say under suspicion that they don’t know about. And it means, too, that attempts to address the very real problems the Chinese government has (every government has them) will fall on deaf ears because they’ll assume what you’re saying is bullshit motivated by ignorance and/or malice.

              Let me see if I can come up with a parallel to show you what I mean. What would you think of a Chinese person coming up to you and saying that Washington should be ashamed of their conduct in conducting the Fort Pillow Massacre and that the United States of America should pay reparations to the former Confederacy for their crime?

              That’s about how off-target most western critiques of China are.

                • pimento
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                  3 years ago

                  Why is it always the same picture of bikes, and people lying on the ground clearly lifting their heads? Not exactly proof of a massacre. Meanwhile you can find pictures of the burned bodies of PLA soldiers, who were sent in unarmed and killed by the “peaceful protestors”.

                  You can see the pictures of dead soldiers here.

                • ttmrichter@lemmy.ml
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                  3 years ago

                  No they’re not. They’re dead.

                  Now learn to read.

                  Go back to what I wrote in my long diatribe and see if you can spot your error.

                  (Hint: I repeated a phrase with some key differences that I called out.)

                  Engage your critical facilities this time.

          • southerntofu@lemmy.ml
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            3 years ago

            There’s a main heading that says the claims are a synthesis of unverified/unverifiable stories.

            Really? Ctrl+F “unver” yielded nothing. Yet i saw some compelling arguments for deleting/renaming that page, but your denialism about the crimes of marxist-leninists against the people does not help your case for communism. Communism is power to the people, not power to psychopaths. The State is a bourgeois construct to protect the ruling class: the “worker State” is a myth.

  • vis4valentine@lemmy.ml
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    3 years ago

    Is this denialism on the big genocides under communist regimes?

    If Wikipedia put some denialism stunt like this im gonna loose a lot of respect. I wonder if later they would put something like “Armenian genocide never happened and Holocaust was a hoax”

    • kyleisguilty@lemmy.mlOP
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      3 years ago

      open the link in this post, it refutes every single “communist genocide” argument

      fact is, these “genocides” didn’t happen, and, if they did, it wasn’t done on communism

      • Thann@lemmy.ml
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        3 years ago

        I’ve seen the tiananmen square pictures, how are you saying that didn’t happen?

          • southerntofu@lemmy.ml
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            3 years ago

            These articles themselves are partisan propaganda. How do they go from “the military showed restraint against rioters” and “the CIA supported anti-CCP movements” to “there is no censorship around Tiananmen square in China” and “nobody died through police/military intervention”?

            Not saying USA/France government is any better. All governments are bastards, and all trying to conceal their crimes against the people. But chinese government isn’t exactly “soft” either against political activists, eg. from the anti-gentrification movement.

            • pimento
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              3 years ago

              I honestly dont see how these statements contradict each other. And you probably dont speak Chinese, so how would you know about censorship in China?

        • ttmrichter@lemmy.ml
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          3 years ago

          Show me the pictures of the Tiananmen Square massacre. The pictures of the massacre note. Can’t? But you’ve seen them!

          OK, then, next best thing: show me the pictures of a massacre’s aftermath. You know, the dead bodies, the literal rivers of blood that must have been involved, the bullet holes in every building surrounding the square. That kind of thing.

          What’s that? You can’t? BUT YOU’VE SEEN THEM!!!

          (cough)

          • CriticalResist8A
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            3 years ago

            There are pictures… of soldiers lynched and burned by the mob.

            And then pictures that could really be from anywhere, could even be movie props for all we know. But they have that 1987 look so everyone accepts them. And then, yes, pictures of wounded protestors. Some seem dead. My issue with those pictures mostly is there’s no backstory (and I don’t speak Mandarin so forget about me tracking them down at the source). The problem to me is not if they were wounded by the police or military (because that was in 1987), the problem to me is that they are always accepted as victims of government repression without any questions. But their status has not been proven, it has only been eagerly inferred.

            Chai Ling (one of the organisers) hoping the army kills lots of students: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5__ESiklA1A. She flatly said “I won’t be at the square tomorrow” when asked.

            A contingent of CIA-sponsored students (such as Chai Ling) took the helm of the protests and turned them from legitimate grievances to “let’s install a US-comprador regime instead!”. Many protestors actually left the protests and went home when the shift happened, because that is not what they were supporting. Like you suddenly had armed students in the square inciting for revolution. Where did they get their weapons? Where did these students come from? People need to understand students don’t just roll up to the nearest weapons shop and spend all their savings on ARs lol.

            • ttmrichter@lemmy.ml
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              3 years ago

              This is disingenuous as well. You don’t help against calls of “denialism” by lying.

              Armed students? Where? Literally nobody involved—including the Chinese government—has made the claim that the students were armed. The closest they got to carrying arms was wresting bludgeons from riot cops and turning them back: improvised and captured weaponry, in short, while said arms were being used against them.

              The workers came with arranged arms. But they weren’t in the square, now, were they? They hit the streets multiple kilometres away armed with improvised weapons and Molotov cocktails.

            • ttmrichter@lemmy.ml
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              3 years ago

              Streets, dude. Streets. I don’t deny that there was a massacre. The clue is in these words:

              Note, I didn’t say there was no massacre on or about June 4, 1989.

              See what that says? See? WHERE IS THE FUCKING DENIALISM WHEN I’M EXPLICITLY SAYING I DON’T DENY IT YOU UTTER ILLITERATE!?

              My contention is that there was no Tiananmen Square massacre.

              Learn to read, please! And then use this newfound skill to READ THE WORDS THAT ARE ACTUALLY PRESENT and not the words that fill your brain after you yanked them out of your asshole.

              READ. WHAT’S. ACTUALLY. THERE!

              Fucking Hell is talking to Americans draining!

              • Thann@lemmy.ml
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                3 years ago

                How far away from Tiananmen Square do you think the massacre happened? And how far away is acceptable for it to be called the Tiananmen Square massacre?

                • ttmrichter@lemmy.ml
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                  3 years ago

                  I don’t “think” it happened away from Tiananmen Square. It happened far away. Reality doesn’t work by thought, it works by, well, reality.

                  Of course you’d have had your answer if you bothered to, you know, read the community you’re stinking up with your ill-conceived what-passes-for-thoughts.

                  In fact you’d have found this if you’d bothered to do more than demand people feed you like you’re an intellectual toddler: https://lemmy.ml/post/75157/comment/68837

      • southerntofu@lemmy.ml
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        3 years ago

        it wasn’t done on communism

        What does that even mean? When your so-called communist party advocates rule by an elite of bureaucrats/autocrats and these psychopaths decide to kill an entire part of the population due to its ethnicity, being gay, or being a little too communist (i.e. anarchist) for their taste, is that not genocide?

        I mean, beyond making an alliance with Hitler, Stalin is well known in former sovietic country as the man who tried to (and did) purge muslim ethnic groups from USSR via mass-killings. So, while i agree this has nothing to do with my definition of communism (as the classless, stateless society), it certainly has a lot to do with the marxist-leninist definition of “dictatorship of the proletariat”.

        • kyleisguilty@lemmy.mlOP
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          3 years ago

          When your so-called communist party advocates rule by an elite of bureaucrats/autocrats and these psychopaths decide to kill an entire part of the population due to its ethnicity, being gay, or being a little too communist (i.e. anarchist) for their taste, is that not genocide?

          genocide = extermination + power. under communist regimes there can only be extermination (tho most of them are still lies)

          • southerntofu@lemmy.ml
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            3 years ago

            genocide = extermination + power. under communist regimes there can only be extermination (tho most of them are still lies)

            Don’t you think the secret police, the gulags and prisons, and Red Army represent some form of “power”?

              • southerntofu@lemmy.ml
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                3 years ago

                Hmmm i think we agree that this is not “power” in the sense of “empowerment”. But it’s still a strong power that will crush the population.

    • CriticalResist8A
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      3 years ago

      Armenian genocide never happened and Holocaust was a hoax

      Well, hopefully no, because those two actually happened.

      Though they had a very long and concerning debate on the page “Genocide in the Congo Free State” (now deleted and the main proponent of this page banned), with a guy named after his grandpa who served in the CFS in the camp for deletion so, who knows…

    • southerntofu@lemmy.ml
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      3 years ago

      Its not denialism, but contextualisation. From the debate page:

      credible mainstream histography tends to neither lump all ‘communist regimes’ together as a subject for scrutiny when discussing ‘mass killing’ or to treat them as some sort of special case requiring unique analysis

      So the situation is different in every case and there’s not really a point about grouping them as “communism-related deaths”.