This is purely a rant because I don’t want to end up writing an effort post about this topic.
Every year, we see Westerners posting about the “Tiananmen Square Massacre” across social media. Their devotion to “fighting the oppressive Chinese government” is like fucking clockwork. It’s so reliable that if you wanted to, you can prepare posts and comments to counter their narratives months before each June 4th. The western narrative has been debunked thoroughly even by Western sources.
But the point of this post isn’t to complain about the twisting of events, but the glaring contradiction that is their relative (or absolute) lack of posts about events outside of China that were equally or even more brutal than they claim June 4th was.
Why is that?
Why aren’t they posting as regularly about the genocide of indigenous people in their own countries? Why aren’t they posting so frequently about the massacres in Jakarta? Why aren’t they posting as regularly about the bombing of Nagasaki or Hiroshima or Nagasaki or Dresden or Yemen or Iraq of Afghanistan or Syria? Why aren’t they posting each year about the famines Britain engineered in India and other countries? Why don’t I see yearly posts about the Nanjing Massacre? That also occurred in China. Why don’t I see the same reminders about the transatlantic slave trade?
The governments that perpetrated (and in some cases, continue) many of these atrocities still exist and are still oppressing the people who were targeted during these events. This is why they say they target China, right?
Hell, the Holocaust and the subsequent resurgence of facism sees less attention from Westerners than the June 4th incident these days.
The reason for this disparity is that these people don’t actually give a shit whether the Chinese people are oppressed. When they say “I hate the Chinese government, but I don’t hate the Chinese people,” they don’t give a shit whether the Chinese people support and continue to build their current government. It’s not about supporting others, it’s about asserting the dominance and righteousness of the Western world. Not only can they not empathize with those outside the West, they put immense effort into doing the opposite.
It’s about convincing themselves that they live in a just society and that, despite how badly they are oppressed, they could always be worse off. It’s racist, but that racism serves a purpose: it is the copium that keeps them convinced that it’s ok to be oppressed by their own governments.
I don’t rant because I expect the sinophobic propaganda to disappear. I rant because I’m tired of the racism. I rant because I’m tired of the ignorance. I rant because all I want is to see people show others a bit of empathy, to show a little skepticism when they are told others are evil, a little curiosity about the other’s point of view, but I’m constantly disappointed.
Rant over. Thanks for listening.
Counter point, the USA doesn’t view any of those other countries governments with the same level of antagonism or as much of a political/economic threat as China.
Constantly bringing up Tienanmen Square is a way for the powers that be to keep reminding us USA citizenry that we are supposed to view China as bad. Its the shiny jingling keys to distract us from looking inward at our own government.
We aren’t supposed to think about it, we aren’t supposed to learn the historical sequence of event that lead to that incident, we definitely aren’t supposed to acknowledge that the event took place decades ago and we haven’t see a “Tienanmen Square massacre” every few months since the one in 1989.
And its a pretty low cost propaganda campaign to boot.