Please hear me out.

Lately there has been a lot of fighting regarding the infamous June Fourth Incident. Lefties make it appear as though all of it is a fabrication, while liberals dismiss all of it as CPC propaganda. Very few seem willing to engage in any meaningful discussion, as they feel like their ideology is under attack by a hopelessly brainwashed political opponent.

While there certainly are many uncertainties regarding the event, I’d say much of the disagreements are quite needless. While there definitely were hundreds of civilian deaths that night and morning, scholars tend to agree that very few (if any) died on the square itself. The square seems to have been peacefully evacuated, and most of the deaths seem to have happened in dispersed conflicts between violent protestors and law enforcers, and on Changan Jie as people tried to reënter the square. It is also worth noting that a lot of (non-student) protestors were very violent against the law enforcers, killing several and severely injuring many others.

While the events and the government’s heavy censorship on the topic are still not justified, it is very different from the story of tanks rolling into the square, mercilessly killing many thousands of peaceful student protestors. The few witness accounts that did tell such stories were very quickly picked up by western media despite often being disproven, and although many news agencies later corrected themselves, this version wad the one that caught on with the public.

A read on the Wikipedia page may clear up the biggest misconceptions. Also check out these articles by the Columbia Journalism Review and CBS News, both of which would definitely not like to render the CPC favourably.

The lefties are actually not trying to say much more than this. If you pay attention, you see thay they always say that specifically the “Tiananmen Square Massacre” is myth. Of course they also have things to say about the nature of the protestors and other context, but ultimately most of their views are quite nuanced. It is just because of their dislike for brainwashed liberals that they appear so confrontational, which in turn discourages liberals from having a listen, exacerbating the estrangement and preventing any productive discussion, ultimately causing more people to have a narrow point of view.

I suppose my main message is that one should be a bit more open minded and that a lot of disagreement just stems from misunderstanding due to unnecessaty hostility. To be fair, I have been pleasantly surprised by the general open-mindedness here on Lemmy. I salute everybody that has the courage to admit that they are wrong.