My experience is similar to yours, though I thought that it was included in one such collection. Maybe I have made a mistake, but it was being treated by “apologists” as though it was genuine and so I was credulous about it.

I believe this was the picture:

There is another on the same site of an alleged crushed person but the picture is totally indecipherable beyond being very bloody. Also one or two other pictures of corpses that it says are from the incident, which seems plausible but it’s a weird site so I’m going to give that caveat anywsy.

It does not help that the source it gives appears to be down and also is called “christusrex.org”. Christian radicals were famously a driving force in the death of civilians during the incident . . .

So in short I have basically no more context than you do.

I guess it depends on where, but a place like here generally has the “liberation theology” types take a Unitarian Universalist approach like you describe at the very end of your comment.

I agree with your point about political salience, even if ultimately I do fall into the “religion sucks” camp.

I fully support calling out bullshit, and indeed you can see elsewhere in this thread me arguing for Christianity being reactionary, but even wavering Christians are generally going to be repulsed by this “magical wizard grandaddy in the sky” language as compared to just engaging with the beliefs and refuting them.

Disinformation and anti-party agitation, yes. Of course, what they view as “disinformation” may be different from how you view it, but you are correct that the idea of any mention of it being banned is made up and as the other commenter said it is taught about in schools there. It is certainly a sore spot for the Party in some respects, but there’s no use in trying to construct a false reality where nothing happened when it has lots of documentation including a large number of instances of it being publicly addressed on Chinese state media and in international discourse.

The stance of the Party, which I think is broadly correct, is that most of the protestors were innocent and not involved in anything nefarious, but some treasonous individuals took advantage of the protests to try to instigate a counterrevolution (this is documented fact), proactively engaged in violence against the PLA (documented fact), and in the process of trying to crush this opposition force there were a number of innocent people (both manipulated protestors and total bystanders) who were caught in the crossfire, many of them tragically dying. That said, the vast majority of the protestors dispersed with the initial dispersal order and the bulk of the remainder were dispersed without a shot being fired*, and the PLA were only shooting after that point (to the best of my knowledge, this is also a documented fact).

*some people were hit with batons to make them move, and I assume in some cases people were pushed or manhandled, but that’s the extent of the violence at that stage as far as I know.

So there’s a combination of things that are literally just true and some parts that are matters of one’s interpretation of the evidence.

Edit: It is also simply true that no one died in the Square itself, and while this seems like absurd hair-splitting (and sometimes it is), the importance of this claim is that it discredits certain myths of people who claimed to see people killed and mutilated in the Square itself. People were killed, as already mentioned, it just happened elsewhere.

My point is that if you want people to listen to you, explaining the dangerousness of Christianity with due severity is fine but the performative shit is rhetorically repulsive and will only help you feel better about yourself while no one is convinced. If you actually care about helping people, then you need to be able to successfully talk to them.

“god exists” is an assumption, and it is deadly to treat assumptions as facts.

There is no such thing as operating without premises (“assumptions”), and if you fail to recognize this then you’ll fall into a scientism cult or something.

You structurally cannot make an argument without assuming the truth of your premises, if you argue for their truth, they are conclusions rather than premises and you used some other premises to support them, which themselves are being assumed. You cannot escape the necessity of assumption, you can only strive to have intellectual integrity about what those assumptions are.

I think the appeals to Christ’s progressivism will ultimately be hollow at scale if it’s being pushed by self-admitted atheists. I also have a softer view on negative rather than positive assertions in this realm if we mean interpersonal dealings, e.g. to me there is a great difference between pointing out that their Bible does not say what they claim it does versus telling them that they should believe something because the Bible says so and they are Christians (also the Bible is extremely inconsistent and self-contradictory anyway, so a lot of that would basically be quote-mining).

As I have said several times, I have no interest in deboonking the Bible to the public (except in the occasional cases we have probably both encountered of someone drifting away from their faith and being receptive to such things). Party platforms do not exist to make the public perfectly adhere to them and criteria for support is not the same as criteria for party membership. Criteria for support is just supporting without stirring shit, and there are many people who would support a materialist platform on the basis of class interest, which is the primary goal.

I don’t believe you mean this but just to be clear you’re not saying people with Christian beliefs is reactionary in itself?

Interesting phrasing. The short answer is that I have no interest in fighting people on it, but fundamentally basically yes, I do believe that. I believe the world would be improved by less religious belief (this is usually called “anti-theism”) and I believe that a vanguard must operate from a materialist standpoint that precludes ideas of divine intervention, divine teleology or morality, etc. These are all concepts that would fundamentally interfere with materialist reasoning. If someone is religious but is willing to engage with the subject from a materialist standpoint, then that is fine.

I don’t believe in engaging in any form of religious persecution or attacking people for not being atheists or anything like that. My belief is that with better material conditions, more agency in your life, and better education (and an absence of billionaire ghouls boosting evangelicalism, etc.), religiosity will become increasingly defunct, something that has already been observed happening in the real world for over a century.

So I am an anti-theist, but I am very peaceable about it, unlike how I address many other matters (such as in this conversation).

Yeah I often wonder what exactly libs are seeing when they watch this footage

Almost none of them watch the footage, or they watch the shortest snippet of Tank Man or whatever. Genuinely, they treat it as evidence without the barest effort to understand its content.

That story is made up just like you imply, but it is worth noting there is at least one picture of someone rolled over with a tank. I don’t really know what the situation was, presumably just the army advancing and incidentally rolling over someone who died in a gunfight just prior . . . I wonder if they were a bystander or one of the guerrillas, though.

I am like 70% sure Mishima would prefer participating in the skeleton war.

I would probably replace “Marxist” with “Marxist revolutionary” here, but if we accept that substitution, then I agree wholeheartedly.

I disagree with it as-written because Marxism is not just a political project but a worldview, and without the worldview there is no project, and without the worldview there is no maintaining the victory of the project.

Also Marxism genuinely is helpful for navigating daily life on a purely personal level.

Edit: what is this from, by the way?

You are correct, but the way you are talking about it in the earlier comment is performative reddit atheism. I have full belief that you can talk about it in a more measured way and actually succeed in helping people.

I’m genuinely curious what the point you are making is. Are you saying it needs to be “the right type” of Christianity, like a Unitarian Universalist pseudo-Christianity?

I’ve seen this “you didn’t respond to everything” point a few time and it comes across as rude. You are not entitled to a full response to everything you say, and I will choose what to respond to and when to respond to it.

Don’t give me lectures on being rude, you don’t give a shit about rudeness and are just using it as a cudgel. You’ve been actually rude to me many times (which is whatever, this isn’t me prompting for an apology, I’ve been rude too), so clearly this isn’t something you care about but just a tool for this “it’s not my job to educate you”-style radlib nonsense.

Huh, turns out pandering to values that you don’t actually hold makes you look silly! Who could have guessed? Maybe you can apply that to the present topic.

Much “ruder” is misrepresenting my position and talking past me because I already explained a point.

I am also against this notion that we can’t do politics unless we are 100% correct on every point.

I am curious if you can explain what this even means. Obviously no one is “100%” correct, and no platform or party is either and I never said they had to be. What I said is that you should try as Best you can to come to correct conclusions and then not deliberately support incorrect conclusions (i.e. lie to people) for what you view as political experience.

Politics is not a game of “who is more correct”, it’s “who has the most power and control”

I’ve already addressed this, but I’m not actually disagreeing with this characterization of politics, the difference that I’m arguing for is not that being honest is the most expedient way to gain power, it is often not, but that it is the only way to have real democracy (where people have agency to choose their representation based on genuine platforms), and therefore the only way to have actual socialism.

You can win by lying, for example you can get lots of money and public support by denying the genocide in Gaza depending on where you are, but taking power on that platform fundamentally means abandoning socialism and becoming part of the machine.

This is literally the problem also with the “vote blue no matter who” people, that they don’t believe in advancing their own agenda except for having someone painted blue winning. They don’t actually gain power that way, because that power rests on the support of reactionaries (or more often, they just lose to people who are even more reactionary, but even in their ideal scenario they are ultimately still failing). I am describing the attitude of members of the public who sign on to this idea, obviously the pols and consultants themselves generally don’t care about or are actively opposed to advancing progressive policy in the first place and this is just a trick.

So what I am saying is not that honesty is best for getting power but that it is necessary for maintaining the “who” in “who has power”. Does that make sense? Becoming a backwards political novement to get support from reactionaries just makes you another reactionary and makes the conversation about who gets power meaningless.

and that will never be us if we aren’t able to bend and organize people from where they are rather than where we want them to be.

Here radlib language is useful, because you should meet people where they are at, but you cannot be content to leave them where they are at. It is the job of a vanguard to agitate the public to support socialism, not to act like the baby communists on reddit saying “well actually we shouldn’t call it socialism but actually super patriotism!”

I see this talking point from Piker and his followers constantly, he uses it for example to justify using ableist slurs because “that’s how normal people talk”, and this is a backwards view, a capitulation to ableism that doesn’t serve any progressive purpose (but let’s be real, he uses a lot of this shit just to defuse any criticism because he almost never admits to ideological fault, ever, which should be a sign of dogmatic fossilization from a socialist perspective). Also it’s used for his weird entryist nonsense, but we don’t need to get into that.

I think the main point I have that you would find more agreeable is that there are some battles worth fighting at a given time and some things are not. That does not mean you need to agree to reactionary nonsense, you just need to identify in each instance what is most important to counter and leave the rest for later. Someone using ableist slurs and also engaging in, idk, supporting anti-immigrant policy should be argued with on that latter basis, but there is no need to yourself use ableist slurs in the meantime.

I think you’ll find this to be consistent with the thought experiment about the old black woman you made up, that I believe we should be getting people on the same page about more urgent matters (does community defense require participation from the community?) rather than struggle over things that have very little urgency (does God exist?) when there are urgent matters. Of course, I believe that the platform itself should be materialist, but that doesn’t mean your supporters will all be, especially not immediately.

I thought of another point for your hypothetical, so let’s see if I can edit it in the other comment before your see it . . .

Is she saying that because God will protect her, she does not believe in taking action? I would simply say that I do believe we need to take action and she should pay close attention to what ends up happening and why. I don’t need to get into a theological debate, nor do I need to validate her beliefs. She is still a thinking human who presumably wants to not live in squalor, so she can see for herself either the community successfully defending itself or it failing to do so and judge from that if “God is protecting her”. I would not say that last part, obviously, the point is that she figures it out herself, and if she doesn’t, then I personally am not equipped to reach her anyway and hopefully the community encourages her or something. You can’t reach everyone.

If she is not saying it to not take action but just as a statement about personal feelings (which I think is much more realistic), then it doesn’t matter and I would leave it be.

Edit: it of course would be worth pointing out that there have all through history been communities of faithful Christians (and people of all faiths) that have been forcibly displaced. It’s worth asking her what she thinks of it, but if she says that in her case it is different just like evangelicals believing the rapture will happen in their lifetimes when generations of their ancestors died believing the same thing, then see my original point because I don’t think I can directly reach someone like that, nor is it all that important unless this is a widespread community belief.

Gatekeeping?

I agree that Christianity is a death cult, so we can be glad to have found agreement there. I think the extent to which it is “authoritarian” depends heavily on the sect, since again obedience to God that has no actual state enforcement is just a religion having values, and we shouldn’t treat the idea of God punishing infidels and heretics as being the same as human governance. As a great counterexample, check out Imperial Shintoism, where actual fascist governance was part of the religion. You can also look at the religious views of Christian nationalists, who again make enforcing their religious morality the business of the state, or Hindutvas or any number of other examples.

Read self-help books and corporate promotional materials. I’m not even joking (though obviously there’s a lot of other stuff).

Also the Helenic nose and the Hitler Youth haircut in the second one.

Still funny

“Liberation theology” is such a hollow buzzword the way it gets used most of the time on sites like this. People just use the phrase but few of them have anything to say about the, you know, theology, because it’s just something they think is cool for other people in some weird condescending way and not something they have any belief in to begin with.

See this thread.

You didn’t address about half of what I said where I tried to explain it to you, so it is no surprise that you are also completely misrepresenting my position. You are just making the same crass tailist mistakes in reasoning that people have been making for over a century in what you suppose is the interest of socialism. It’s not about the “normies” (lovely nomenclature) being “100% correct,” it is about getting people on your side without empowering reactionaries or premising your stance on condescending lies. You don’t understand anything at all about political movements if you think someone supporting you means they are “100%” in agreement with you, and it is in fact quite unreasonable to think the majority base of a socialist movement is going to be nearly that aligned as opposed to working on the basic premise of class interests.

I am also not saying we must be deboooonking Christianity to the masses and demanding they be atheists – I have never and will never say that is an effective method of communist organizing – but being a Christian does not mean all of your opinions come from the Bible or your pastor or some Christian lifestyle influencer, you still need to eat and to have a roof over your head. What we should advocate for is a secular government that isn’t predicated itself on any sort of religious fealty, though members of the public may follow religions as they wish that aren’t breaking secular laws regarding abuse, etc. This is already a pretty normal and uncontroversial idea to most Americans, though even if it wasn’t it would still be what we should fight for because persecuting religious people is not a good method of fighting religion.

If you aren’t fighting for what is correct, victory means nothing except that the reactionary rulership has a personnel change.