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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

Tiananmen is an extraordinary achievement of forgetting.

There we a huge number of people involved on both the PLA and protestor sides. There are some reports which claim thousands of people killed and gruesomely disposed of; those people must have had relatives. We (outsiders and history in general) have very little idea what happened, and a single photo which escaped the censorship.

If the gunpoint forgetting is maintained for the lifetimes of the surviving participants, we may never know what happened.

Of course, even in incidents which are hugely documented, there is scope for denialists and propagandists to sneak in misinformation.

Edit: well, looks like there's lots more. I've been misled myself by how prevalent the Tank Man photo is compared to all the other footage!

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A single photo? What are you talking about. There are plenty of video footage from the square where you can see the military shoot from cars into crowds of civilians[1].

We don’t have “very little idea what happened”.

Contemporary BBC news report: https://youtu.be/kMKvxJ-Js3A

I really think you're underestimating the propaganda.

I'm honestly not sure if you are referring to Chinese or western propaganda.

>a single photo which escaped the censorship.

It seems there's quite significant documentation, even documentaries with video of the event. Perhaps more is coming to light because it's the 30 year anniversary.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/world/asia/tiananmen-squa...

> We (outsiders and history in general) have very little idea what happened, and a single photo which escaped the censorship.

...what? We have more than a single photo of the Tiananmen Square incident! While in the article, have some archival BBC footage:

https://youtu.be/kMKvxJ-Js3A

Here's another (NSFW):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA4iKSeijZI

Discussion on reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/bw8x9b/a_look_at_th...

And if not outright denied it is dismissed as "unhelpful" to talk about:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/02/opinion/tiananmen-square-...

Some other commenters point out how there is plenty of evidence and archival footage of the event, but that's all available here in the west - how much of that can be found in China itself? One of the major goals of the Chinese internet censorship is to hide all references to the event; I don't know how effective it is, but I wouldn't be surprised if the generations born afterwards don't know about it, and eventually (within China at least) it'll be lost entirely.

I mean the US likes to forget it had concentration camps for the Japanese after Pearl Harbor.

> I mean the US likes to forget it had concentration camps for the Japanese after Pearl Harbor.

I don’t think this is a fair comparison. some people are ignorant of this, or don’t want to know about it, but there isn’t any active state-sponsored campaign to suppress this. My own experience is that I was at an openly advertised exhibition in San Diego 20 years ago on this very topic and there wasn’t even a scintilla of fear that it could be the subject of any kind of censorship.

> I mean the US likes to forget it had concentration camps for the Japanese after Pearl Harbor.

An odd comparison to make. It’s taught in public school and there are memorials to this at several locations including the national mall in Washington DC, and at least some of the locations are marked as national historic sites.

Yeah, and it's not taught in a heavily biased way like Tiananmen is taught to Communist Party members.

At least in my school, it was taught as unequivocally wrong and one of the biggest mistakes the US government ever made. The focus was on how painful it was for the families and how much they lost. And this was in a rural, conservative community.

> I mean the US likes to forget it had concentration camps for the Japanese after Pearl Harbor.

No, it doesn't. Not only is it part of public school curriculum in most (all?) states, it's actively cited by major party politicians as a historical reference in policy debates, usually negatively but at least as recently as the Bush II era occasionally positively by figures on the Right in defense of War on Terror policies.

> I mean the US likes to forget it had concentration camps for the Japanese after Pearl Harbor.

Yeah - my wife was mentioning such camps near here in Phoenix to one of her coworkers who's younger and they'd never been taught about them at school (here in Arizona!):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gila_River_War_Relocation_Cent...

https://saltriverstories.org/items/show/338

I think we have our own version of "forgetting" going on, but we call it "no child left behind" and "common core" and things like that. By this I mean it (and tons of other history and other topics) seem to fall by the wayside in favor of "higher scores on standardized testing" - not because of any concerted government effort or anything like that...

Note:

My wife knows about it because she loves Arizona history, in part because she went to school with and is a friend of our state historian's son (or grandson? can't remember), so she's heard lots of this state's history from "tales around the campfire", so to speak.

EDIT: Rethought my response; it seemed a bit trite or something. Wanted to clarify it.

Perhaps the US would like to forget. But when we have a National Historic Site at one of the camps, we don't seem to be working very hard on the amnesia: https://www.nps.gov/manz/index.htm . And some years ago, the book Snow Falling on Cedars sold quite a few copies, and there was a movie made of it.

Interesting, I was taught about Japanese internment in public high school.

It was taught in school when I was growing up in Ohio in the 90s. The US government even paid reparations to those or decedents of those affected.

I think we can both agree, regardless, that we should be working towards improving our countries and that starts be being honest and calling out the bad thinks our countries do so as to have a hope of not repeating the same mistakes.

The idea that the USA has forgotten Japanese concentration camps is fairly out there.

Which is kind of sad, in that there are plenty of government-driven forgettings we have here. E.g. COINTELPRO. Even the history of slavery is subject to government-sponsored campaigns of mnemonological displacement (e.g. the Civil War was about states rights, not slavery!)

The term "concentration camp" is very inappropriate here.

It's the established, standard name for such internment camps, going back to the Boer War. There's a popular assumption that "concentration camp" always means "death camp" but that's not the established definition of the term.

> concentration camp. n. a place where large numbers of people, especially political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area

It's literally a camp where you "concentrate" some minority group in a small area to make them easier to deal with; that's exactly what was done to the Japanese. The fact that the concentration camps in Germany were worse (because they enslaved and killed mass numbers of them) doesn't make the one in the US any less a concentration camp.

The US canps were exactly historically normal concentration camps, designed to concentrate a disfavored population for easier control, as had been used by many powers for quite a long time before WWII.

The idea that the label is inappropriate comes entirely from going beyond accepting the term’s ludicrously euphemistic use for Nazi extermination camps, but to preferring that use exclusively, which is about like saying it's inappropriate to use the term “shower” for washing chambers with overhead water sprayers because the term was euphemistically used for Nazi extermination chambers.

The Waco or, on a much smaller scale, Ruby Ridge massacres are closer comparisons than internment.

And let me tell you - you won't hear two words about them in your high school social studies class.

> And let me tell you - you won't hear two words about them in your high school social studies class.

Both Waco and Ruby Ridge were both addressed (not in particular depth) in the book for the 11th grade US History class I subbed for ~19 years ago.

Nor is the MOVE police bombing of 1985. It's always interesting to see which police overreach people choose to remember, and how difficult it is to get them to link it all up into reform.

I remember MOVE, but it's categorically different to the other two (Which were not race-motivated).

Why would they spend time on these in a high school social studies class?

Because it's a beautiful example of ways in which government authority fails, because you can raise questions about when state violence is appropriate, and when it isn't, whether ends justify means, what accountability processes exist for the infliction of violence against individuals...

Oh, I suppose these are great reasons to not expose high school students to it.

I think it would be awesome for high school students to be taught about the patterns where our government has failed its people - absolutely. I don't know if I find these two cases as noteworthy as you do. I'd probably cover instead:

- Ways that administrations have built the case for foreign wars (Bush & Iraq War 2, Bay of Tonkin)

- Ways that police have been misused against citizens (labor struggles in early 20th century, FBI vs civil rights movement)

> Tiananmen is an extraordinary achievement of forgetting.

Indeed, the book "The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited" [1] was mentioned recently on NPR's "Morning Edition" in the context of the anniversary of Tianenmen Square.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People%27s_Republic_of_Amn...

> Tiananmen is an extraordinary achievement of forgetting.

It's only forgetting if you use the GDPR-compliant definition of the word that connotes force.

This is erasure. This is Orwell's memory hole in action. We know exactly what happened, and have plenty of evidence. But there is also a powerful government that would like us to think we're uncertain, unsure, lacking evidence or proof.

> We know exactly what happened

We don’t know exactly. We don’t, specifically because of the erasure that you mentioned.

We argue with each other over the details of how people were killed and how bodies were disposed of. We’ll question the reliability of UK cable sources. In our never-ending quest for truth we’ll point out that the propaganda was likely coming from both sides.

That’s the point of it, eh? Ensure that the perpetrators, the dead, and those who fear for the lives of their families are mute. Let those who care do the work of ruining any truthful narrative. Present a very consistent narrative of your own.

It’s already gone from HN homepage, despite being posted 4 hours ago and having 230 points. (I know the algorithm is more complex than just time & points so I’m not blaming the mods.)

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