You seem to be projecting a lot of things that don’t have a firm basis in external reality
I’m not sure why you would say that.
Are the guys with machine guns there to intimidate tourists, or are they there because Tienanmen Square is right in front of the Chinese equivalent of the White House and several other important buildings that require high security?
Considering the exact placement, I would say the former. Considering their non-presence at other equally important locations? I would also say the former.
The incident (which, let us be clear, also involved armed insurrectionists with incendiaries and commandeered rifles) wasn’t even the last major violent event in the area,
Do you know what double-think is? Was the military killing armed insurrectionists, or was it all made up? Or were they standing their with tanks and watching the armed insurrectionists kill everyone? I trust Amnesty international more than you, and more than propaganda recordings from the Chinese government. Not as someone with a prejudice against China, either. The narrative makes sense, where yours does not.
when Falun Gong members set themselves and a small girl on fire in protest of the group being banned
Are you implying that the soldiers with machineguns were ther ebecause Falun Gong members set themselves on fire? And not because of the internationally known incident that, whether true or not, China is clearly censoring and jailing people for publicizing?
However you might feel intimidated in the moment, clearly once you left you understandably made a firm association between the Square and machine guns!
You’re absolutely right. I did not think China were death dealers before Tianenmen Square, but now I do. They succeeded in terrifying me, and I think that was their intention. I was sure as hell afraid to speak truth aloud in China.
Furthermore, you’re making silly excuses for liars
Why should I believe you over pretty much every unbiased body in the world?
There were people who weren’t even there for the supposed massacre (see the video) who were accounting very peculiar events in lurid detail, like tanks running over inhabited tents and then mulching them and such
Are you referring to the on-site live announcers saying they were witnessing it in real time, and the grisly follow-up photos that China was unable to suppress of a line of corpses with tank-tread sized crush marks destoying their bodies? Are those the lie? All the photos that show half naked and unarmed people killed by large military vehicles were fabricated? Or did “armed insurrectionists” bring tanks?
Do you think some scared college student is going to have an anxiety-based hallucination that causes them to think they were places they weren’t and saw things that have probably never happened anywhere?
No you’re right. People can have panic-based hallucinations when tanks open fire. And the first thing they’ll do is try to take photos of it. And no matter how hard you try, the photos come out eventually. Let me reiterate, photos of bodies crushed by tanks.
It seems to me that you are reaching for excuses, especially since you are disregarding the numerous witness, both domestic and foreign visitors, who all saw that there was no massacre in the Square
I’ve seen photos of the massacre. I have heard witness testimonies that corroborate those photos, and witness testimonies that do not. I am aware of several governments (including my own) that have used false or intimidated witnesses to try to hide an atrocity. Why EXACTLY do you see me as “reaching for excuses”? Do you think I WANT any government to mass-murder its protestors?
At what point should I throw out every piece of evidence I’ve ever seen in my life and believe this? How would you prove to an outside observer that Tienanmen Denial is different from Holocaust Denial?