Just blocked lemmy.ml from my Lemmy account, and I swear to god it's one of the best things I've ever done on this platform. My homepage feels actually clean now.

For the past few months I'd been seeing a lot of tankie posting and pretty much far-left propaganda on my feed. It got tiring enough that I finally checked my blocked-user list, and realized pretty much everyone I'd blocked was from lemmy.ml. So I just blocked the whole instance instead.

Saying this as someone who considers themselves a leftist: I used to think Lemmy itself was an echo chamber. Turns out lemmy.ml was the problem the entire time. Probably the reason I tolerated it for so long is that I agreed with a lot of what they posted, but like an oversaturated meme, I'd had enough. Browsing the platform was starting to feel way too tiring instead of fun, which defeats the point of being here in the first place.

The breaking point was seeing some dude post a "meme" implying North Korea and China are basically communist utopias and that the West sucks. I mean, the West does suck, but come on - you're saying North Korea is the ideal the West should strive for? What the hell...

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[–] Zarobi@aussie.zone 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Also from that Wikipedia article:

Tap for quotes

Official government announcements shortly after the event put the number who died at about 300.

The Swiss Ambassador had estimated 2,700, following a visit to Beijing's hospitals.

Records from Beijing's main eleven hospitals, compiled shortly after the events, recorded at least 478 dead and 920 wounded, though Timothy Brook notes that these figures are an undercount due to lack of information from other hospitals.

Jonathan Fenby puts the death toll at over 700 in his book

British Ambassador Alan Donald initially claimed, based on information from a "good friend" in the State Council of China, that a minimum of 10,000 civilians died [...] Donald later revised his estimate to 2,700–3,400 deaths

While public discussions about the events have become socially taboo, private discussions about them continue to occur despite frequent interference and harassment by the authorities. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo remained in China in order to speak out about Tiananmen in the 1990s despite the fact that he received offers of asylum; he faced constant surveillance. Zhang Xianling and Ding Zilin, the mothers of victims who died in 1989, founded the Tiananmen Mothers organisation and were particularly outspoken about the humanitarian aspects of the protests. The authorities mobilize security forces, including members of the People's Armed Police, every year on 4 June in order to prevent public displays of remembrance, with an especially heavy security presence on the anniversaries of major events such as the 20th anniversary of the protests in 2009 and the 25th anniversary of the protests in 2014. On the 30th anniversary of the protests in 2019, the well-known Chinese artist Ai Weiwei wrote that "autocratic and totalitarian regimes fear facts because they have built their power on unjust foundations" and he also wrote that memory is important: "without it there is no such thing as a civilised society or nation" because "our past is all we have."

Journalists have frequently been denied entry to the square on the anniversaries of the massacre. Also, the authorities are known to have detained foreign journalists and increase surveillance of prominent human rights activists during this time of year. Internet searches on "4 June Tiananmen Square" made within China return censored results or result in temporarily severed server connections. Specific web pages with select keywords are censored while other websites, such as those which support the overseas Chinese democracy movement, are blocked wholesale.

The actual numbers of deaths seems to be heavily disputed. In a country where the government heavily censors even discussion of the event and redacts all mention of it online, I'm hesitant to take the "official" numbers at face value. The truth is we'll never know the true death count, we only have unreliable information; but I wouldn't be surprised if the event was as bad, or worse, than what we know.

[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 week ago

The CPC does not redact all mentions of what is known in China as the "June 4th incident." It's true that the total death count is disputed, but you'll find that much of the dispute comes from western or western friendly organizations. We know the west already lies about their enemies, from Palestinians to the claims of Iraqi WMD. The total death count appears to be, from the most credible sources, in the hundreds, not thousands.