was it ridiculous for people to doubt that iraq had wmds?

for anyone not familiar:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

"Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE), also known as "embrace, extend, and exterminate", is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found that was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences in order to strongly disadvantage its competitors.

sane leftists generally simply discount tankie talking points out of hand

how is this sane? tankies might well be wrong, but I don't see how they're obviously wrong. the west does lie about its enemies. a million iraqis died on a lie in our lifetimes. i'm not here to fight a court case, i just find the dismissal baffling.

Thanks for this write-up. Great link to send people.

The issue with this is beehaw is large enough that them defederating from other instances is potentially a serious threat to those instances. Social networks are inherently monopolistic because people follow the crowd, and federation is meant to counteract that tendency toward userbase consolidation. Moves like this could be interpreted as an attempt to become the dominant instance, defeating the purpose of the fediverse.

beehaw has defederated from 352 other lemmy instances, including two of the largest - lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. I would be cautious about settling in there.

the American invasion of Korea killed 20% of the population and leveled 80% of the buildings - over 1.5 million died - and now the nation responsible annually conducts the world's largest military exercises on the north/south border.

also some of the more outrageous stories and defector testimonies about north korea have turned out to be false, like the "all men are required to get haircuts matching kim jong un" story, which turned out to be unsourced claims from radio free asia, and contradicted the equally unsourced bullshit story that men were forbidden to get the kim jong un haircut

anyway it's still a tightly controlled, militaristic regime but I think there's room for nuance

The reason people are fleeing towards western nations is that the west extracts 25% of its GDP from the impoverished colony states these people are fleeing from.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802200005X

Unequal exchange theory posits that economic growth in the “advanced economies” of the global North relies on a large net appropriation of resources and labour from the global South, extracted through price differentials in international trade. Past attempts to estimate the scale and value of this drain have faced a number of conceptual and empirical limitations, and have been unable to capture the upstream resources and labour embodied in traded goods. Here we use environmental input-output data and footprint analysis to quantify the physical scale of net appropriation from the South in terms of embodied resources and labour over the period 1990 to 2015. We then represent the value of appropriated resources in terms of prevailing market prices. Our results show that in 2015 the North net appropriated from the South 12 billion tons of embodied raw material equivalents, 822 million hectares of embodied land, 21 exajoules of embodied energy, and 188 million person-years of embodied labour, worth $10.8 trillion in Northern prices – enough to end extreme poverty 70 times over. Over the whole period, drain from the South totalled $242 trillion (constant 2010 USD). This drain represents a significant windfall for the global North, equivalent to a quarter of Northern GDP. For comparison, we also report drain in global average prices. Using this method, we find that the South’s losses due to unequal exchange outstrip their total aid receipts over the period by a factor of 30. Our analysis confirms that unequal exchange is a significant driver of global inequality, uneven development, and ecological breakdown.

As for the rest of what you said, see my other comment

Why would there be only one lie?

Western audiences care when a lie costs a lot of tax money and soldier's lives. Under those circumstances the lie eventually hits the headlines. Otherwise people tend not to look into it and the bullshit goes unchallenged, especially when questioning it means denying an atrocity. That's the whole point of atrocity propaganda. It works especially well on leftists because leftists are goodhearted people who care about atrocities.

For example, saying "Although people died in violent clashes on Chang'an Avenue and elsewhere in Beijing, no one died in Tiananmen Square" is a bad look. Your reaction to it isn't curiosity, your reaction is "how dare you erase the lives of those thousands of brave students who were crushed into a paste under the treads of tanks in Tiananmen Square!" And I fucking commend that reaction, it proves you have a heart.

and yet

• Wikileaks published diplomatic cables acknowledging that no one died in the square [1].

• Multiple established western journalists who were present at Tiananmen have said that no one died in the square [2][3][4][5][6]. These journalists are all otherwise critics of the Chinese government.

• Multiple organizers of the protests have said that no one died in the square [7]. Hou Dejian, who was there all night, called out the false narrative in an interview: "Are we going to use lies against an enemy who lies?"[8]

• A Spanish film crew was in in the square all night and filmed students leaving peacefully at dawn, singing the Internationale. Here it is on Youtube: [9]. This aired on Hong Kong news but never in the west — I wonder why?

But even if these sources managed to convince you, you're not gonna go around telling other people, because "The Tiananmen Square massacre never happened" sounds absurd and makes you look like some kind of holocaust denier — except the holocaust is supported by overwhelming evidence and the Tiananmen Square massacre is not.

So now you're aware of two lies.

Turns out there's a third lie, and a fourth lie, and...

You could write a post like this on North Korea, and people have [10].

You could write a post like this on Xinjiang, and people have [11].

I'm running out of bookmarks now — I don't make a habit of writing posts like this — but I hope I have at least gotten the point across that tankies have their reasons, and in a media landscape as distorted as the one we live in I think it is absurd to write them off as easily as people do.

The dismissal of tankies really bothers me.

Remember Iraq's WMDs? Remember how the intelligence reports were actually based on a Nicholas Cage movie called The Rock? Remember how this goofy story was nevertheless widely reported and believed, and America still invaded Iraq, and 2.4 million Iraqis still died? Remember how 4 in 10 Americans still think America found WMDs in Iraq to this day?

the Iraq WMDs story inundated western media. It was everywhere. And everyone believed it. And millions died as a result. Tankies and other leftists disagree mainly on what is western distortion and what is true. That is an important question to think about, not one to be dismissed out of hand. America does lie about its enemies, and it does have enormous resources for selling those lies to the public. And people die when those lies are believed.

Hey there, thanks for asking!

I took an ambien a little while ago so I'm gonna keep it short, but I just wanted to make sure you got a deeper response tonight

China is a complex place with its share of problems, but we also have to acknowledge that we're not getting an honest or unbiased picture in western news media. The same people who manufactured the Iraq WMDs hoax have been controlling China narratives in the west for decades.

In this post I'm gonna focus on Tiananmen because I have bookmarks for it. Hopefully someone else will tackle the Uighur genocide allegations, but in the meantime I can leave you with this page someone sent me with links and info on the Uighur situation in Xinjiang — the short answer is that most of what we hear on Uighurs and Xinjiang is hearsay from sources with demonstrable links to US intelligence agencies, like Radio Free Asia. Anyway, on to Tiananmen.

In short, the Tiananman Square massacre never occurred. Around 200–300 people did die in violent clashes elsewhere in the city (more on that in the next paragraph) but no one died in the square itself. It has been one of the most successful propaganda campaigns in history. Wikileaks published secret diplomatic cables acknowledging that no one died in the square. That was in 2011, didn't even make a dent. Numerous western journalists, many of whom were in present at Tiananmen, have acknowledged that no one died in the square itself [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] and some have expressed regret for their complicity in the false narrative that took hold. Many (perhaps all) of these journalists are otherwise critics of the Chinese government. Hou Dejian, one of the main Tiananmen protest organizers, who was there all night, has acknowledged that no one died in the square, and numerous other organizers have agreed with him. These people are still critics of the Chinese government. A Spanish film crew was present in the square all night and filmed students peacefully leaving the square at dawn. Hong Kong television aired that footage, but to my knowledge western media never has. I don't imagine this is accidental.

As for the violence elsewhere in the city, it was mutual. Both sides were armed, and both sides suffered fatalities. The fighting actually began two days earlier, when civilians attacked unarmed soldiers. (CW: DEATH, GORE) Multiple soldiers were burned alive and their burnt corpses strung up in nooses. Some soldiers were lynched. Others were beaten (Note: you can't beat someone up if they have a gun). Vehicles were molotov'd with people still in them.. This was the first violence to occur, and it was committed by the civilians against the soldiers. Other civilians intervened in some cases to drag soldiers to safety. Two days later, similar attacks were carried out, setting fire to vehicles with people in them, only this time the soldiers were armed and prepared to fight back.

I'm about to pass out, but I wanted to at least mention western intelligence involvement before I do. Check out this article showing that even in 1989 journalists knew about CIA and NED involvement in the protests. Their involvement shouldn't be a surprise. Color revolutions and regime change are one of the main functions of the CIA. I would argue the Tiananmen incident was an attempted color revolution that failed. Pretty sure I have more sources elaborating on this angle but I want to sleep.

Here's one more article, wasn't sure where to put it: Tiananmen: the massacre that wasn't