[rfrey]

Many of us (worldwide, I'm not American) watched China massacre thousands of its own children at Tiananmen Square. The US is descending into totalitarianism, but it hasn't reached that level yet.

And China may have changed in some ways but there have been no signals it would not repeat that event if it thought circumstances warranted.

[kolinko]

Also, many of us have lived in countries actually freed thanks to the west’s (mustly us) intervention, and we felt the support during the Russian occupation pre 1989

[yaakushi]

Many of us have lived or live in countries that are constantly affected and destabilized by past and even modern interventions from the U.S. (the only blame the rest of the "West" bears here is just watching without ever acknowledging the harm done). Just look at Latin America.

edit: Not trying to say "US bad, China good." Just there is perspective to everything.

[xtracto]

This is important.

Just a couple of days ago we found out that 4 undercover CIA agents were operating here in Mexico: https://www.infobae.com/mexico/2026/04/22/no-eran-dos-eran-c...

It has been knokwn that US government operatives provide weapons to Mexican cartels ( https://grothman.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?Document... ).

So, yeah, the US is no "blanca palomita" at all. And those of us suffering from their actions have learned that all powerful nations have good and bad things. Here in Mexico, we've got BYD cars, and they are AMAZING. Also being able to use DeepSeek is so cool.

[DoctorOetker]

If your government refuses to stop the flow of drugs into the US by addressing cartels don't be surprised if the US delivers weapons to said cartels so they can have some infighting going on.

If the mexican government would actually make work of dismantling the organized trade, there would be no incentive to deliver them weapons to shoot each other.

[xtracto]

Demand, markets are always driven by demand.

[nxm]

So that’s an excuse?

[DANmode]

That’s your understanding of why Intelligence backs/works with cartels?!

Oh honey. Black budgets. Cashflow, flow of power.

The “Mexican government” was headed by CIA assets multiple times in recent history: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34903090

https://jacobin.com/2023/06/mexico-jose-lopez-portillo-decla...

What are you expecting Mexico to do, again?

[bdangubic]

supply is never an issue, USA would supply poison to entire planet if the demand was there. blaming Mexico for the sickness of our society is very rich (but often repeated)

[DoctorOetker]

I never pretend supply is a monocausal issue, but it is a contributing issue.

You prefer to believe in monocausal scapegoat mechanisms? Stick your head in the sand at your own peril.

You claim US would supply the poison with pleasure itself, but then why is it being imported?

[HWR_14]

My Spanish isn't great, but it seems like the CIA agents were going on missions with Mexican authorities. Is that an issue?

[throwaway85825]

They were declared cia officers with black diplomatic passports.

[wayeq]

> Just a couple of days ago we found out that 4 undercover CIA agents were operating here in Mexico

was that a surprise? i'd be more surprised if it were only 4.

[xtracto]

They were actually 10 haha, according to the article.

[glenstein]

And some of us have a sore lower back after playing tennis, while some of us have terminal stage four cancer. Who is to say which is worse?

I think right now there's a kind of global propaganda competition playing out and the thing that does the most damage is false equivalences that encourage loss of perspective.

[mlnj]

The only instance of false equivalence I see is the mention of lower back pain vs cancer.

[meowkit]

You cant compare qualia of suffering. At least not with our current technology. Thats the point - they both involve suffering but that doesn’t mean one is inherently worse than the other. The details and experience matter which got glossed over in these stupid debates- hence loss of perspective.

Honestly I had to read the wiki page of false equivalence and you’re not asserting the fallacy correctly.

[DoctorOetker]

we don't need machinery or a mechanism to compare it, natural selection works just fine for 99% of all species on earth.

[CuriouslyC]

The US committed massive treaty violations and genocide, on top of huge imperialist destabilization of many sovereign nations. Tianmen square and the Uyghers are bad, but we're straight up evil.

[blackqueeriroh]

The Chinese government regularly kidnaps its own citizens, who have no due process rights, and is currently engaged in a mass genocide of a racial group they consider “inferior.”

Additionally, they have supported Russia consistently during their occupation of Ukraine, and just install leaders for life.

I’m confused how you think the US is worse. I say this as an Afroindigenous person who is very clear about the harms white supremacy has inflicted upon the cultures I am a part of.

[bdangubic]

> Additionally, they have supported Russia consistently during their occupation of Ukraine

And who are we supporting since roughly 01/2025? :-)

[CuriouslyC]

Just on the genocide scorecard, it's us 0, China 1. Ask a native american what they think of the US govt.

[meloyc]

tell us your story

[1234letshaveatw]

Us? wow, tell us your story

[0x737368]

And which countries are those?

[kolkov]

How many not-so-smart and not-so-intelligent people can claim Russia occupied you? Never mind, your liberation by the West will come back to haunt you, mark my words... and very soon! You'll remember how well you lived during the years of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact!

[andriy_koval]

those countries were liberated 35 years ago, GDP and other essential metrics increased significantly. How longer they should wait to start feeling remorse?

[randomname93857]

I remember constant grocery deficits, no meat, no cheese, etc in groceries. and all other kind of deficits. But there were rotten potatoes, and 2 types of bread! Glory to our leaders! fun times, you say.

[chrischen]

Whether a country massacres its own people is not really a good litmus test since there are countries that treat its own citizens well but foreigners really badly. One such country is… oh the US!

[incrudible]

You sincerely think a country that massacres its own people is better than the relatively good conduct of the US during war (or the treatment of foreigners on its soil)?

[platinumrad]

Why do we keep on getting into these wars in the first place?

[HPsquared]

"Good conduct during offensive warfare" is one of those contradictory expressions like "clean coal".

[unethical_ban]

This is a really, really messed up opinion.

Who cares if a country installs a panopticon to monitor their citizens and runs them over with tanks, look at this other thing over here.

[platinumrad]

Yeah that "other thing over here" is totally irrelevant. It's not like it's the actions of the second country in the comparison or anything like that.

Suppose country A kills 1000 people and country B kills 1000000 people and people are criticizing country A for murder while calling country B a better alternative. What is relevant here?

[roamerz]

How could you think those two, massacring your own people and buying plane tickets home for people illegally here are on the same scale at all. We are not ideal here at all but we don’t do that and I think if it were tried there would be an uprising against whoever was calling that unimaginable shot.

[z2]

You might be omitting the foreigners that are not in the United States that are being treated rather badly by the United States. I suspect that's what GP was referring to.

[skrtskrt]

How about the US massacring more civilians around the world than any empire since Ghengis Khan?

[breppp]

Nazis? Soviets? CCP? Spanish Empire? How are you doing the math?

[skrtskrt]

You only need the Native Americans, the US share of transatlantic slave trade, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Iraq for the US to be well clear of the Nazis.

This doesn’t even touch the Guatemalan genocide, US backing of the Rwandan genocide perpetrators, the white terror, Pinochet, the Khmer Rouge, Afghanistan, or Israel.

[breppp]

I'd like to see the numbers please, how that gets close to 50 million dead by the CCP, and I can't fathom how do you attribute the Khmer Rouge genocide committed by a communist party to the USA or others on the list

[LeFantome]

If I did not know better, I would assume you did not know about the government murdering its own citizens and/or buying plane tickets for citizens to countries that have never been their homes.

Did I miss the uprising?

[platinumrad]

How about bombing a school?

[Qem]

Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Minab_school_attack

[Ar-Curunir]

There are plenty of people who are here legally being shackled in chains and deported too.

Also, nice try propagandizing chained deportation as “free plane tickets”

[spwa4]

Are you implying China treats foreigners well?

[platinumrad]

How many schools has it bombed recently?

[spwa4]

In it's entire existence? I believe it shot up a couple tens of thousands of schools during the cultural revolution, and not by mistake. But yeah, I guess that's not bombing. China clearly prefers shooting the students, keeping the building.

Why are you changing the subject?

[platinumrad]

Am I changing the subject? I thought we were discussing treatment of foreigners and I am detailing a very recent example of how the US treated foreigners.

[spwa4]

Yes, the question was if you want to claim China treats foreignors well, and was a reference to that China

1) conquers places, e.g. Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjang, ...

2) kills, "disappears", ... the people there https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbSypV2ixjE

3) China's CCP has been pushing out immigrants, and fostering racist sentiment

[platinumrad]

Tiananmen Square was obviously horrible but not even 10% as bad as the current war against Iran or 1% bad as the Second Gulf War, and those are both very recent conflicts.

[singularity2001]

The US has massacred millions of people of other countries, is that better?

[code_for_monkey]

You dont even have to look abroad, the USA kills its own citizens all the time. Police brutality is a huge issue here, we had some large protests here and the country ended those with the realization that nothing can be done about it. Kids get shot in school all the time in the US and once again, nothing gets done about it ever. The USA has a gigantic prison population and you guessed it: nothing gets done about it.

[neves]

China is a peaceful country. They don't interfere with other countries politics. They look more trustworthy than countries that kidnapped chiefs of state they don't like.

[roenxi]

> They don't interfere with other countries politics. They look more trustworthy than countries that kidnapped chiefs of state they don't like.

On the one hand, anyone who believes this is the sort of person who buys bridges from shady individuals in backstreets. On the other, China will literally sell people quality bridges at good prices. I feel lost for a metaphor.

I like the Chinese military policy a lot more than the US one (China's policy is actually making them more prosperous which makes it stand out). But as a nation they're not trustworthy and they're absolutely going to interfere with other people's politics. The network of spies and influencers they manage is actually pretty sophisticated once you look at things like the Confucius institute and their international web of spies/law enforcement tracking people down.

[neves]

Can you cite real examples not based in American propaganda?

[worik]

> children at Tiananmen Square. The US is descending into totalitarianism, but it hasn't reached that level yet.

Ask that question of the American Indians the USA genocided.

I do not see why USAnians killing Iranians is better than being killed by other Iranians. Dead is dead

The bombs that implemented the genocide in Gaza were dropped by the IDF but supplied, paid for and profited from USAnians

Not really so clear

[maxglute]

> no signals it would not repeat that event

Of course there is, there's anti riot gear now when there wasn't before.

[thiagoharry]

> Many of us (worldwide, I'm not American) watched China massacre thousands of its own children at Tiananmen Square. The US is descending into totalitarianism, but it hasn't reached that level yet.

Wasn't the US bombing its own children just 4 years earlier in Philadelphia?

[nz]

And the US massacred four _million_ people in South East Asia, during the Vietnam war. That is 2/3rds of a holocaust. The Iraq War (second one), cost between half a million and a million lives (estimates vary, and it only includes violent deaths directly caused by American troops -- the war itself caused an increase in crime and murder and out-migration).

I could go on, but Tienanmen does not compare to most of the things the US has done outside of its own borders from 1946 to the present. And no, we (I am American) cannot justify a body count in the millions, just because our victims are communist/authoritarian/theocratic. Note also that we only number 5% of the world's population, and that if we compared body-counts as percentage of populations, instead of as absolute numbers, I doubt we even have enough people to settle that debt.

Even worse, if the world internalizes that it is fine to murder millions of foreigners, just because they are oddballs that their citizens cannot empathize with, the _we_ are going to have a big problem -- we appear much more odd to the world than the world does to us.

I am surprised that our shenanigans have been tolerated for nearly a century.

[noah_buddy]

Don’t you think that it’s a signal that the last major event you can point to is decades old?

Others may say “what about Uighurs?” or “what about Hong Kong?” but I think that the rest of the world is not doing all that much better on terms of civil repression.

In the UK, you can be arrested for voicing disagreement with the rationale for another person’s arrest (not generally, but on a specific hot button issue they’d rather not anyone talk about). French politicians are attempting to make illegal criticism of Israel, carte blanche. Don’t even get me started on Germany, which is so self-shamed from the last century they have overcorrected into legitimating an external state above all else. Across the pond, you hardly even have to convince anyone that it’s on the downtrend, unless they’re 30% of the population who believe the Don is christ alive (but don’t like if he says it).

The world is very unstable at this point and China is a country that strongly values and incentivizes stability, at the expense of individual rights. This is contra a lot of the west which is both unstable and actively undermining individual rights.

[hirvi74]

There is no such thing as individual rights. In our universe, there are only privileges. What a government gives, a government can take.

[msabalau]

Oh, sure, putting a million or more Uyghurs in internment camps, sterilizing people, and trying to systematically erase a culture and a religion is "just as repressive" as the what is happening in Europe, as long you one is willing to ignore nearly everything relevant about the scale, recourse, and consequence of the PRCs atrocities.

Also, reducing Germany’s complex, decade-long process of grappling with the Holocaust as "self-shame" is... a choice.

[FpUser]

Hypocrisy meter just exploded after being fed the message

[LeFantome]

> China massacre thousands of its own

> China massacre thousands

Is the first one worse to you?

> massacre thousands

Does the second automatically seem worse than the third?

The one not called China has shot and killed multiple of its own citizens on the street recently. Perhaps that triggers your morality.

Which one of them has killed thousands of civilians just in the last month or so including hundreds of school aged girls (confirmed)? And can they even articulate a reason for doing so?

Which one decided, made the choice, to kill hundreds of thousands of children by dismantling USAID? And the reason for that was?

I mean, they both have concentration camps where they detain their own citizens without due process. So, I guess a tie there.

And, they both enabled Russia after Russia stole tens of thousands of children from their parents.

So, ya, maybe no clear winner. Neither are the good guys. But China is losing the death count battle in 2026 at least.

If you are trying to say that China is worse because of an event 37 years ago, I am not sure I agree.

[nz]

Just to add some perspective to this comparison: the US massacred four _million_ people in South East Asia, during the Vietnam war. That is 2/3rds of a holocaust. The Iraq War (second one), cost between half a million and a million lives (estimates vary, and it only includes violent deaths directly caused by American troops -- the war itself caused an increase in crime and murder and out-migration).

I could go on, but Tienanmen does not compare to most of the things the US has done outside of its own borders from 1946 to the present. And no, we (I am American) cannot justify a body count in the millions, just because our victims are communist/authoritarian/theocratic. Note also that we only number 5% of the world's population, and that if we compared body-counts as percentage of populations, instead of as absolute numbers, I doubt we even have enough people to settle that debt.

Even worse, if the world internalizes that it is fine to murder millions of foreigners, just because they are oddballs that their citizens cannot empathize with, the _we_ are going to have a big problem -- we appear much more odd to the world than the world does to us.

I am surprised that our shenanigans have been tolerated for nearly a century.

[riskd]

Can you share the video where thousands of children were massacred in Tiananmen Square? I haven’t seen it yet and am very curious!

[idiotsecant]

Make your claim directly, without weasel language. This is a tiresome way to communicate.

[riskd]

That doesn’t seem to be a valid URL?

[idiotsecant]

I'm not who you were originally talking to, champ.

[riskd]

Still not a resolvable URL, sadly. Thanks for your input, little buddy.

[45qyqy45]

Bush sacrificed a few thousand Americans on 9/11 so that they could get away with killing a million or so Muslims.