Wikileaks Cables Say No Bloodshed Inside Tiananmen Square 235
netchaos writes "Secret cables from the United States embassy in Beijing have shown there was no bloodshed inside Tiananmen Square when China put down student pro-democracy demonstrations 22 years ago." Which is not to say that everything was flowers and wine: "Instead, the cables show that Chinese soldiers opened fire on protesters outside the centre of Beijing, as they fought their way towards the square from the west of the city."
No big secret here (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No big secret here (Score:5, Insightful)
... and remember, Li Peng's still alive. There's still time for a trial in the Hague...
Oh, haha, I forgot, he has power and influence.
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Didn't see folks who ordered nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or carpet bombing Drezden's housing areas on trial either. Winners are exempt from war crime trials.
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> Winners are exempt from war crime trials.
@Nuremberg, sure. But that was when such trials were in their infancy.
Today, winners are exempt from war crime trials until regime change occurs in their nation. Then sometimes they are hauled before the ICC or another international tribunal, because the new regime is willing to give them up.
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You're presenting my arguments for me: USA specifically signed membership treaty while telling ICC that it will not ratify it until USA citizens get immunity. I wonder why would USA want immunity...
Yeah.
Re:No big secret here (Score:4, Insightful)
> I wonder why would USA want immunity...
Several reasons, some of them legitimate. There is a lot of anti-US sentiment in the world that makes the US doubt it can get a fair hearing in an international war crimes setting. Also, the US is the leading military power in the world, and its unique role in world affairs makes it much more likely to get dragged into court than other nations.
In the less legitimate realm, like other world powers, the drawbacks of certain international processes are greater for it than the benefits. It supports the ICC, but will not fully sign on because it does not trust the international community not to be anti-American, and because it would cost either side quite a few votes in domestic elections. Finally, when it does things badly, it does not want attention drawn to it, and signing on to the ICC makes it slightly harder to cover things up when they decide to for reasons of saving face--they need to pretend to do an investigation. The ICJ shows that pretty clearly--a CIA operation supporting terrorist techniques against communists during the cold war was dragged into the spotlight.
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> So where does that anti-US sentiment come from... I wonder...
A variety of places. Some of it is legitimate and other parts are not. For example, if someone is bitter at the United States because it allies itself with wretched hives of scum and villainy, as we do on occasion, that is legitimate. Similarly if its people are mistreated by its soldiers. While it would be best to direct the hatred at the individuals responsible, the nation still bears responsibility and gets stigma.
Other parts are not.
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For if the Allied forces had to attack Japan with soldiers it would have been a cultural slaughter.
Lets not forget who started the fight, and lets not forget who was given the chance to surrender.
Dont be ignorant in your views, know the full facts before you spew your nonsense.
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What do you think of this?
http://mises.org/Community/forums/p/16118/325657.aspx [mises.org]
"So I would say NO, Japan was not justified in attacking the USA over the USA refusing to sell Japan oil or steel or other stuff.
It is sad that the Rosevelt Administration refused to speak to the son of the Emperor of Japan who was carrying a deal with the USA that Japan would withdraw from China if the USA would continue the previous trade relationship. The worst part is in the opportunity cost: M
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Question: if nuke dropping on "military town" (in WW2, essentially every large town was one) was justified, why do we bother with not nuking the shit out of:
1. Afghanistan - essentially 50% military country - male children under age of 10 generally know how to take apart, put together and shoot AK47/74. Only women are not military, and even then to an extent.
2. Iran's military bases and nuclear installations.
Countless other examples.
Perhaps because now we view the (now much smaller but) inevitable civilian
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Re:No big secret here (Score:5, Insightful)
Does it make that much of a difference if the students were slaughtered in the squares, or just round the corner?
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Yes, it means that the number of protesters killed is a more certain number than previously believed. Meaning that the death toll has almost certainly been exaggerated on the assumption that there were protesters killed where nobody was looking. If they were all killed in places where the world had some means of observing it means that the crimes committed by the Chinese government in this instance were less severe than previously believed.
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Well, Tiananmen is a big issue when it comes to censorship.
The accepted fact is that we know the truth, and poor, oppressed Chinese people do not, due to censorship.
If it turns out we, free people, believed a lie all these years, it would mean our information is just as doctored as what the Chinese get.
That would mean that the rulers of the west are not better than the guys who build the Great Chinese Firewall, it would only mean that the West methods, mainly propaganda, are better than more direct ones.
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Re:No big secret here (Score:4, Informative)
I don't remember the "run over by tanks" part, although I do remember a man standing in front of the tanks, not getting run over.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man [wikipedia.org]
Though it appears that at least some folks went by way of tank track (graphic):
http://pbh2.blogspot.com/2009/06/tiananmen-square-massacre-in-pictures.html [blogspot.com]
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No one was run over by tanks.
Also many forget that this wasn't just a few thousand idle students peacefully hanging out in the square. There were about a *million* disaffected students and unemployed workers camping out wherever they could, demanding free food from vendors, and harassing the general public. This went on for almost a month before the government took action.
Think about how long a million people would be allowed to camp outside the US capitol buildings, especially if they were harassing and lo
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People have been arrested for *dancing* in the Jefferson Memorial, so, no I don't think the US would put up with millions camping outside the Capitol.
Re:No big secret here (Score:4, Interesting)
Think about how long a million people would be allowed to camp outside the US capitol buildings, especially if they were harassing and looting.
It happened, recall the Bonus Army. *four* people died. Not hundreds (or possibly thousands, accounts vary) like in or around Tiananmen Square.
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Call me an idiot, but I neither believe something simply because it was reported, nor disbelieve it because wikileaks refuted it.
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Yea! They had it coming, didn't they? Kudos to the PLA for putting a swift end to the mischief.
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especially if they were harassing and looting.
You haven't been to D.C. lately, have you? ;)
Re:No big secret here (Score:4, Informative)
A lot of Americans live withing walking distance and have relatively unrestricted access to the press and the court system. DC has one of the highest lawyer-per-capita populations in the world. You can't walk ten feet without tripping over an NGO. If anyone tried to cover up something that big, a lot of those people would work very hard to prevent it--and they have media connections and strong grassroots networks.
Re:No big secret here (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all this news in no way lightens the cruel brutality through which the PRC government dealt with their citizens that day, but I want to make a point on a possible explanation for the "tanks crushing people" claim. I'm not saying it's false, since we'll never know the truth having not been there, but consider this: The Chinese word for "suppress" is "ya", which is the same exact word for "to physically crush underneath" -- to put suppress an idea or to crush grapes underfoot for juice, it's the same word. So the phrase "they're using tanks to suppress people in the square" and "they're using tanks to physically crush people in the square" are the same in Chinese. Perhaps the real meaning was lost in the moment, then even more so in translation.
Rubbish (Score:4, Insightful)
This is rubbish. Of course you can specify what kind of crushing it is in Chinese. The character ya alone is ambiguous, but by using it in a 2 character compound word (as most words are in Chinese) you can easily be more specific.
It's almost exactly the same as in English. You can have ambiguity or you can be specific.
There's a Chinese guy on Chinese /. right now writing "Ah, but in English they say 'They used tanks to crush the protestors', but in English 'crush' is vague. It could mean that the tanks physically squashed them, or that they used shells to fire on the protesters, or that their presence alone with police alongside was enough".
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On the 5th anniversary of the Tienanmen uprisings, there was a graphic shock website which posted photos of the aftermath which had been smuggled out. Many of the photos were very graphic and disturbing, and I had the misfortune of being tricked into visiting it (the
Re:No big secret here (Score:5, Interesting)
I was working for CTV news in Toronto at the time and I saw the raw footage of a protester getting run over by a tank and squashed like a bug. It's not something you forget. The footage was edited down to make it look like the tank had stopped, which it did, hesitating for a few seconds.
Two weeks later we were visited by the Chinese head of media and they were given a full tour of the facility.
Re:No big secret here (Score:5, Interesting)
Was this footage made public? If not, why not?
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Does it really matter if they were run over outside or inside the square?
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The OP is right (more or less - they didn't "wait" for people to leave before shooting, they killed plenty trying to get to the square); this wasn't a secret. Even the Wikipedia article about the massacre shows this fact was known for a while:
BBC 2 June 2009 James Miles, who was the BBC's Beijing correspondent at the time, stated:
I and others conveyed the wrong impression. There was no massacre on Tiananmen Square... Protesters who were still in the square when the army reached it were allowed to leave aft
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Re:Not inside the square. (Score:5, Informative)
> What I remember is the video of a protester standing down a column of tanks inside the square.
Actually the "tank man" footage was shot from the Beijing Hotel, looking WSW down Changan E. Rd.. The vantage point is (IIRC) a few hundred yards east of the square.
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The tanks may not have run over him, would be very bad propaganda because foreign reporters were filming from hotel windows. however no one ever knew what became of that man, not even his identity has been divulged.
Re:No big secret here (Score:4, Interesting)
Slashdot you're beginning to really suck.
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Not only that, but this is actually saying that the US embassy's contact didn't see any bloodshed in the square at the time, not that there wasn't any. All of the leaked cables have similar caveats attached.
Tomato Tomato (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not saying any of it is right or siding with any side but the Chinese authority protect that authority just like authority in any other country, including whichever one you happen to live in.
Re:Tomato Tomato (Score:5, Insightful)
The difference is that in this country such things were reported on the news, you can read reports about what happened, and many laws were changed as a result.
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US has free press and open courts.
China has controlled press and closed courts.
Otherwise, politicians try to get away with just as much crap in both countries.
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If you do not put a value on freedom of speech, free enterprise, the right to a fair trial, the right to privacy, then yes. Everything is relative and there is no good and no evil, communist regimes are about power to the people, and all countries are just as bad for having killed some of their citizens at one time or another.
Now, with that out of the way, I heard great things about North Korea. You hardly hear any complaints coming out of that country.
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Everything is relative and there is no good and no evil
Historically and culturally pretty much. I think it's wrong that the government in my country tells people what they can ingest and who they can marry. Others in this country might find it evil that people would want to ingest cer
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While I certainly don't disagree with your ideas regarding it being relative, equating the acts of the Chinese military in this incident to those of any other authority is massively misleading for one simple reason: the number of people killed. Please pardon the excessive use of Wikipedia links, but here are some numbers I found for the deadliest individual riots related to the incidents you mentioned.
Workers riots: At least 12 dead at the Haymarket Affair [wikipedia.org], 2/3 of them officers
Race riots of the '60s: 43 dea
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waving a machine gun and slaughtering bystanders - terrorist
They may not have had machine guns back then but I believe many founding fathers of the United States where called terrorists by the British. It all has to do with who won and which side you are supporting.
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The "terrorists" then fought for secular freedom for everyone
hmmm, except black people. I'm pretty sure there were many slaves that were not Christian (and certainly not Western Christians) but were then forced to become so. For there own good of course, savages that they were /sarcasm.
The terrorists now fight for religious oppression of those who are not Muslim or male.
Many of them would argue they fight for there way of life (that we don't agree with) and against what they see as oppression by a foreign government. I believe there may even be some females taking up that fight.
Again, I'm not siding with them. I'm merely pointing out that the wo
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hmmm, except black people. I'm pretty sure there were many slaves that were not Christian (and certainly not Western Christians) but were then forced to become so. For there own good of course, savages that they were /sarcasm.
If you look up the history of slavery in the US, you'll find that the first real slave-owner was a black Angolan who was himself once an indentured-servant. He was the first to bring suit in order to retain a servant for life, and the courts ruled in his favor. Things kinda snowballed from there. But the idea that slavery was introduced "for their own good" is ludicrous; nobody ever claimed any such thing. As far as I can tell, slavery became legal because this guy successfully argued that back home in
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Yep, you're right, there's no reason to get emotional about a nitwit defending fascists and murderers. Carry on, good sir!
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At least tell me where I defended fascists or murderers. I even tried typing in Caps that I don't support them.
*sigh*
Ok, try this:
"I DON'T LIKE the Bloods and the Cryps, but I don't see why you have to call them 'criminals'. They're just fighting for their way of life, same as we would fight for ours. We send cops to their neighbourhoods, they don't send them to ours. Calling them 'criminals' or 'evil' doesn't help us understand them.
If, after reading that, you still can't understand how retarded you sound to me - or why I think you're defending them - then you're a lost cause. I mean, you seem like a fairly int
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Personally, I think the number one reason most people fight offensively (outside of nationalism) is poverty and hunger. It'
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I mentioned the bases because it is something that causes some people in that area to dislike us.
I'm sure some people dislike you because of the Star Wars prequels. How come you're not mentioning that?
Personally, I think the number one reason most people fight offensively (outside of nationalism) is poverty and hunger.
And you're wrong. There's absolutely zero data to support that conclusion. You harp on about how important it is to understand our enemies, and then completely fail to realize that all 19 of the 9/11 hijackers were educated, well-off men from middle-class-or-better families. You ignore the fact that Bin Laden comes from a family of billionaires.
People fight because the battle gives their lives meaning
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If you look up the history of slavery in the US, you'll find that the first real slave-owner was a black Angolan who was himself once an indentured-servant.
Citation needed, sir / ma'am.
The first enslaved people in the Americas were American Indians. Specifically, there were some societies that enslaved each other. The first to experience European-style slavery were the Arawaks, who had the misfortune to meet Christopher Columbus. Columbus promptly enslaved many of them and captured several to be taken back to Europe.
As far as the first slaves of Europeans in the present-day US, in 1526 the Spanish created the colony of San Miguel de Guadalupe, with African sla
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Citation needed, sir / ma'am.
The first enslaved people in the Americas were American Indians.
I said "in the US", not "in the Americas". Although technically speaking, I'm wrong, because the US wasn't a country at the time when Anthony Johnson [wikipedia.org] won the right to keep a slave for life. Still, the gyst was correct :)
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Missing the point (Score:2)
Osama (Score:4)
Re:Osama (Score:5, Insightful)
To be fair, my average fellow American didn't stick around to listen long enough to updated reports. At "Osama was killed", they spent the next week flopping their dicks in the air and smashing beer cans on their heads while running around in public with giant foam fingers chanting "USA USA USA" like retards.
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Naw, that was just the people on the right side of the political spectrum. The other half of the country spent the next few weeks in mourning, after which they logged on to slashdot in order to post whiny comments and mod each-other "insightful".
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Thank you for aptly demonstrating my point, that there were only imbecilic responses from "both sides" devoid of any abstract thought or critical thinking.
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You're welcome :)
Bullshit (Score:3)
My wife was in Tiananmen.
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My wife shot bin Laden in the left eye. What's your point?
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Fuck you! My friend died hacking Windows 98!
The End Of An Era (Score:2)
...G...
Underestimation (Score:3)
The one thing that I find constant in accounts of massacres at the time they happen is that they get underestimated. Usually, first-hand accounts by the well-connected are based on observations from safe vantage points or from second-hand information. Also, if you spend a lot of time in a safe place, you end up being very careful to not overstate anything and sound alarmist, lest you are seen as panic-stricken or sensationalist.... or wrong.
So, in accounts of how regimes treat their victims, I tend to believe the more brutal accounts of what happened. It's hard to underestimate how cruel people can be toward eachother.
My how times have changed... (Score:2)
The account of one diplomat shows something? (Score:2)
Since when does one eyewitness account of some diplomat (usually these are not the freedom fighter types, to put it mildly) "show" anything?
Re:why did you post this? (Score:5, Insightful)
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The average mundane "idiot" doesn't have the time to be a subject matter expert on every single event in history, every single peice of technology, so on so forth, all at once
And on that assumption, you would think we would have far fewer people posting about such things that they havent researched; sadly, thats not the case.
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The number of casualties is still controversial. These leaked cables (which apparently we can't even read, they were released exclusively to the Telegraph) at best give us one more data point.....a datapoint that comes from an eye witness account of a Chilean diplomat. What actually happened is not known.
Part of the problem may be that different
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If you are truly a historian, and know for a fact that a widely-held belief is incorrect, and can also easily prove this to be true - then you are, in fact, to blame for this widely held belief still being perpetuated.
If that's what you truly think, then you are grossly, *grossly* naive about how the world works.
There are countless historical, political, scientific, etc. etc. etc. inaccuracies out there that experts can- and do- authoritatively and comprehensively dispel until they're blue in the face, yet are still propagated. Propogated because people pass on what they "know" to be true as the "truth", or because it suits large vested interests to have people believe that, or simply because people don't like having t
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You're not catching a vital part of the conversation. The problem wasn't that there's a disparity of knowledge, the problem is that the person who claims to be substantially correct, is immediately ridiculing those who do not already know what he knows. That's elitism, not someone who is want to share knowledge. "If you don't know, I won't tell you" isn't
Re:why did you post this? (Score:5, Insightful)
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knowledge flows from those who have it, to those who do not. If those who have it do not share it, then they are to blame for it not being widely known.
How do you know he didn't share it? Maybe he shared it and people still believed in the simpler story.
This happens all the time.
Fact is, 75% of people have around average or worse intelligence and they pre
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Did you know that medieval people thought that the earth was flat?
No, they didn't [wikipedia.org].
That was my point - see the "it's wrong" in parentheses :-)
All three statements are "common knowledge" but are false: medieval people were not so stupid to think that the earth is flat, the universe expands faster than the speed of light and hackers were not criminals originally.
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What's faster than the speed of light?
(Other then the hypothesized expansion of the early universe as current theory stands.)
The current expansion of the universe is faster than the speed of light.
Distances between the out-most galaxies at opposite ends of the universe is growing faster than the speed of light and current models suggest that this process is accelerating.
Some quick (and hopefully not totally bogus!) back of the envelope calculations: the latest value for the Hubble constant is 71 km/sec (with about 5% of accuracy), which means 71 km/sec expansion of the universe, per megaparsec of space. Given that the current siz
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If those who have it do not share it, then they are to blame for it not being widely known.
Your implication is that he knew this, yet kept it secret or did not share it.
The only apparent reason I can see for you believing this is that- if I read you correctly- you seem to think that if anyone in possession of the truth tells other people, then all inaccuracies and incorrectly-held beliefs will be dispelled. [slashdot.org] Thus the fact that this isn't the case *must* be clear evidence that circletimessquare is to blame for withholding the information.....?!!!
Regardless of who is correct about the tanks, you
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this is fucking pathetic of you slashdot, to pass this on. you are spreading ignorance
Totally. No one ever contradicts the premise of a story on slashdot. That just isn't the slashdot way. If the slashdot editors really cared about readers getting a more accurate understanding of a story, they would have some sort of way for other people to provide contrary evidence and opinions. Too bad slashdot is so totalitarian.
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Suppose I (just one person without any particular personal connection) did not "understand" what you claim to be "universally understood".
Then your assertion is *false*. That's the danger of making absolute claims like the one that you just made *again*; you undermined and invalidated all the rest of your argument/rant.
Please at least use the words "absolute" and "universal" correctly in a forum with a high-ish proportion of readers who care about accuracy and precision.
Rgds
Damon
Re:You're arguing over a rhetorical artifact... (Score:3)
Since it's called the "Tiananmen Massacre" everybody assumes it happened in Tiananmen Square, when really this was just an easy shorthand, since it was a response to the Tiananmen Protest, which had been going on for several weeks by then.
I know several people who were there that night, and this "new revelation" is nothing new, as you said.
Re:why did you post this? (Score:5, Insightful)
>> has the appearance of a cover up or a smear against china, in the eyes of your average idiot reading this post who's knows nothing about tiananmen square
Or to be fair, in the eyes of the intellegent reader who happens to not know the details of what is referred to as the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
Don't be so dramatic. Not everyone knows everything and we all take accounts of some events for granted. You rant has some good points, but my eyes glazed over at your egotistical attitude. You've got something to contribute, clearly. Why not let people take you more seriously?
You forget the enemy (Score:3)
Lets take another event in history, the holocaust. Everyone knows Anne Frank but where did she die? Now lets assume that the average person answers Auschwitz. You would the argue, let it be. Since the horror of that place is well known it can't hurt in convincing people how horrible it was right by giving the millions a human face in the form of a young girl?
But there are evil people in this world who would use your convenient lie to cast doubt on everything. Holocaust deniers take any tiny little detail th
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there is bringing out all the facts, then there is a headline that points to one factoid in the events that implies, years later, that the massacre didn't happen
that's spreading ignorance. duh
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Most of the time you call people like that shills or propagandists.
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no, there's no evil at work here on slashdot's part, only stupidity:
"omg, look what they found in wikileaks!"
(and what they found is mundane)
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I've never heard it used that way. I have, however, heard "truism" used that way, and I'm not sure it really means that either.