Hard to compare these two scenarios. Look, I’m not arguing that US officials throughout the course of history have been perfect. Kent State was an atrocity, no question.

But anyone with a gun can pull the trigger. It takes an enormous amount of coordination to uniformly run over people with tanks, burn their bodies, and flush them down drains.

The incidents you’ve linked are undoubtedly dark chapters, but they are not comparable to what we’ve seen in China.

I would never say that the US is an authoritarian state on par with the vileness of the PRC. But your specific claim was that we’ve never done to our own citizens what happened to the protesters at Tiananmen, which I now guess hinges on how coordinated the killings were. I think this is historically inaccurate, absent engaging in this kind of special pleading.

Think about it. You had troops in China that were ready and willing to not only kill their countrymen, but also desecrate their dead bodies and discard them in an unimaginably cold manner.

Contrast that with Kent State, Jackson State, and other places where troops were deployed and the situation escalated.

The ultimate difference here is that it’s perfectly legal and acceptable for us to talk about what happened at Kent state. The events are not in dispute.

China, on the other hand, jails people for talking about Tiananmen Square. To acknowledge the existence of such heinous acts is itself a crime in that country.

The fact that we can sit here and argue about this without fear of going to prison is itself proof that these situations, and countries, are incomparable.

It’s not even just that. It’s that the government indicted five guardsman at the times, but couldn’t secure convictions. A civil trial ended in settlement. Fifty years later, we’re still talking about four deaths.

>Tanks are a bit showy when you can just have the police and National Guard shoot protestors without consequence:

uhh... what? Have you checked the "legal action" section?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings#Legal_act...

or did you expect that the guards' heads be put on a pike?

Oh, and don't forget that we can talk about what happened freely. Try doing that in China.

Yes? They were never convicted of anything. Perhaps read it again yourself.

Parent obviously cares about the truth, evidenced by their references. It is amazing to me how so many freely thinking individuals can completely disregard the importance of free speech. How many of your references would be visible to a Chinese citizen? Doesn't the fact that we can discuss the US government's misdeeds on their own soil mean anything to you?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_...

Really? So CBS News apparently didn't get paid by CIA when they expose Abu Ghraib scandal [0], and NYT must have forgotten about that as well when they partnered with the Guardian to publish Edward Snowden's leak [1]. Those are two of the biggest reveals of the last two decades.

Talking about Snowden, I have always wondered why there's never been a Chinese whistleblower. Nobody working in Chinese intelligence has the courage or conscience, or they have no way to let the world know?

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisone...

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-security-snowden-guar...

Thank you for bringing up Kent State. That event is taught in history classes all over the country as an example of something we did wrong, and desperately want to never repeat.

Contrast this with Tiananmen Square: Beijing does everything it can to prevent its citizens knowing about it, and is all to happy to cultivate a reputation that they would gladly do it again today.

Really good example. Thank you.