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Comment by vtange | Hacker News Reader

There's inevitably going to be people trying to justify the tragedy here by suggesting America is no better, pointing to instances such as the Kent State Shootings (Vietnam War protest).

For those people I'd like to point out that unlike China, America doesn't actively try to hide the negative sides of its history to the extent China does. I can read about the Kent State shootings all I want, along with the My Lai Massacre, the Trail of Tears, American involvement in Central America or the Middle East, etc..

It is in fact sad that China depends on the West to expose the darker sides of its past, and then claims Western negative bias whenever we do.

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It doesn't really matter whether America or any other country gets it right. The entire point of the "tu quoque" (appeal to hypocrisy) rhetorical tactic is derail the debate and get people defensive, instead of focusing on the actual problems.

The United States has a long list of historical human rights abuses, starting with the legacy we inherited from Columbus of enslaving and murdering the local populations and continuing up to a laundry list of problems we still have today. They were wrong at the time, they are wrong now, and we should really work to not keep committing large or small scale atrocities, and redress what past crimes we can.

But that doesn't change the wrongness of other countries human rights violations, and doesn't mean that they shouldn't stop what they're doing and redress what they've done. The US or every other country being wrong doesn't give them a pass to be wrong also. We shouldn't wait for one pure leader of one untainted country to arise[1] and call us out on our actions before we repent.

[1] Peter Thiel, Immortal Sea-King of Sealandia, obviously.

We can read about Kent State shootings. But what can't we read about? What ugly stuff happened in the US that we don't talk about?

We don't have systematic censorship like China does, by any means, but we do choose not to teach and write down certain things, and so they end up nearly forgotten. The Tulsa race riot was excised from official histories, never talked about, and so it faded into a little-known episode of history, until activists brought it to wider attention at the end of the 20th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_riot

> the city settled into an uneasy peace, and decades of virtual silence about the events were held. It was not recognized in the Tulsa Tribune feature of "Fifteen Years Ago Today" or "Twenty-five Years Ago Today"... The first academic account was a master's thesis written in 1946 by Loren L. Gill, a veteran of World War II. But it did not then receive circulation beyond the University of Tulsa... [In 1996] the chamber of commerce decided to commemorate the riot, but when they read the account and saw photos gathered by Ed Wheeler... they refused to publish it. He took it to both major newspapers, which refused to handle it. His article was finally published in Impact Magazine, a new publication aimed at a black audience, but most of white Tulsa never knew about it."

"With the number of survivors declining, in 1996, the 75th anniversary of the riot, a bi-partisan group in the state legislature authorized formation of the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (...) The park [to the 800 dead riot victims] was dedicated in 2010."

No worries then, in 48 years China will acknowledge what happened at Tiananmen, and in 2078 Beijing will get a lovely new park.

Its because the west cannot do this in current circumstances. I can make a bet that when China GDP per capita comes close to the developed nations, their censorship has to be seriously downgraded.

And what do you say about Russia. Internet censorship is not all for hiding, there are many different ways to hide information, some of which the western countries are actively practicing, and I feel the situation is getting worse and not better over time.

"I can make a bet that when China GDP per capita comes close to the developed nations".

Exactly, people seem to forget that we're so comfortable here that we (I mean the majority) just couldn't care less. Every once in a while, we'll hear about some atrocity in a war we're in half way around the world, complain about it on Reddit and just forget about it the next day. We can sanction smaller countries about a list of human rights we created, but it's next to impossible for a smaller country to impose any sanctions on us thus making the US virtually unaccountable of anything.

The gov does not have to fear the populace here but that is definitely not the case in a developing country.

This alone is reason why I think china's handling of it's past is outdated and they will soon change it. Look at the US and EU nations: people forget and move on despite it being in the open. Being a productive power house of capitalism, which china now is, means most of the people are busy and will likely discount any negativity from government actions that are more than a decade old.

I don't think they justify the tragedy, rather disagree with the US/West moral highground claims.

So the west is superior because their citizens, although having access to damning documents of the actions of their nation, both domestic and abroad, choose not to care?

Do they choose not to care?

Yes, all other things being equal, open information is better than censorship. But you are obviously exaggerating, lots of people care.

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