Unlike "us", we never rewrote our history, right?
edit: I can think of the Armenian genocide but it's not yet dealt with the same diligence and tech level than the Tiananmen event is.
But nonetheless: the tiananmen square is quite unique in it's bloodiness.i know of nothing even remotely as bad as military personal killing unarmed civilians in the hundreds which mostly just try to flee.
How is it unique in its bloodiness? You are rendering the human history a lovely picture of peace and kind. It may not be as nice as the Chinese government portrait it, and it may not be as bad as europeans portrait it either. There is nothing wrong with leaving it to the past and move one.
Absolutely not. It's uniqueness comes from is bloodiness in the context of the situation.
Most crimes of that caliber happen by systematically alienating a people, 'legitimizing' these clearly inhumane actions in some way.
Take the Holocaust for example. Jews were portrayed as the source of all problems for years and subsequently slaughtered in the millions. Clearly inhumane and wrong... And way worse than the square was, but still a 'us vs them' situation.
On the square, you got the military doing a parade and civilians standing in the way in a demonstration. Their only crime was their unwillingness to let the parade continue. And the military opened fire on these people, because they were standing in the way and unwilling to leave
You don't think that such a situation is unique?
Communists are always down to this single argument at the end.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_protests_of_1970
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_German_uprising_of_1953
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_Revolution_of_1956
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pozna%C5%84_protests_of_1956
But also this - Blair Mountain - one milion rounds fired.
All kinds of events, from the Philippines war, to provoking Japan in WWII, to Mosaddegh, Vietnam atrocities, to the bloody US labour history, and so on [1].
Though in the US, as long as their importance is downplayed at official politics and the educational system, you can still let people talk and write books about those events, since nobody really cares. A lot of the suffering in those events happened to people outside the country anyway.
Whereas in China, talk about their things could seriously polarize people and have extended consequences (not just the CCP elites falling from grace, but also a hellish period of power struggles to fill the power vacuum, even a civil war).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_People%27s_History_of_the_Un...
Which is a far cry from what China is doing regarding Tiananmen.
The same for Labour day.
Well, that's because talking about those things in the use and people wont care anyway (it's not like they'll rebel against the government). Whereas talking about those things in China could create mayhem and turn the country into a chaos of civil war and power struggles as I wrote above. So the US can afford to be magnanimous about it. In areas where it wants to keep stuff secret, people exposing them have the fate of Snowden, Manning, Assange and co.
https://www.reddit.com/r/fakehistoryporn/comments/bm2ek3/the...
Instead of "active censorship", history gets rewritten much like our own memories, after all: we tend to keep the ones (or the viewpoints) we are more comfortable with. I don't even think there is a need for a concerted effort.
A perfect way for people living in glass houses to throw all the stones they like at others unharmed...