RoadLessTravelled

Chinese-Australian. 高级五毛(*sarcasm*). Anti-imperialism. Realist politics.

[Richard Medhurst @richimedhurst]

The British oil company that became BP discovered Iran's oil. When Iranians realized they were being robbed, they nationalized it — so MI6 & CIA toppled their democracy in 1953, installing a dictatorship. Iranians rose up in 1979 & the West has never forgiven them for it.

[𝘊𝘰𝘳𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘦 @OopsGuess]

Seven years later, Chinese President Xi Jinping and his wife made their second visit to North Korea.

Most Westerners have never been to North Korea.
They know almost nothing about its people, its education system, its daily life, its history, or how a country survives decades of sanctions, isolation, military pressure, and ideological demonization.

But in their imagination, North Korea already exists as a completed villain template.
Dark.
Backward.
Brainwashed.
Poor.
Disposable.

A cartoon state built for Western moral theater.

China has been placed into the same narrative machine, only on a larger scale.
Not a civilization.
Not a country.
Not 1.4 billion human beings with history, memory, labor, grief, ambition, and survival.

Just “the authoritarian threat.”
A giant villain with ports, factories, missiles, AI models, high-speed rail, engineers, and 5,000 years of civilizational continuity.

That is how Western ideology works.

First, it removes human complexity.
Then it replaces reality with a label.
Then it treats the label as evidence.

“Dictatorship.”
“Regime.”
“Threat.”
“Axis.”
“Rogue state.”
“Authoritarian bloc.”

Once the label is installed, no fact is allowed to disturb it.

If a sanctioned country survives, it is propaganda.
If its people are educated, it is indoctrination.
If life expectancy rises, it is ignored.
If it builds industry, it is militarization.
If it resists Western pressure, it is aggression.

This is why the West misunderstands both China and North Korea.

It does not study them as societies.
It consumes them as villains.

[Mark Slapinski @mark_slapinski]

It is okay to be Jewish.

It is okay to attend your local synagogue.

It is okay to celebrate Hannukah.

It is not okay to use white phosphorus on civilians in Gaza and Lebanon.

[Thomas Fazi @battleforeurope]

Crazy that this is getting barely any coverage. This year’s European Press Prize was just awarded to an investigative report by the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant. It is entitled “What the Wounds Tell” and in it the journalists Maud Effting and Willem Feenstra document the cases of 114 children in Gaza under the age of 15 who were struck by a single bullet to the head or chest. Almost all of them died or were left severely disabled. They chose to document only the cases of boys and girls under the age of 15 (though often much younger: aged 3, 4 or 7) because these are children who can be immediately identified as such. “A single bullet in these parts of the body is a clear indication that these children were deliberately targeted“, the two journalists write.

This is the article: https://t.co/YkZrpqBWBQ

[susan abulhawa | سوزان ابو الهوى @susanabulhawa]

ZIOS: it's antisemitic to say Jews control the media

ALSO ZIOS: controlling all the media is a lot of work. "Instead of trying to control the whole world," [yes, that's a direct quote], all we have to do is control AI, because people trust AI and that's where everyone is getting their information.

[David Shoebridge @DavidShoebridge]

The UN has warned of total collapse in Cuba. This is deliberate punishment imposed by the most powerful nation on earth on one of its poorest neighbours that dares to have a different political system. Australia should not stay silent while bully USA starves the people of Cuba.

[The Cockatoo @DarcyAmaroo]

China is not a country focused on War.
China is our biggest trading partner.
It has never threatened Australia or other countries in the Asia Pacific.
Why do we join with the US to threaten China and prepare for war?
What a complete waste of time and money.

[Angelica 🌐⚛️🇹🇼🇨🇳🇺🇸 @AngelicaOung]

I was a rather precocious nine-year-old in Taipei on June 4th 1989. In my childish mind's eye...helpless students were kettled into Tienanmen square like animals in a pen before the tanks rolled over them, creating a kind of bloody, dense, student-patty. It was a flashbulb moment that represented the evil of the communist party of China and the destruction of the flower of China, the best of the best, by the worst of the worst.

Growing up sometimes means finding out the fairytales of your childhood is far more complicated than you thought.

This is Tienanmen Square 1989, as I understand it today. There was no bloodshed in the square. Dissident leader Liu Xiaobo (who subsequently won the Nobel Peace Prize) negotiated the peaceful withdrawal of demonstrators as the troops moved in. By the time the iconic Tankman stood in the way of PLA tanks, the crackdown was basically over. If you watch the video all the way through, you'll see tankman block the tank a few times, climb on top of it, before being led away.

This is not to say, of course, that there was no bloodshed. They mostly happened in clashes between violent demonstrators and PLA troops off the square. The "peaceful protestors vs brutal regime" picture is inaccurate and incomplete. The crowd ambused, mutilated, lynched, disembowled and burned the corpses of PLA soldiers. This is when the shootings happened: not in the square, not on the students.

You have to understand, in 1989, China didn't know how to deal with protests. They had no riot police. They rolled out the tanks and the troops not because they were determined to exterminate the crowd, but becauses they were unprepared. Since then, it's been largely a hushed and censored topic in China, which I think is a mistake. Because once you go through what actually happened, June 4th was a tragedy, not a crime.

It was Deng Xiaoping that made the decision to initiate the crackdown. He knew he'd bear the infamy. But looking at China in 2026, it's hard not to come to the conclusion that Deng did the right thing. The students in the square might have been truly idealistic and only wanted the best for China, but if the Chinese government have given in to their demands, China would not have been a democratic paradise but might have fallen into a chasm of chaos. We all saw what happened when the people of Russia cast off the Soviet Union only to be plunged into decades of pitch black despair. Had China done what the students asked, could the results have been any better? Already almost in retirement...Deng, who already saved China with his reform-and-open-up, arguably saved it again.

Most ordinary Chinese people I know now sees June 4th as an example of a failed color revolution, or an externally-driven attempt to destabilize China from the outside. They don't percieve the crackdown as the government oppressing the people, but of China asserting its sovereignty.

I know this is a controversial topic, and will probably draw a lot of condemnation from the usual crowd. So let me end with a criticism of the Communist Party of China: Stop censoring and shielding the history so much, and be frank about the past. When you try and erase June 4th, it means you yourself cannot tell your side of the story. The cultural revolution, for instance, works far less well as an anti-China talking point because the mistakes of that era are widely acknowledged and digested in China itself while June 4th still seems too raw to touch.

Below you can find the full "tankman" video. It only takes two minutes to watch. Try and watch it as if you're seeing it for the first time. What do you see? See less

[Eddy Jokovich @EddyJokovich]

@nicolelampert Why should “Free Palestine” frighten Jewish people? Kill the fuck out of Gaza with no qualms, butcher young children and blow the shit out of them, but frightened of a little message on a TV in a hotel? Go and fuck yourselves you ghouls.

[𝘊𝘰𝘳𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘦 @OopsGuess]

The Atlantic is hysterical because China refused to become the economy the West wanted:
cheap labor forever,
low-end factories forever,
a consumer market for Western brands forever,
and never a serious industrial competitor.

Now China makes EVs, solar panels, steel, machinery, robots, and advanced manufacturing products at scale — and suddenly affordable goods are a “global threat.”

Please.

The West subsidizes banks and calls it stability.
Subsidizes weapons and calls it security.
Subsidizes farmers and calls it protection.
Subsidizes chips and calls it strategy.

But when China supports real industries that produce real goods for real people, it becomes “distortion.”

So no.

China is not taking everyone down.

China is exposing how little the West has left once cheap moral lectures stop working.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

People like me take great pains to avoid coming across as antisemitic in our criticisms of Israel, and then Jewish Zionists go to these events all “Yes we Jews need to be actively manipulating western institutions in order to deceive everyone and control society.”

[Chris Menahan 🇺🇸 @infolibnews]

AI presents an incredible opportunity for Jews because "instead of trying to control the whole world" and "manage" social media, "we can go directly to the companies" with "advocacy solutions," Dr. Maya Ackerman tells the American Jewish Committee.

"For the first time, there is a path to correcting the digital world!" Ackerman says.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

Let's talk about "unalienable rights of free expression and peaceful assembly."

In 2023 and 2024, pro-Palestinian protests were banned, dispersed, or criminalized in Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and across multiple American university campuses.

Students were arrested. Professors lost jobs. People were fired for social media posts.

In Germany, even displaying a watermelon emoji was treated as a potential criminal offense in some contexts.

This happened in the Western democracies that hold Tiananmen as a symbol of the cost of suppressing free expression.

The same governments posting Tiananmen commemorations were simultaneously deploying riot police against students holding vigils for children being killed in real time.

You can hold both of these things as wrong simultaneously.

Or you can keep posting about unalienable rights while your governments demonstrate, in the present tense, exactly which populations those rights are designed to protect.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

@SecRubio Tank Man survived, Marco.

The tanks stopped.

Rachel Corrie's bulldozer didn't stop.

It reversed.

She was 23.

Your government funded the machine that killed her.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

The logic of Israel is the logic of every empire:

The victim must disappear for the project to succeed.

But the victim refuses.

And in that refusal, the empire exposes itself as the one that cannot live without killing.

[NoRetreat @NoRetreatXX]

People of #Australia need to know that Anthony Albanese's 'envoy', #JillianSegal, is forcibly re-educating our Children to support these daily War Crimes and Human Rights abuses, by #Israel.
This evil country has free access inside ASIO, free access to all of our personal information, for Mossad to use as they wish. Israel now controls our Federal and many of our State Governments, including those of NSW and Queensland.
We have been the victims of a coup, by the most insidious and destructive nation on Earth.
The Albanese government is hiding it's activities, including from our Senators, who are asking them direct questions and being deliberately thwarted, with salient information being inappropriately and corruptly withheld.

[Nury Vittachi @NuryVittachi]

It is truly EYE-OPENING to talk to Iranians and get their point of view:
.
IRANIANS: You murdered Qasem Soleimani.
U.S./ ISRAEL: We don’t believe in international law.
IRANIANS: You bombed our peace talks in Qatar.
U.S./ ISRAEL: We don’t believe in international law.
IRANIANS: You murdered our govt members and their spouses and children.
U.S./ ISRAEL: We don’t believe in international law.
IRANIANS: You stole our ships and everything in them.
U.S./ ISRAEL: We don’t believe in international law.
IRANIANS: You made an unprovoked attack which killed more than 100 school kids.
U.S./ ISRAEL: We don’t believe in international law.
IRANIANS: We’re going to charge shipping fees so we can rebuild what you destroyed.
U.S./ ISRAEL: YOU CAN’T DO THAT! INTERNATIONAL LAW!!!!

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

Who decides which images become sacred and which images are forgotten?

We have seen thousands of bodies in Gaza on camera, limbs, faces, parents holding pieces of their children.

Somehow those photos do not trigger in you the same absolute moral clarity that a few carefully curated Chinese-themed images do.

Why?

Because you have been given a hierarchy of outrage:

Some uniforms are proof of tyranny.

Other uniforms, when they beat antiwar students, drag protesters from campuses, raid homes, guard checkpoints, or stand beside mass graves, are called "security forces."

Some courts are "show trials."

Other courts sentence whistleblowers and protesters to decades in prison and you call that "the rule of law."

Some tanks are eternal symbols of evil.

Other tanks rolling through Iraq, Libya, Gaza, Afghanistan are called "defending freedom."

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

Why do you remember the image of one man in front of a tank, but forget the bodies of thousands crushed under American bombs?

Because the first image serves power.

And the second indicts it.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

The Tank Man image is so powerful that most people believe tanks crushed protesters at Tiananmen.

They didn't. The tanks stopped for Tank Man. He lived.

The Israeli bulldozer did not stop for Rachel Corrie.

She was 23.

She was American.

She was wearing an orange vest.

She died on March 16, 2003.

Marco has never posted about March 16.