Thought provoking article, quote; "There are some things concerning history that we simply know to be true without having to research them or look any deeper into their validity. They are established and popular facts. Things that have always been true and always will be correct. One such thing that we all know to be certain is the “fact” that the Chinese military slaughtered thousands of innocent and peaceful student protestors at Tiananmen Square in Beijing in June of 1989… Only they didn’t.
“As far as can be determined from the available evidence, no one died that night in Tiananmen Square.”
Jay Mathews, Columbia Journalism Review
The myth of the slaughter at Tiananmen Square should be immediately familiar to anyone who has been following events in North Korea. Recent reports that originated in the South Korean media suggested that Kim Jong-Un had died. Twice. The source for the claims was Japanese media and the South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo. Chosun Ilbo has a track record of printing fake news about North Korea in conjunction with campaigns by South Korean intelligence.
In 2013, the newspaper printed an allegation from an “unnamed source” in China that 12 people had been executed by firing squad, including Hyon Song Wol, the ex-girlfriend of Kim Jong Un. The reasoning behind the executions was said to Hyon making a sex tape that was then sold and spread into China. Apparently, she was machine-gunned. The news was again repeated throughout western media without question. The problem with this, of course, is that Hyon Song Wol is alive and well and, far from being shamed and out of favour, was elected to the Workers Party’s Central Committee in 2017.
In 2016, it was General Ri Yong-gil who had allegedly been executed on charges of “factionalism, abuse of power and corruption”, the execution claiming to be more “evidence” of a “reign of terror” by Kim Jong Un. Yet again the news was repeated through the mainstream western media without question. Of course, General Ri Yong-gil had not been executed at all. Again, just like Hyon Song Wol, he was quite alive and serving as a member of the Workers Party’s Central Military Commission. In 2018 he returned as the army’s chief of general staff with Reuters saying he was “known for [his] unquestioning support of leader Kim Jong Un”.
Just last year, it was the turn of Kim Yong-chol to be “executed” by the North. The propaganda collapsed after he was seen in pictures released by North Korean state television that showed him attending a musical performance held by the wives of Korean People’s Army officers in Pyongyang. Again, Western media sources had wasted no time in reprinting these allegations without fact-checking. The long history of South Korea and the West claiming the North has had people executed on a whim are beginning to be exposed for the propaganda that they are.
Unfortunately the biggest lie of all persists.
As with North Korea, China is an insular and closed culture, making the dismantling of propaganda all the more difficult. China didn’t have the benefit of social media in 1989 to quickly pick apart the narrative that would dominate popular perception for China for a generation. As with North Korea today, the campaign of disinformation has been immensely successful in souring the public perception of a Western ideological rival.
The Times, June 5, 1989
The fact that nobody actually died at Tiananmen Square is not debatable or open to interpretation, it is a known fact amongst the political establishment and the mainstream media in the West.
Sparked by the death of reformist leader Hu Yaobang in April of 1989, the Tiananmen Square protests were a reaction to the changing nature of China, moving from the age of Mao into the international economic superpower that we see today. The relaxation of financial rules allowed for corruption to re-enter Chinese society and create a wealth gap between newly affluent citizens and the working poor. Like most protest movements, those making up the bulk of the protestors had no single ideology. While there was indeed an undercurrent of calls for democracy, the thrust of the protests was not a people “yearning to be free”, but rather an anti-capitalist stance against corruption and the new direction of the state.
The United States has a tried and tested methodology of undermining governments and arranging coups. There are uncanny pre-echoes of events 25 years later during the 2014 Ukrainian revolution at Maidan Nezalezhnosti, the central square of Kyiv and, equally, more recent events in Hong Kong.
As with both these examples, there have always been claims that events at Tiananmen Square had been influenced and encouraged by the CIA. In just one example, rationing of petrol was in effect in China during 1989, only being available to embassies, government ministries and for the small number of the public who owned cars. Yet arson was rampant during the protests, with a considerable amount of Molotov cocktails being used against security forces. Many of the protestors were armed with automatic weapons.
Enflamed by passionate but angry agitators, the initially peaceful protests turned increasingly violent, and the unprepared authorities lost control of the situation, leading to widespread insurrection throughout Beijing. Despite attempts by the police to negotiate with the protestors, Premier Li Peng even meeting protest leaders on national TV, firebrand radicals refused all possibility of negotiation and seemed to be intent in spilling the blood of the state.
Since the beginning of the protests, Tiananmen Square had been surrounded by soldiers armed with little more than truncheons. Once protestors began burning vehicles containing soldiers and even lynching and mutilating state forces, there was little choice but to move against the protests.
Images of these atrocities by protesters are freely available online and are not posted here due to their graphic nature. The images, which serve as primary evidence against the Western narrative, can be viewed here. Once again, readers are advised that these images are extremely graphic and depict mutilation and burning of human beings through mob violence.
The bulk of the protestors were not actually students, but workers. It was the workers who had created and occupied the barricades that the Chinese tanks so famously smashed through, it was the workers who were responsible for the killing of Chinese soldiers and it was the workers who continued to resist the army once they had entered the square. The real students in Tiananmen Square were allowed to leave in peace while the agitators continued the battle throughout the evening, leading to the majority of the deaths.
On June 13, 1989, The New York Times issued a correction after it has published claims first reported in the Hong Kong newspaper Wen Wei Po and then the San Francisco Examiner that protestors had been shot at Tiananmen Square. The NYT clarified that while people had been shot, it wasn’t at Tiananmen Square.
“The article does not correspond with accounts of other witnesses on important points… State television has even shown film of students marching peacefully away from the square shortly after dawn as proof that they were not slaughtered.”
New York Times, June 13, 1989
These claims are responsible for many of the falsehoods about Tiananmen Square that have been told ever since. They originated with a Qinghua University student who alleged students were machine-gunned in front of the Monument to the People’s Heroes in the centre of the square. The issue of bias was never raised. However, the accounts that nobody died at the square were further confirmed on July 12, 1989, when a Latin American diplomat provided an eyewitness account of events in Beijing via a cable later released by Wikileaks.
Chilean Second Secretary Carlos Gallo stated that he witnessed the military enter the square “and did not observe any mass firing of weapons into the crowds”. He added that “most of the troops which entered the square were actually armed only with anti-riot gear–truncheons and wooden clubs.”
“Although gunfire could be heard, Gallo said that apart from some beating of students, there was no mass firing into the crowd of students at the monument. When poloff mentioned some reportedly eyewitness accounts of massacres at the monument with automatic weapons, Gallo said that there was no such slaughter.”
Diplomatic Cable, 1989, released by Wikileaks
People indeed died during the six weeks of protests that swept China, but it was a number far lower than the absurdist 10,000 figure such as the British government suggested, one that was spread by the BBC in 2017. China has long accused Britain of being behind much of the propaganda campaign that was constructed after the non-incident at Tiananmen Square, suggesting that it was an attempt by Britain to avoid the return of Hong Kong to Chinese authorities in 1997.
The video below shows the level of propaganda that was being disseminated. Containing claims of shooting and slaughter at Tiananmen Square that was widely debunked by those on the scene, it ignores the fact that many of the burning vehicles highlighted early in the video contained members of the Chinese forces. These vehicles were seen in the disturbing images referenced earlier." Go to: https://blog.michaeleastwriter.com/tiananmen-square-30-years-of-propaganda-e0fb288ef24 for full article.
So he’s coming down on the side of attempted “leftist” Leninist coup really…
Here are the rest of the images (be advised): http://xahlee.org/Periodic_dosage_dir/tiananmen_64_1989.html
Weird though, how does propagandising against a capitalising regime help a capitalist? That Britain alone would be responsible? Big risk to take for an old colonial base far away surely?
