HEADLINE = Demolishing a 25 year old massacre myth

STRAP = The Tiananmen Square massacre was a lie cooked up by the West in order to bring down the
Chinese regime.

Was the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 one of the biggest disinformation coups of the 20
th

century? Was it a myth spun by western governments and given the stamp of approval by the pliable
media in these countries in the hope of destabilising China? Or did the Chinese army really shoot point
blank at student protesters?
If you go by the western narrative, on the night of June 4, 1989, after seven weeks of occupation by pro-
democracy student protesters, the Chinese government sent in tanks and heavily armed troop to clear
the iconic Beijing square. Hundreds, if not thousands, of students were allegedly massacred.
Here are some snapshots by westerners of the events of that night.
A BBC reporter watching from a high floor of the Beijing Hotel said he saw soldiers shooting at students
at the monument in the centre of the square.
(http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/the_myth_of_tiananmen.php?page=all#sthash.X3Xh6gsl.dpuf)
US diplomat Richard Solomon claimed he saw on CNN Chinese soldiers firing on students in Tiananmen
Square.
Tim Russert, Washington bureau chief of NBC television channel, referred to tens of thousands of
deaths in Tiananmen Square.
The Encyclopaedia of the World notes: June 3-4, PLA troops entered Tiananmen Square during the
night and fired directly into the sleeping crowd.
Even Lonely Planet-China, 2000, a travel publication, thought fit to twist the knife: The number of
deaths is widely disputed. Eyewitness accounts have indicated that hundreds died in the square alone,
and its likely fighting in the streets around the square led to another several thousand casualties. The
truth will probably never be known.
Sorry, but the truth is very much out there.
Different take
The latest salvo against the massacre myth was fired on June 17, just days after the 25
th
anniversary of
the massacre. Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and
ex-associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, says, Washington and its puppets condemned China for
an event that did not happen.
There was no massacre in Tiananmen Square, Roberts writes on his website.
(http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/06/17/washington-beating-war-drums-paul-craig-roberts/) It
was just another Washington lie like Gulf of Tonkin, Saddam Husseins weapons of mass destruction,
Assads use of chemical weapons, Iranian nukes, etc. It is an amazing fact that the world lives in a false
reality created by Washingtons lies.
Among the most authoritative accounts is that of The Washington Posts Jay Mathews, who was at
ground zero during the demonstrations. In a report for the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR)
(http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/the_myth_of_tiananmen.php?page=all#sthash.X3Xh6gsl.dpuf)
he writes: Many American reporters and editors have accepted a mythical version of that warm, bloody
night. As far as can be determined from the available evidence, no one died that night in Tiananmen
Square.
Lets hear that again: No one died that night in Tiananmen Square.
So if no one died at the Square, how did the rumours begin?
What really happened?
The best propaganda is that which has a kernel of truth in it. Yes, there were fatalities but those who
died were workers who had joined the protesters, and certainly not in Tiananmen Square. The Chinese
government actually admits some 300 were killed.
Many victims were shot by soldiers on stretches of Changan Jie, the Avenue of Eternal Peace, about a
mile west of the square, and in scattered confrontations in other parts of the city, where, it should be
added, a few soldiers were beaten or burned to death by angry workers, says Mathews.
Most of the hundreds of foreign journalists that night, including me, were in other parts of the city or
were removed from the square so that they could not witness the final chapter of the student story.
Those who tried to remain close filed dramatic accounts that, in some cases, buttressed the myth of a
student massacre, he adds.
One of the few eyewitness accounts comes from Graham Earnshaw, a Reuters correspondent, who
spent the entire night near the square, interviewing students till early dawn when the troops allegedly
started shooting. I was probably the only foreigner who saw the clearing of the square from the square
itself, he writes in his memoirs. According to Earnshaw, most of the students had left earlier that
evening, and the remaining few hundred were persuaded by the troops to do likewise.
In fact, the Chinese government had exercised great restraint in the face of grave provocation by the
students. Regime challenging demonstrations were prohibited by the communist regime, but Beijing
allowed the students to occupy the historic Square for weeks.
In contrast, student demonstrators were publicly massacred in Mexico in 1968 and Thailand in 1973, yet
the west looked the other way.
So why did China get so much flak?
Australian diplomat-turned-author and journalist Gregory Clark says the massacre stories were planted
by US and British intelligence as part of a disinformation campaign against the Chinese government.
Clark writes on his website (http://gregoryclark.net/page15/page15.html) twice senior members of
Deng Xiaopings regime had tried unsuccessfully to negotiate compromises with the students.
Eventually the regime lost patience and sent unarmed troops into Beijing to clear the Square, he
writes. But those troops had quickly been turned back by barricades set up by the angry pro-student
crowds that had been gathering in Beijing for days.
The following day armed troops were sent in to do the job. They too quickly met hostile crowds but this
time they continued to advance and this time some in the crowd began throwing Molotov cocktails.
Dozens of buses and troop-carrying vehicles were torched, some with their crews trapped inside. Not
surprisingly, the largely untrained troops began panic firing back into the attacking crowds. As a result it
is said that hundreds were killed, including some students who had come from the Square to join the
crowds. But that killing was the result of a riot, not a deliberate massacre. It was provoked by the
citizens, not the soldiers. And it did not happen in Tiananmen Square.
Clark suspects the reports that were published by American newspapers, such as the New York Times,
were very likely the work of the US and UK black information authorities ever keen to plant anti-Beijing
stories in unsuspecting or cooperative media.
Perhaps the most iconic photo splashed across newspapers around the world was that of a solitary
student stopping a row of army tanks. But the story not told is that it actually shows the restraint
showed by the Chinese military.
Photos of lines of burning troop carriers are also used, as if they prove brutal military behaviour against
innocent civilians. In fact they prove the exact opposite, namely some fairly brutal behaviour by those
civilians leading to the deaths of quite a few fairly innocent soldiers, writes Clark.
In fact, photos of solders incinerated or hung from overpasses have yet to shown by the Western media.
According to Earnshaw of Reuters, a photo of a Chinese soldier strung up and burned to death was
withheld by the news service.
The real story
In trying to focus on the story the western media missed the uprising of the workers and civilians who
were undergoing great hardships because of the botched policies of the communist regime. Beholden to
their corporate paymasters, these journalists pitched the Tiananmen Square protests as that of an evil
regime killing innocent students.
The workers were much more numerous and had much more to be angry about than the students. This
was the larger story that most of us overlooked or underplayed, Mathew writes in CJR.
This basic lack of judgement and skepticism has been a defining characteristic of the western media.
Think about it. The same journalists later went on to swallow and then regurgitate the lies about
Saddams nuclear bombs. Not having learned from that $2 trillion and counting mistake, they bought
the lie about a popular uprising against another Arab leader, Muammar Gaddafi. In the process, they
contributed to the destruction of Libyas beautiful cities and its welfare state. It continues with Crimea,
Syria and Ukraine.
In fact, Tiananmen Square has an uncanny parallel to the Gujarat riots of 2002 which was in response to
the massacre of 57 Hindu pilgrims, including children, in Godhra. A key source for the original
Tiananmen massacre myth was the student leader Wuer Kaixi who claimed to have seen 200 students
cut down by gunfire at the Square. But it was later proven he was a liar. Turns out, several pro-
democracy students were feeding such lies to western observers.
Similarly, in Gujarat the number of Muslims who died in the riots kept ballooning until it reached a
figure of over 3000. It was a lie that was peddled by the entire Indian mainstream media, and gleefully
picked up by the western press.
In a news item dated May 11, 2005, the Indian Express quoted Congress leader and then Minister of
State for Home Sriprakash Jaiswals statement before Parliament that 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus were
killed in the riots.
After the above figures were disclosed by the government, the Indian media stopped saying over 3000
Muslims were killed, although the fact that 254 Hindus were killed was never mentioned. However, the
western media continues to describe the riots as a pogrom.
Do these commentators have any idea what a pogrom means? In Europe, during the 1933-45 campaign
against the Jewish people, over six million Jews were killed without the death of a single German,
Ukrainian, Romanian or Pole in retaliatory attacks by the Jews. That was a pogrom.
That such blatant lies hurt the image of their country did not matter at all to the social activists. All they
wanted was a pat on the back by the west. Mumbai-based activist Teesta Setalvad was accused of
tutoring witnesses of the riots by none other than her former associate Rais Khan Pathan.
(http://www.dailypioneer.com/nation/teesta-denies-tutoring-riot-witnesses.html) A court later held
that she was only guiding the witnesses.
Why target China?
Among all the nationalities of the world that have felt the jackboot of colonial oppression, the Chinese
stand alone in wanting to pay the west back at an opportune time. The west knows this very well. The
volley of vitriol directed at the Chinese during the highly successful Beijing Olympics showed the wests
unconcealed envy of Chinese prosperity and fear of its growing influence.
Tiananmen was an ideal opportunity for the west to paint the Chinese as cold blooded murderers.
Indeed, it was part of the standard western game plan of demonising those they consider future threats.
It was China then, Indian nationalists in 2002, Saddam in 2003, Gaddafi in 2011 and Russians today.
Lee Kuan Yew, the Singapore strongman, and one of the keenest minds of the 20th century, said that
mass demonstrations were happening not in Beijing alone but spreading to other cities. Deng Xiaoping
understood that if you released the forces, unless you do it in a controlled way, the system will collapse.
And he did not allow the system to collapse, because if you allow that, nothing is achieved, he said in
an interview to PBS television.
(http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitext/int_leekuanyew.html)
"The Chinese will judge him not from whether he was humane or he was brutal, but whether he saved
China, or he allowed China to risk disintegration.
Had Beijing allowed the demonstrations to snowball into a revolution like the US-UK engineered
colour revolutions of eastern Europe there would be no Chinese economic miracle. The BRICS group
would have remained on Russian papers. It would have been the west rather than the east that would
have been rising today.