Thomas Hon Wing Polin: Tiananmen: the Empire’s Big Lie

In essence, it says that Chinese authorities massacred unarmed student protesters demanding democracy, slaughtering thousands and even tens of thousands in and around Tiananmen Square. Extensive subsequent research and many eyewitness accounts have shown conclusively that none of this is true. The most reliable estimate, from many sources, was that the tragedy took 200-300 lives. Few were students, many were rebellious workers, plus thugs with lethal weapons and hapless bystanders. Some calculations have up to half the dead being PLA soldiers trapped in their armored personnel carriers, buses and tanks as the vehicles were torched. Others were killed and brutally mutilated by protesters with various implements. No one died in Tiananmen Square; most deaths occurred on nearby Chang’an Avenue, many up to a kilometer or more away from the square.

More than once, government negotiators almost reached a truce with students in the square, only to be sabotaged by radical youth leaders seemingly bent on bloodshed. And the demands of the protesters focused on corruption, not democracy.

All these facts were known to the US and other governments shortly after the crackdown. Few if any were reported by Western mainstream media, even today. Perpetuation of the big lie about Tiananmen reminds one of the infamous saying by Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbel: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/06/06/tiananmen-the-empires-big-lie/

Seawapa.com

ATTEMPTED COUNTER-REVOLUTION IN CHINA

In fact, the U.S. government was actively involved in promoting the “pro-democracy” protests through an extensive, well-funded, internationally coordinated propaganda machine that pumped out rumors, half-truths and lies from the moment the protests started in mid-April 1989.

The goal of the U.S. government was to carry out regime change in China and overthrow the Communist Party of China which had been the ruling party since the 1949 revolution. Since many activists in today’s progressive movement were not alive or were young children at the time of the Tiananmen incident in 1989, the best recent example of how such an imperialist destabilization/regime change operation works is revealed in the recent overthrow of the Ukrainian government. Peaceful protests in the downtown square receive international backing, financing and media support from the United States and Western powers; they eventually come under the leadership of armed groups who are hailed as freedom fighters by the Wall Street Journal, FOX News and other media; and finally the government targeted for overthrow by the CIA is fully demonized if it uses police or military forces.

http://www.seawapa.co/2014/06/what-really-happened-in-tiananmen.html

If the West can get away with a lie as big as this you wonder what they can't get away with. I once found an article by a reporter who was in Tiananmen Square when it happened. He reported the true story, that protestors were murdering policeman and soldiers outside of Tiananmen Square. Soldiers had initially been sent in unarmed when the protesters attacked. The Guardian was having a Tiananmen Square anniversary at the time, so I put the report out on CiF but they removed it.