Tuesday, June 6, 2017

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.

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.


4 comments:

sths said...

I'm sorry but this is BS. Nobody said 'thousands' were killed, or if they do say that they're wrong. Nobody knows the exact number but its dozens or at most hundred.

But lets get one thing straight. "Few were students, many were rebellious workers, plus thugs with lethal weapons and hapless bystanders." THIS IS UTTER BS. This is China 1989, the most 'lethal weapon' the common people had access to was probably a molotov. The protestors were up against, the PLA armed with tanks, machine guns and armored vehicles. The protesting students built a statue of liberty out of plastic and foam for godsakes. Does that sound like marauding thugs to you? The student leadership wrote a '10000 word' essay on their dreams for a new china and knelt at tiananmen square for the CCP leaders. Does that sound like murdering thugs?

The west may have been involved in a very minor sense of donating some money to some student causes,but this was a real protest from the Chinese youth.

Kaivey said...

Here's a good article by professor Mark Crispin Miller about what happened in Tiananmen Square. It has a collection of eye witness accounts. It looks like you fallen for Western propaganda.

https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/newsfromunderground/F3mZGFJJizw

'Back then—and today—there couldn't be "another Tiananmen Square massacre" in Hong Kong, because there was no
"Tiananmen Square massacre" in 1989. That story was a fabrication by the "mighty Wurlitzer" of US propaganda, as
several US journalists have noted, and as even Nicholas Kristof, the NYTimes Beijing bureau chief back then, suggested
(very quietly), as we shall see.'

sths said...

I realize now that we're actually in agreement. My main point was just that the protest was genuine and not some nefarious plot by the west.

Kaivey said...

Seawapa.com is a very strange site. I didn't realise it until after I posted it. They are climate change deniers, and full is end of the world doom and gloom. It seemed like an American conspiracy theory site, but it based in the UK. I won't be going to it for my main source of news stories.