In a post “Lost Tapirs” published December 23 of last year, I had alluded that I no longer buy into the Western narrative on the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
I now accept that the infamous incident didn’t happen in the way the mainstream media continues to portray it.
The story that Chinese troops machine-gunned hundreds of innocent student protesters on the night of June 3rd or 4th, has been thoroughly debunked by many of those present in the Square on those nights. Among them was a Chilean diplomat (Second Secretary), a Spanish TVE television crew, a correspondent for Reuters, and protesters themselves, all of who said nothing happened that night other than a military unit telling the remaining students to leave the Square.
Bluntly put, there was NO STUDENT MASSACRE IN TIANANMEN SQUARE.
Wait, what?! Who would make such a blatant propagandist claim? The Communist Party of China? Nope. It was Jay Mathews, who was Washington Post’s Beijing Bureau Chief in 1989. He wrote a detailed 1998 article “Reporting the Myth of Tiananmen and the Price of a Passive Press” that tracks down “the dramatic reports that buttressed the myth of a student massacre” and published in the Columbia Journalism Review.
CBS News reporter Richard Roth wrote this: “We saw no bodies, injured people, ambulances or medical personnel – in short, nothing to even suggest, let alone prove, that a “massacre” had occurred in [Tiananmen Square]”.
BBC reporter, James Miles: “I was one of the foreign journalists who witnessed the events that night. There was no massacre on Tiananmen Square”.
On June 13, 1989, NY Times reporter Nicholas Kristof – who was in Beijing at that time – wrote, “State television has even shown film of students marching peacefully away from the [Tiananmen] square shortly after dawn as proof that they [protesters] were not slaughtered”. And in that article, he also debunked an unidentified student protester who had claimed in a sensational article that Chinese soldiers with machine guns simply mowed down peaceful protesters in Tiananmen Square.
Graham Earnshaw, formerly Reuters Editor-in-Chief for Asia was in the Tiananmen Square on the night of June 03. He didn’t leave the square until the morning of June 4th. He wrote in his memoir that the military came, negotiated with the students and made everyone (including himself) leave peacefully; and that nobody died in the square.
A well-known Taiwan-born writer Hou Dejian, who had been on a hunger strike in the Square in a show of solidarity with the students, asserted: “Some people said that 200 died in the Square and others claimed that as many as 2,000 died. There were also stories of tanks running over students who were trying to leave. I have to say that I did not see any of that. I myself was in the Square until 6:30 in the morning”.
A Wikileaks cable from the US Embassy in Beijing – sent on July 12, 1989 – also reveals the eyewitness accounts of a Latin American diplomat and his wife: “They were able to enter and leave the [Tiananmen] square several times and were not harassed by troops. Remaining with students… until the final withdrawal, the diplomat said there were no mass shootings in the square or the monument”.
You may ask, what about the iconic “tank man”? A well-travelled image that illustrates a show of brave defiance against a supposedly cruel regime. In fact, the photo was taken the day after the Tiananmen event, and the tanks were moving away from, and not into, Tiananmen Square.
I couldn't locate any pictures or videos of soldiers actually shooting at or killing people. This, of course, does not mean that there weren’t any killings nor were there no episodes of violence – there were but pinning the blame onto the Chinese authorities is way off the mark.
Propaganda involves not only exaggeration, but also omission. Western media rarely show pictures of tanks and military vehicles burned down by the so-called “peaceful protestors”, because this will demonstrate how restrained the military was:
And there were reports too of Chinese soldiers being killed by the protesters. In fact, numerous protesters were armed with Molotov cocktails and even guns.
In an article from June 05, 1989, the Wall Street Journal described some of this violence: “Dozens of soldiers were pulled from trucks, severely beaten and left for dead. At an intersection west of the square, the body of a young soldier, who had been beaten to death, was stripped naked and hung from the side of a bus”.
Wait, how could the protesters kill so many soldiers? Because, until the very end, Chinese soldiers were unarmed. Most of the times, they didn’t even have helmets or batons.
The western narrative of the alleged massacre is a modern-day Deus hoc vult. They believe in the false righteousness of their cause and the rest of the world is standing steadfastly on their side, so any means, including making up lies, justifies the ends.
I put to you that the 1989 Tiananmen Square "student massacre" was actually a hoax manufactured by the US of A.
As far as I'm concerned, the country is hostile to China and it better realizes it. For its own sake.
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