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Tuesday, May 14, 2024

American Pravda: Gaza Protests and the Legend of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, by Ron Unz - The Unz Review

"Tiananmen Square Massacre".......was a HOAX? - CL


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The Israel/Gaza conflict is now well into its eighth month as the slaughter and starvation of Palestinians continues unabated, with many tens of thousands of helpless civilians already dead.

Despite occasional bleats of feeble disapproval by members of the Biden Administration, America’s government has continued to fully support that massacre, providing all the necessary money and munitions that enable it. Although as far back as January, the jurists of the International Court of Justice had issued a series of near-unanimous rulings that the Palestinians were at risk of suffering genocide at the hands of an Israel consumed with bloodlust, the leadership of America and the West totally ignored that verdict. Just a couple of weeks ago, our government passed new legislation providing an additional $26 billion in financial and military support to that genocidally-minded country. When word came out that the International Criminal Court might be planning to indict several Israeli leaders for war-crimes, twelve U.S. Senators published a letter directly threatening the ICC and its leadership if it took that step.

For many months, horrific images of dead or dying Palestinian children have become widespread on relatively uncensored social media platforms such as TikTok and Elon Musk’s Twitter, and across America large numbers of college students have reacted to that carnage. Over the last two generations, they and their predecessors had been heavily indoctrinated in the story of the Holocaust and the terrible shame of those who stood by and did nothing as innocent men, women, and children were murdered. So with grisly scenes of what they consider a present-day genocide unfolding in real-time on their smartphones, a huge wave of protest demonstrations has swept across our colleges and universities, a campaign far greater than anything since the late 1960s movement opposing the Vietnam War.

College protests on a wide range of different social and ideological issues had been common for decades and these have sometimes focused on foreign policy controversies. But unlike all those previous examples, the protests criticizing Israel immediately provoked an enormously harsh and hostile reaction from our political and media establishment. When the presidents of Harvard and Penn were hauled before a Congressional committee and they emphasized their commitment to maintaining political free speech at their universities, both those Ivy League leaders were quickly forced to resign, an absolutely unprecedented development in American academic history.

Then last month the president of Columbia University sought to avoid a similar fate after she faced a grilling before that same House committee, so she quickly called in 100 NYC riot police who broke up the pro-Gaza demonstrations taking place on her campus and arrested many of the protesters. Images of burly, helmeted police manhandling peaceful students on their own campus for protesting a possible genocide went viral on social media, inspiring a huge wave of sympathy protests at dozens of other universities, many of which were soon broken up in similar fashion by local police raids. As of last week, some 2,800 college students have been arrested at dozens of schools for peacefully exercising their freedom of speech. This crackdown seems far more severe than anything since the late 1960s and in some respects may have even exceeded that previous peak set more than a half-century ago.

As I emphasized in an article last week, the scenes from Emory University were particularly shocking, with Georgia’s Republican governor ordering his state police to invade the grounds of one of the most prestigious local academic institutions and arrest the protesters. In one particularly dramatic incident a 57-year-old tenured professor of Economics named Carolyn Frohlin was distressed to see one of her own students being violently wrestled to the ground and approached him. For merely walking across her own campus, she was immediately grabbed by a hulking police sergeant and another officer, thrown to the ground, hog-tied, and arrested. CNN anchor Jim Acosta expressed total shock at this when he reported the story, and the video has now been viewed hundreds of thousands of times on YouTube.

Consider that a seemingly very respectable-looking middle-aged college professor was brutally man-handled and arrested by the police on her own campus merely for trying to closely observe the arrest of one of her own protesting students. I’m not sure whether anything like this had ever previously happened in American college history even during the height of the 1960s protest movement, and it seemed more what we would expect to see on the college campuses of turbulent Latin American dictatorships.

Others had similar reactions. Someone distributed a shorter clip of the same incident on Twitter, with that Tweet viewed some 1.5 million times.

 

Although my main focus was on the video clip itself, the first line of the Tweet’s introductory text also caught my eye:

This isn’t CHINA.. This is AMERICA..

In recent years our government and its subservient media have become intensely hostile towards China. As far back as January 2020, both the Trump Administration and the Biden Administration had together declared that the Chinese government was guilty of committing “genocide” against its Uighur minority of Xinjiang Province despite failing to provide any evidence that significant numbers of Uighurs had been harmed let alone killed. Our leading media organs enthusiastically endorsed and promoted that story, which merely seems to be a ridiculous propaganda-hoax.

So surely if there existed any video footage of Chinese security forces attacking a Chinese professor at a Chinese university in such a manner, the global media would have been blanketed with that story for days or weeks and it would have been featured on the front page of the New York Times. Indeed, I think that merely a credible report of such an incident would have gotten heavy media coverage, and I haven’t seen any such thing. So although that Tweeter’s accusatory comparison was certainly well-intentioned, he was probably mistaken. There’s no evidence that anything like that has happened in China in recent years, let alone on a regular basis.

What then inspired those words? Obviously the proximate cause was the unrelenting wave of anti-China rhetoric and propaganda that has poured out of nearly all of our media outlets during the last few years. But I strongly suspect that a crucial factor had been the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989, which for 35 years has been regularly revisited on every June 4th anniversary by our media.

In that notorious atrocity, euphemistically known within China itself as “the June Fourth Incident,” many hundreds of peaceful pro-democracy student protesters were massacred by the Chinese military, with some senior American officials even later claiming that the true death-toll was vastly larger, perhaps numbering many thousands or more. Those huge anti-government protests in Beijing had gone on for many weeks so large numbers of Western reporters and camera crews were already on the scene covering the story. This allowed them to document the events as they unfolded and their gripping photographic images and video footage were widely broadcast all across the world, becoming an indelible part of our historical memory. Who can forget the famous, tragic scene of a single, lone civilian courageously blocking an advancing column of Chinese tanks with his own body? The story of “Tank Man” became world famous, with that image often appearing in our standard textbooks.

For more than three decades, the legacy of that horrific 1989 Chinese massacre has been a weighty one, greatly coloring Western perceptions of China, even among writers who were focused on entirely different matters.

For example, two weeks ago I published an article on the origins of the Covid epidemic and my analysis discussed important books on that topic by Sen. Rand Paul, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and an independent Canadian journalist named Elaine Dewar.

All those authors strongly believed that the virus had been created in China’s Wuhan lab and then leaked out, resulting in the global epidemic that has killed perhaps thirty million people worldwide. The writers were firmly convinced of the nefarious nature of China’s government and although the leak of the virus had been accidental, China’s stubborn denial of what had happened demonstrated the notorious dishonesty of its regime.

Although 1989 was decades in the past, all those books also included mention of the Tiananmen Square Massacre of that year, in most cases several times, citing that incident as proof-positive evidence of the cruelty of China’s dictatorial government, which had slaughtered so many of its own young college students merely for peacefully seeking democratic freedom. The authors also suggested various conspiratorial plots by China’s dictatorship, and although the evidence for most of these seemed extremely thin, there was an underlying assumption that a government willing to butcher its own idealistic young students was capable of almost anything.

Back in late 2021 I’d published an earlier article that reviewed and analyzed several other books on Covid origins. These had similarly blamed the epidemic on a virus bioengineered by the Chinese, and once again they mentioned the Tiananmen Square Massacre in much the same way. Indeed, Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin cited that 1989 massacre five separate times in his book, while Sharri Markson of Rupert Murdoch’s SkyNews quoted former Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who suggested that up to 10,000 Chinese civilians had been killed at the time. The subsequent denial of that brutal massacre by the Chinese government merely demonstrated its total dishonesty, indicating that it could not be trusted on matters related to Covid or anything else.

Rather than fading away over time, the story of the 1989 massacre still very regularly appears in our media. When I did a quick search of the New York Times for the last five years I found more than 100 different references to the “Tiananmen Square Massacre” while a similar search of the Wall Street Journal returned 95 results. Given the enormous influence of those elite newspapers on so many other publications and journalists, I’m sure that searches of lesser outlets would return comparable totals. With that story of Tiananmen Square still appearing in the news so frequently, it’s hardly surprising that all those books and authors would have mentioned it, believing that it provided important insights into the behavior of China’s government and the Communist Party that controlled it.

Just as Auschwitz and the Holocaust have permanently branded Germany with a mark of Cain and the 1937 Rape of Nanking has similarly blackened Japan’s reputation, China will long suffer the international political consequences of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, at least while its Communist Party remains in power.

 

Those books mentioned above were focused upon the origins of Covid and uniformly blamed the Chinese for the creation of the virus and its accidental release. But from the earliest days of the epidemic, my own analysis has been very different and over the last four years I’ve published some two dozen articles making my contrary case. The first of these appeared in April 2020, and in it I suggested that the story of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre provided a useful means of weighing the credibility of China’s government and media against that of our own:

Consider, for example, the Tiananmen Square Massacre, which every June 4th still evokes an annual wave of harsh condemnations in the news and opinion pages of our leading national newspapers. I had never originally doubted those facts, but a year or two ago I happened to come across a short article by journalist Jay Matthews entitled “The Myth of Tiananmen” that completely upended that apparent reality.

According to Matthews the infamous massacre had likely never happened, but was merely a media artifact produced by confused Western reporters and dishonest propaganda, a mistaken belief that had quickly become embedded in our standard media storyline, endlessly repeated by so many ignorant journalists that they all eventually believed it to be true. Instead, as near as could be determined, the protesting students had all left Tiananmen Square peacefully, just as the Chinese government had always maintained. Indeed, leading newspapers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post had occasionally acknowledged these facts over the years, but usually buried those scanty admissions so deep in their stories that few had ever noticed. Meanwhile, the bulk of the mainstream media had fallen for an apparent hoax.

Matthews himself had been the Beijing Bureau Chief of the Washington Post, personally covering the protests at the time, and his article appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, our most prestigious venue for media criticism. This authoritative analysis containing such explosive conclusions was first published in 1998, and I find it difficult to believe that many reporters or editors covering China have remained ignorant of this information, yet the impact has been absolutely nil. For over twenty years virtually every mainstream media account I have read has continued to promote the Tiananmen Square Massacre Hoax, usually implicitly but sometimes explicitly.

Although I’d only devoted three paragraphs to debunking that non-existent 1989 massacre, I regarded the case as so strong that I’d never considered any further investigation, while occasionally quoting that passage in my later articles or comments. But given such brief and glancing coverage, relatively few probably absorbed it. For example, several weeks ago a commenter who was unaware of what I’d said urged me to write an article on the true history. At the time, I doubted it was worth the effort, but now that I’ve recognized that the false legend of Tiananmen still remains so widespread and has regularly been used to attack the credibility of the Chinese government, even with regard to the origins of Covid, I’ve decided to do so.

An important point is that Washington Post journalist Jay Matthews was hardly alone in asserting that all the student protesters had peacefully left Tiananmen Square just as the Chinese government claimed at the time. Nicholas Kristof, Beijing Bureau Chief of the New York Times, had also been covering those historical events, and in a Times article published about a week later, he’d said much the same thing, citing various credible eyewitnesses to that effect. He also strongly debunked other, anonymous accounts of a massacre that had previously appeared in his own newspaper. Some months later Kristof published a long 5,400 word article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine providing a very detailed chronology as well as an analysis of the political circumstances surrounding the crackdown, and towards the end of the piece he flatly asserted that “There [was] no massacre in Tiananmen Square.”

 

Knowledgeable observers certainly soon recognized the facts. Steven Mosher is a conservative China researcher who has published a long series of books intensely critical of the country’s Communist government. One of the earliest of these was China Misperceived, which appeared in 1990, and on the very first page of the text he explained that the denouement of the Tiananmen protests occurred just as he was writing his final chapters. Then, towards the end of his book, he described the grisly tales that were widely reported in the Western media and eventually became embedded in the permanent narrative:

The best illustration of this sudden eagerness to believe the worst of Beijing was the wide circulation received by an unsubstantiated report of a massacre of students on Tiananmen Square proper. During the final stage of the assault on the Square, the rumor went, the army had surrounded thousands of students encamped near the Monument of Revolutionary Heroes and cut them down with machine-gun fire. Tanks had run back and forth over their tents to ensure that there were no survivors. The corpses had then been piled into mounds and burned under cover of darkness to destroy evidence of the slaughter. Stories along these lines ran in several major American newspapers, including the Washington Post. Correspondents continued to refer to this episode on the air and in print even after it was publicly disputed by Western eyewitnesses such as Robin Munro of Asia Watch. It was too perfect a demonstration of what Beijing was now believed capable of to be lightly abandoned.

In a footnote, he expanded on what seemed to have been the true facts:

Robin Munro was one of the Westerners with the final group of several thousand students occupying the Square. He reports that they evacuated the Square shortly before dawn on June 5 without loss of life. On the eighth he joined a BBC camera crew as an interpreter and was astonished to hear the BBC correspondent refer to the massacre of these students during the course of a broadcast as if it were an established fact. Robin Munro, personal communication with the author, 18 February 1990.

In 1993 Munro himself joined veteran foreign policy journalist George Black to publish Black Hands of Beijing, a very detailed 400 page account of those 1989 protests that was strongly supportive of the students and sharply critical of the Chinese government and its crackdown, with their book glowingly praised by numerous China scholars. They also very firmly declared that no such massacre had ever occurred, opening Chapter 15 with the following explanation, worth quoting at length:

The phrase “Tiananmen Square massacre” is now fixed firmly in the political vocabulary of the late twentieth century. Yet it is inaccurate. There was no massacre in Tiananmen Square on the night of June 3…

But most of the reporters who remained near the square after one o’clock in the morning, when the first army units got there, left in haste and out of legitimate fear for their safety.

The lack of eyewitnesses was the first problem in establishing what happened on that fearsome night in Beijing. But there were other, more profound questions about how the foreign media saw their role in the Beijing Spring. The pacifist idealism of the young students triggered memories of the 1960s and America’s civil rights movement, and the students’ adept use of Western symbols, like headbands inscribed with Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty, or give me death,” riveted Western attention on the students…

There was more: some predisposition, perhaps, to believe in the massacre in the square, even though no one actually saw it. Whether or not it happened in reality, it was the necessary consummation of an allegory of innocence, sacrifice, and redemption…

Imagination filled the gaps. Into the vacuum rushed the most lurid tales of the supposed denouement in the square…A widely recounted eyewitness report, purportedly from a student at Qinghua University, spoke of the students on the Monument being mowed down at point-blank range by a bank of machine guns at four in the morning. The survivors had then either been chased across the square by tanks and crushed, or clubbed to death by infantrymen. But it was all pure fabrication.

By the time historians began to correct the record, the episode was enshrined in myth: Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of students had died in a massacre in Tiananmen Square.

 

Over time, other highly-credible mainstream journalists who had been present at Tiananmen Square came forward and reported those same facts. I’d highly recommend a long 2019 blogpost by Chris Kanthan that conveniently compiled and linked much of this material, along with a wealth of images and videos that I have drawn upon below.

In 2009, the CBS News website carried a short column by Richard Roth, who had been its correspondent covering the Tiananmen protests, appropriately titled “There Was No ‘Tiananmen Square Massacre.'”

That same year, the BBC published a piece by James Miles, its own correspondent saying much the same thing:

The first draft of history can be crude…I was one of the foreign journalists who witnessed the events that night…There was no massacre on Tiananmen Square.

A few years later, former Australian diplomat Gregory Clark published a piece in the Japan Times taking that position as well as very similar piece in the International Business Times entitled “Tiananmen Square Massacre is a Myth, All We’re ‘Remembering’ are British Lies” that opened with the following paragraphs:

June 4, 2014 will for many mark the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. What it should actually mark is the anniversary of one of the more spectacular UK black information operations — almost on a par with the mythical Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

The original story of Chinese troops on the night of 3 and 4 June, 1989 machine-gunning hundreds of innocent student protesters in Beijing’s iconic Tiananmen Square has since been thoroughly discredited by the many witnesses there at the time — among them a Spanish TVE television crew, a Reuters correspondent and protesters themselves, who say that nothing happened other than a military unit entering and asking several hundred of those remaining to leave the Square late that night.

In 2011 Wikileaks released a trove of secret American cables and these included several sent from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing reporting on the events of June 4th and fully confirming this same reality. Moreover, these cables demonstrated that for the previous 22 years the American government had been deliberately deceiving its public about what had happened in 1989, but this explosive story was totally ignored by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and almost every other mainstream media outlet of the Anglosphere so very few heard about it.

The sole exception to that shameful silence was Britain’s conservative Daily Telegraph which ran an article on the June 4th anniversary entitled “Wikileaks: no bloodshed inside Tiananmen Square, cables claim.” The subheading was even more forceful: “Secret cables from the United States embassy in Beijing have shown there was no bloodshed inside Tiananmen Square when China put down student pro-democracy demonstrations 22 years ago.” A sidebar in that same publication quoted the text of some of those explosive secret cables:

1. From 89BEIJING18828 – July 7, 1989. A Chilean diplomat provides an eye-witness account of the soldiers entering Tiananmen Square: HE WATCHED THE MILITARY ENTER THE SQUARE AND DID NOT OBSERVE ANY MASS FIRING OF WEAPONS INTO THE CROWDS, ALTHOUGH SPORADIC GUNFIRE WAS HEARD. HE SAID THAT MOST OF THE TROOPS WHICH ENTERED THE SQUARE WERE ACTUALLY ARMED ONLY WITH ANTI-RIOT GEAR–TRUNCHEONS AND WOODEN CLUBS; THEY WERE BACKED UP BY ARMED SOLDIERS.

2. From 89BEIJING18828 – July 7, 1989. A Chilean diplomat provides an eye-witness account of the soldiers entering Tiananmen Square: ALTHOUGH GUNFIRE COULD BE HEARD, HE SAID THAT APART FROM SOME BEATING OF STUDENTS, THERE WAS NO MASS FIRING INTO THE CROWD OF STUDENTS AT THE MONUMENT.

Under normal circumstances I would have been reluctant to belabor the point by citing so many different eyewitnesses and credible analysts all essentially saying the same thing about those 1989 events. But for more than three decades, perhaps 99% of all Western media coverage has assumed and endorsed the “Tiananmen Square Massacre Hoax” and as a consequence I suspect that 99% of Westerners, including influential journalists and authors, today probably believe in the reality of that fictional event. This completely false narrative has severely tainted both public and elite perceptions of the Chinese government on all sorts of other important matters. Therefore, I felt it was necessary to demonstrate the enormous weight of evidence on the other side.

Although Wikipedia is an invaluable source of basic information, it is notoriously skewed and unreliable on controversial matters, and I naturally assumed this would be the case when I read its 26,000 word article entitled “1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre. “ But to my considerable surprise the article was much more even-handed and objective than I’d expected, presumably because the factual evidence was so overwhelmingly against the story of “the Tiananmen Square Massacre” promoted in our mainstream media.

 

In order to better understand how the legend of the Tiananmen Square Massacre became so deeply embedded in our mainstream media narrative despite such strong evidence to the contrary, we must consider what actually transpired in Beijing on June 4, 1989. Parts of the city, including some of the roads to the square saw violent attacks against the advancing military forces in which considerable numbers of Chinese servicemen were killed. As the Wall Street Journal reported at the time:

As columns of tanks and tens of thousands of soldiers approached Tiananmen, many troops were set on by angry mobs who screamed, “Fascists.” 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. Another soldier’s corpse was strung up at an intersection east of the square.

Many of these soldiers carried no firearms, and they often even lacked helmets or any weapons to defend themselves when the rioters attacked their vehicles, setting them on fire. According to the Washington Post, protesters used fire-bombs and Molotov cocktails to torch an entire military convoy of more than 100 trucks and armored vehicles, while a CBS News photographer reported witnessing the mobs beating to death some of the soldiers inside. Obviously, under such circumstances it’s hardly surprising that armed troops would have responded with lethal force.

A video from Chinese television shows the burning military vehicles and the general mayhem in parts of Beijing.

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Based upon my limited research, I think the exact number of casualties on both sides remains unclear to this day, as well as which side initiated the violence, and the latter may have varied in different parts of the city. The official report of the Chinese government apparently claimed that more than 1,000 military and police vehicles were burned by rioters and over 200 soldiers and policemen were killed, but this may be a considerable exaggeration, and they may have similarly under-reported the number of civilians killed, which they put at around 300. According to the WSJ, some news organizations calling local hospitals estimated 500 civilian deaths, while other sources believed that the total was much higher.

Regardless of these disputed casualty figures, for 35 years our mainstream media narrative has incorrectly conflated the fate of the many violent rioters who died elsewhere in Beijing with that of the peaceful student protesters at Tiananmen Square, none of whom were killed or injured.

One of the iconic images from those days was that of “Tank Man,” a lone Chinese civilian who blocked a column of tanks, but I think that the implications of that incident were exactly contrary to our standard narrative. Instead of shooting or crushing that stubborn protester, the column of tanks halted and unsuccessfully tried to navigate around him, until a couple of other civilians finally intervened and pulled him to safety.

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An interesting aspect of the footage is that the YouTube version, which has been viewed some 11 million times, truncated the video before we could see that Chinese protester walking safely away. I suspect this may have been intended to mislead viewers into believing that he was eventually crushed to death by the tanks, since although I spent a few minutes hunting around, I had no luck locating the complete video anywhere on YouTube.

In many other countries around the world, an unarmed civilian who attempted to block a military column of tanks would be facing certain death. Indeed, when American activist Rachel Corrie tried to prevent an armored Israeli bulldozer from demolishing the home of a Palestinian family in 2003, the driver deliberately crushed her to death, and there have been recent reports of Israeli tanks crushing bound Palestinian prisoners in Gaza, with images of their grisly remains available on the Internet.

The Body of a Palestinian Prisoner, Crushed Flat While Alive by an Israeli Tank
The Body of a Palestinian Prisoner, Crushed Flat While Alive by an Israeli Tank

 

At its height more than a million angry demonstrators had occupied the streets of China’s capital, and these protests continued for many weeks during 1989, with most observers reasonably believing that the four decade long rule of the country’s Communist Party was tottering. Although that popular dissatisfaction was probably more focused on mundane issues such as government corruption and inflation—which had spiked to 26% the previous year—rather than political liberalism, the existence of such widespread dissatisfaction was certainly real.

As Western journalists had reported at the time and books by Black/Munro and others later confirmed, China’s top political leadership was deeply conflicted over how to respond to this unprecedented public threat to their continued rule. The country’s highest governing body, the Standing Committee of the Politburo, became deadlocked over a crackdown, and General-Secretary Zhao Ziyang eventually aligned himself with the protesters, hoping to use their popular movement to overcome his political rivals.

Thus, the entire world watched in wonderment as a massive, unexpected popular uprising seemed on the verge of toppling the once seemingly unshakable Communist rule of the world’s most populous nation.

In the decades that followed, similar popular protests and uprisings, usually aligned with American interests or supportive of Western ideology, were to become quite common across the world, so much so that they were given the generic name of “Color Revolutions,” with the governments of Eastern European or Soviet successor states being the most typical targets, including those of Serbia, Ukraine, and Georgia. Therefore, with the benefit of hindsight, some anti-American writers and activists have argued that although ultimately unsuccessful the 1989 uprising in Beijing was actually the first of these, having been orchestrated or manipulated by elements of the American government and its allied groups. Kantham’s lengthy 2019 blog post takes this position, as does a long article published that same year by journalist Max Parry.

Such individuals noted that in 1986 the Open Society Institute of George Soros had provided a million dollars in funding to support China’s emerging pro-democracy forces over the next few years, and after the massive demonstrations began, many millions of additional dollars poured into the country to support the protesters, who were also quickly elevated as international heroes by the globally-dominant Western media. But none of this seems strange or surprising, and there’s a huge difference between the West opportunistically coming out in strong support of a fully organic anti-government populist movement and the belief that the latter had actually been created or heavily instigated by such outside forces.

So while a hidden but central Western role cannot be ruled out, I’ve seen no strong evidence supporting such a conspiratorial analysis of the 1989 protests, and as far as I can tell the conventional analysis provided by the Black/Munro book seems perfectly plausible.

Meanwhile, I’d point to a far more obvious factor behind the 1989 Beijing protests, one that had been completely excluded from all these different analyses, whether mainstream or alterative, pro-China or anti-China. Several months before the Beijing protests began, the important Chinese city of Nanjing had been rocked by demonstrations against the presence of African students in that city, with similar anti-African unrest later spreading to other major cities, including Shanghai and Beijing. Although the government ultimately declared the protests illegal and suppressed them, their popular demands were largely conceded, with most of the Africans leaving the country and new restrictions placed on the activities of those who remained.

Such large public demonstrations had previously been extremely rare in China, and the widespread media coverage of the Nanjing protesters and their considerable success in achieving their objectives must surely have inspired those who began the Tiananmen demonstrations three months later. Indeed some of the latter protesters even still carried signs denouncing African students, underscoring the close connection between the two movements.

 

The story of the Tiananmen Square Massacre that never happened hardly represents the only case in which incorrect or deliberately misleading information has stubbornly been maintained for decades by our dishonest mainstream media.

A few days ago, Chinese leader Xi Jinping began a trip to Europe and his itinerary included Serbia, with his visit heavily covered in the New York Times. A May 7th article contained the following paragraphs, together with a photo of the wrecked Chinese embassy:

Mr. Xi’s arrival in Serbia on Tuesday coincided with the 25th anniversary of a mistaken strike by NATO warplanes on the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during the 1999 bombing campaign. Three Chinese journalists were killed.

That incident, which many in China believe was not an accident, created a “strong emotional bond between Serbs and Chinese,” said Aleksandar Mitic of the Institute of International Politics and Economics in Belgrade.

The much longer Times article on May 8th was even more forceful in declaring that the American attack on the embassy had been accidental, with the subheading reading:

Visiting friendly leaders in Eastern Europe, the Chinese president commemorated the 25th anniversary of a misdirected U.S. airstrike that destroyed China’s embassy in Belgrade.

The first two paragraphs read:

China and Serbia on Wednesday proclaimed an “ironclad friendship” and a “shared future” during a visit to Belgrade by the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, underlining the close political and economic ties between two countries that share a wariness of the United States.

Mr. Xi arrived in Serbia late Tuesday — the 25th anniversary of a mistaken 1999 airstrike involving the U.S. Air Force during the Kosovo war that destroyed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, the Serbian capital. Three Chinese journalists were killed in the strike.

And the article went on to say:

The 25th anniversary of the NATO bombing has come at a time when Mr. Xi’s government is trying to steady relations with the United States and Western Europe. He had been expected to visit the bombed embassy site, which he visited on his last trip to Serbia in 2016 and is usually a mandatory stop for Chinese officials visiting Belgrade. But he had not appeared there before he left Belgrade Wednesday evening for his next stop, the Hungarian capital of Budapest, Europe’s only other reliably China-friendly capital.

His decision to skip the former embassy site, now a Chinese cultural center that features a black, tombstone-like marble tablet mourning Chinese and Serbian “martyrs,” suggested a desire to avoid rekindling anti-American passions that at the time of the bombing in 1999 led to angry protests by tens of thousands of Chinese around the U.S. embassy in Beijing, some throwing bottles and rocks.

He did not ignore the bombing entirely, but avoided anti-Western bombast.

“This we should never forget,” Mr. Xi said in a statement published on Tuesday by Politika, a Serbian newspaper, recalling that “25 years ago today, NATO flagrantly bombed the Chinese Embassy.” He said that China’s friendship with Serbia had been “forged with the blood of our compatriots” and “will stay in the shared memory of the Chinese and Serbian peoples”…

“The Chinese people will never forget this barbaric atrocity committed by NATO and will never accept such tragic history repeating itself,” Lin Jian, a spokesman for the ministry, told reporters in Beijing on Tuesday.

This lengthy Times piece emphasized that the American bombing attack on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade had been a tragic accident, suggesting that the angry Chinese reaction was unwarranted and even irrational, and for twenty-five years this has been the absolutely uniform portrayal by all American mainstream media outlets. But in the same 2020 article in which I’d discussed the true history of the 1989 events in Tiananmen Square, I’d also explained what had actually happened in 1999 Belgrade.

Although our limited bombing campaign seemed quite successful and soon forced the Serbs to the bargaining table, the short war did include one very embarrassing mishap. The use of old maps had led to a targeting error that caused one of our smart bombs to accidentally strike the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, killing three members of its delegation and wounding dozens more. The Chinese were outraged by this incident, and their propaganda organs began claiming that the attack had been deliberate, a reckless accusation that obviously made no logical sense.

In those days I watched the PBS Newshour every night, and was shocked to see their U.S. Ambassador raise those absurd charges with host Jim Lehrer, whose disbelief matched my own. But when I considered that the Chinese government was still stubbornly denying the reality of its massacre of the protesting students in Tiananmen Square a decade earlier, I concluded that unreasonable behavior by PRC officials was only to be expected. Indeed, there was even some speculation that China was cynically milking the unfortunate accident for domestic reasons, hoping to stoke the sort of jingoist anti-Americanism among the Chinese people that would finally help bind the social wounds of that past 1989 outrage.

Even more remarkable were the discoveries I made regarding our supposedly accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy in 1999. Not long after launching this website, I added former Asia Times contributor Peter Lee as a columnist, incorporating his China Matters blogsite archives that stretched back for a decade. He soon published a 7,000 word article on the Belgrade Embassy bombing, representing a compilation of material already contained in a half-dozen previous pieces he’d written on that subject from 2007 onward. To my considerable surprise, he provided a great deal of persuasive evidence that the American attack on the Chinese embassy had indeed been deliberate, just as China had always maintained.

According to Lee, Beijing had allowed its embassy to be used as a site for secure radio transmission facilities by the Serbian military, whose own communications network was a primary target of NATO airstrikes. Meanwhile, Serbian air defenses had shot down an advanced American F-117A fighter, whose top-secret stealth technology was a crucial U.S. military secret. Portions of that enormously valuable wreckage were carefully gathered by the grateful Serbs, who delivered the material to the Chinese for temporary storage at their embassy prior to transport back home. This vital technological acquisition later allowed China to deploy its own J20 stealth fighter in early 2011, many years sooner than American military analysts had believed possible.

Based upon this analysis, Lee argued that the Chinese embassy was attacked in order to destroy the Serbian retransmission facilities located there, while punishing the Chinese for allowing such use. There were also widespread rumors in China that another motive had been an unsuccessful attempt to destroy the stealth debris stored within. Later Congressional testimony revealed that the among all the hundreds of NATO airstrikes, the attack on the Chinese embassy was the only one directly ordered by the CIA, a highly-suspicious detail.

Although the American media dominates the English-language world, many British publications also possess a strong global reputation, and since they are often much less in thrall to our own national security state, they have sometimes covered important stories that were ignored here. And in this case, the Sunday Observer published a remarkable expose in October 1999, citing several NATO military and intelligence sources who fully confirmed the deliberate nature of the American bombing of the Chinese embassy, with a US colonel even reportedly boasting that their smartbomb had hit the exact room intended.

This important story was immediately summarized in the Guardian, a sister publication, and also covered by the rival Times of London and many of the world’s other most prestigious publications, but encountered an absolute wall of silence in our own country. Such a bizarre divergence on a story of global strategic importance—a deliberate and deadly US attack against Chinese diplomatic territory—drew the attention of FAIR, a leading American media watchdog group, which published an initial critique and a subsequent follow-up. These two pieces totaled some 3,000 words, and effectively summarized both the overwhelming evidence of the facts and also the heavy international coverage, while reporting the weak excuses made by top American editors to explain their continuing silence. Based upon these articles, I consider the matter settled.

 

By coincidence, last month also marked another important historical anniversary. On April 7, 2024 the front page of the Times carried the headline “Thirty Years After a Genocide in Rwanda, Painful Memories Run Deep,” with an early paragraph summarizing those horrific events:

The agony of those harrowing days loomed large for many on Sunday as Rwanda marked the 30th anniversary of the genocide in which extremists from the country’s ethnic Hutu majority killed some 800,000 people — most of them ethnic Tutsis — using machetes, clubs and guns.

For decades I had read this absolutely uniform account of Rwanda’s 1994 ethnic slaughter in all my trusted media sources, never once doubting that the story was correct. But a few weeks ago I investigated it more closely and came to diametrically opposite conclusions based upon the persuasive analysis of a number of highly-credible academic scholars and journalists. I was particularly impressed by the work of the late Prof. Edward Herman of the University of Pennsylvania as I explained in my article:

I’d previously been unaware of Herman but henceforth took his views very seriously, and I recently discovered that in 2014 he had published Enduring Lies, a short work co-authored by independent journalist David Peterson that sharply challenged the standard Rwanda narrative, so I bought and read it.

Their slim volume carried a cover quote by the highly-regarded journalist John Pilger hailing their “landmark investigation,” and it also was praised by numerous others, including the authors of two different books on the Rwanda disaster, while my own verdict was the same. Herman was a serious scholar and their book provided a devastating and very convincing refutation of what the authors call “the standard model” of the events in Rwanda.

For most reasonable people, any talk of “genocide” must focus on the numbers, and the authors argued that these had been completely obfuscated in the case of 1994 Rwanda. No one ever denied that huge numbers of innocent Tutsi civilians had been killed, often in very grisly ways, but drawing upon the quantitative research of a couple of University of Michigan academics, the authors argued that the figures and percentages casually mentioned by Gourevitch and so many others were wildly exaggerated. The latter had claimed that many hundreds of thousands of Tutsis were slain, representing a large majority of their total population, but instead probably only 100,000 to 200,000 had died while the number of Hutu victims was a multiple of that, perhaps even many, many times larger.

One important point made by the authors is that the international tribunal later established to try those responsible for the Rwandan genocide deliberately avoided including any coverage of Hutu victims or Tutsi perpetrators, with Kagame and his fellows entirely protected from any legal investigation or sanction, thereby removing a very large majority of all the crimes from any consideration. Completely ignoring most of the killings and most of the victims might seem absurd, but it reflected the very strong political support that America, Britain, and other countries provided to the newly established Tutsi regime, and any prosecutors who tried to broaden that mandate were overruled or even removed from their positions.

An absolutely central theme of all the mainstream media coverage and books had been the planned nature of the genocide, but Herman and Peterson noted that all the Hutu leaders tried on those charges were either acquitted or had their convictions reversed on appeal, thereby demonstrating that this element of the story had little basis in evidence or reality. One of their appendices argued in detail that the key early warning fax allegedly sent to the UN several months before the killings began was a blatant forgery, and the verdicts of the tribunal seemed to strongly support that conclusion. They also summarized the very convincing evidence that Kagame rather than any shadowy extremist Hutu leaders had been responsible for the assassination of Rwanda’s Hutu president, the event that triggered the outbreak of violence.

According to their reckoning, the total number of Hutu civilians killed in Rwanda during 1994 was almost certainly in the hundreds of thousands and may have easily reached a million or more, while even larger numbers of Hutu refugees were slaughtered in the Congo during Kagame’s subsequent invasion, which he claimed had been launched to root out “genocidal war criminals.” That invasion led to the First and Second Congo Wars, which even the strictly establishmentarian Wikipedia admitted cost well over five million civilian lives, a body-count that utterly dwarfed the 1994 death toll in Rwanda.

Yet none of that horrendous bloodshed ever provoked any serious Western protests or even substantial media coverage, let alone outcries of “genocide” and international tribunals. Instead, Kagame, the central architect of those events, remained a great hero across most of our Western media. Herman and Peterson closed their last chapter by noting the extreme irony that although Kagame was widely celebrated as “the Abraham Lincoln” of Africa by Gourevitch and many of the journalists who followed his lead, the current Rwandan leader “is quite possibly the greatest mass murderer alive today.”

The authors argued that this total inversion of historical reality had been maintained since 1994 by extremely selective media access. They produced a list of the twenty leading advocates of “the standard model” and the twenty leading dissenters, and by checking the Factiva database determined that the former had almost totally monopolized media access, especially if small French-language publications were excluded. When only one side of a story is told, the public can easily be persuaded to accept almost anything. I can certainly endorse those findings since despite my very extensive readings until a couple of years ago, I’d never even realized that there existed any significant dissent from the standard Rwanda narrative, let alone that the dissenters included highly-credible scholars.

I soon discovered that two decades after the enormous wave of ethnic killings in Rwanda, the BBC had produced a lengthy documentary that fully confirmed Herman’s controversial analysis, and I discussed this in portions of a follow-up article later that same month:

The year 2014 marked the twentieth anniversary of the killings, and Herman, Peterson, and Black were not the only individuals interested in reexamining the facts. That same year the BBC produced and broadcast an hour long documentary investigation of the Rwanda genocide that came to almost exactly the same conclusions as those authors. Some of Kagame’s former top military commanders were interviewed on camera, revealing that he had been responsible for the assassination of Rwanda’s Hutu president, and then used that crime to provide cover for his renewed invasion of the country and the massacre of its Hutu population. There were also interviews with American academics whose careful quantitative field work contradicted the widely-held narrative of events and instead confirmed that the overwhelming majority of the victims had been Hutu civilians, who died at the hands of Kagame’s Tutsi forces, with interviews of some Hutu survivors. In subsequent years, Kagame had solidified his control through a reign of terror, and any Rwandans who challenged his official account faced imprisonment or death as “Genocide Deniers.” His regime even made efforts to track down and assassinate defectors or political dissidents who had fled the country.

Although I found the facts and interviews presented in the BBC documentary important and persuasive, even more shocking to me was that it had received virtually no coverage in the rest of the Western media in the decade since it had been released, leaving me completely unaware of its existence. For generations, the BBC has been regarded as one of the world’s most prestigious and reputable mainstream sources of news information, yet none of our other media outlets had taken any notice of a major documentary that completely overturned the existing Rwanda narrative.

 

These days our own country’s relations with China are the worst they have been for many decades and the 35th anniversary of the June Fourth Incident is just three weeks away. Based upon past experience, I fully expect our mainstream media will once again give very heavy coverage to that horrifying 1989 massacre of China’s peaceful pro-democracy student protesters in Tiananmen Square, which has become a watershed event of China’s modern history and its relations with the West despite being totally fictional.

A few days ago, our media similarly focused upon the 25th anniversary of the very real American bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, but firmly declared it “accidental,” another absurd falsehood. And the previous month, high-profile stories had noted the 25th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, uniformly described by our media as a deliberate planned campaign of extermination waged by the country’s Hutus against their Tutsi ethnic rivals even though there seems very strong evidence that the actual reality was the other way round.

All of these bring to mind a short passage from one of my 2016 articles that I’ve frequently quoted:

We naively tend to assume that our media accurately reflects the events of our world and its history, but instead what we all too often see are only the tremendously distorted images of a circus fun-house mirror, with small items sometimes transformed into large ones, and large ones into small. The contours of historical reality may be warped into almost unrecognizable shapes, with some important elements completely disappearing from the record and others appearing out of nowhere. I’ve often suggested that the media creates our reality, but given such glaring omissions and distortions, the reality produced is often largely fictional. Our standard histories have always criticized the ludicrous Soviet propaganda during the height of Stalin’s purges or the Ukrainian famine, but in its own way, our own media organs sometimes seem just as dishonest and absurd in their own reporting. And until the availability of the Internet, it was difficult for most of us to ever recognize the enormity of this problem.

If the American political class were to discover what had actually happened in 1989 Beijing, 1994 Rwanda, and 1999 Belgrade, this might have an impact upon world politics and our relations with China and Rwanda. But I do not think that the impact would be large, nor would it change anything about the political issues that currently roil American society. However, the discovery of other important but long-concealed historical facts might do so.

Last Wednesday the top headlines on the front page of the Wall Street Journal reported that Israeli forces had entered Rafah and seized control of the key border crossing into Egypt. This was an important military escalation preparatory to a full invasion of that city now packed with well over a million desperate refugees, an invasion that would enormously increase Palestinian civilian deaths.

But above that article and occupying far more space on the front page was a large photograph showing President Joe Biden, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, and a throng of other leading Washington political figures all gathered together at a solemn public ceremony. The scene was explained by a large headline reading “Holocaust Remembrance Day Observed Amid War.” All this took place shortly after the House had overwhelmingly passed new legislation intended to suppress criticism of Jews or Israel, an important step along the path to ultimately outlawing such behavior.

It might make little difference to our society if most Americans discovered the truth about events in 1989 Beijing or 1999 Belgrade, and few of our citizens care whether Hutus slaughtered Tutsis or it was actually the other way round. But I think that discovering the true history of 1940s Europe would have world-shattering consequences:

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