An article
from Nury Vittachi
Vittachi was born in Sri Lanka to a Buddhist mother and Muslim
father. He worked for the South China Morning Post until 1997 and has
previously been described as an “outspoken critic of China”. Now read his June
4, 2022 article!
How psy-ops warriors fooled me about Tiananmen Square: a warning
Me? I religiously believed the first for decades. I went to Victoria Park with my candle almost every June for 30 years.
Until I did the research and realized that almost all serious sources, western and Chinese, now support the second version—and that includes journalists and diplomats who were present, academic specialists in “human rights”, historians, and even student protest leaders themselves. Even Wikipedia now acknowledges this. It has been an astoundingly successful deception.
THE MYTH OF THE “Tiananmen
Square massacre” is arguably the most successful disinformation campaign of
modern times, according to western and eastern sources—so much so that proud
psychological warfare specialists recently used it to ADVERTISE their news
manipulation skills. We’ll get to that below.
As everyone knows by now,
there have always been two dramatically different tales about what happened in
Beijing in 1989.
One is the horrific tale
of the “Tiananmen Square massacre”, saying that brutal soldiers entered the
public space and machine-gunned “ten thousand” peaceful student protesters
calling for Western-style democracy. They pulped the bodies by running
over them with tanks, before piling them up and burning them with a
flamethrower. It was unspeakably horrific.
The other version says
that nobody died in Tiananmen Square, although there was violence elsewhere,
causing the deaths of only about 300 people, most of whom were not students but
soldiers—or, to put another way, the same number of violent deaths as on any
random weekend in the United States.
Me? I religiously believed
the first for decades. I went to Victoria Park with my candle almost every June
for 30 years.
Until I did the research
and realized that almost all serious sources, western and Chinese, now support
the second version—and that includes journalists and diplomats who were
present, academic specialists in “human rights”, historians, and even student
protest leaders themselves. Even Wikipedia now acknowledges this. It has been
an astoundingly successful deception.
Media newsrooms support one story, ignoring their own
reporters who tell the truth. Image by Ricardo IV Tamayo/ Unsplash
35
TIANANMEN FACTS YOU NEED TO KNOW
But how did the mainstream
media fool us all for so long? And why do media outlets, such as the BBC,
continue to mislead us? And who were the ghosts in the machine? The full story
could make a stunning book. But you don’t have time for that.. To help readers
make up their own minds, here are 35 facts anyone interested in the topic needs
to know.
Fasten your seatbelts.
We’ll go through it quickly.
1) In 1988, an office was
set up in China by a relatively new organization with an innocent name – the
National Endowment for Democracy.
At that time, we reporters
HAD NO IDEA it was a CIA spin-off, designed to build relationships with
anti-government activists overseas for the purpose of spreading disinformation
and destabilising communities in the interests of the US.
2) In the following
months, CIA agents helped Chinese student activists form an anti-government
movement, and even provided typewriters, fax machines and other equipment to
help them spread their message—this information came from a US official.
The CIA was already active, an official told the Vancouver
Sun newspaper.
G-SPAN Image of Bob
Helvey
3) A key player was
Colonel Robert Helvey, a 30-year Pentagon veteran of destabilization operations
in Asia. He “trained, in Hong Kong, the student leaders from Beijing in mass
demonstration techniques, which they were to subsequently use in the Tiananmen
Square incident of June 1989,” according to a highly detailed academic paper by
B. Raman, the former director of India’s foreign intelligence agency.
4) When protests broke out
in China in April 1989, demonstrators were not calling for democracy,
but purer socialism, free of corruption and inequality, which were endemic at
the time. Students carried pictures of Chairman Mao and sang the Chinese
national anthem repeatedly.
Western hybrid warfare
includes two key principles:
1) Locate and amplify
GENUINE local grievances, and
2) Rebrand them as calls
for western liberal democracy and freedom.
Students called for corruption-free communism, carrying Mao
pictures and singing the national anthem repeatedly. They needed their message
to be rebranded.
5) The US State Department
withdrew US ambassador Winston Lord, and replaced him with James Lilley, a
veteran CIA agent who had run operations smuggling people in and out of China.
6) The Chinese protesters
were advised by persons unknown to add the word “democracy” in English to their
banners, and say they were calling for “freedom”, rather than their actual
goal, a purer form of communism.
As Westerners became involved, the messages changed to Western ideals, written in the English language, and in this case displaying a pastiche of a well-known saying “give me liberty or give me death” from a US politician from 1775.
A replica in Vancouver
7) The protesters were
advised to create a statue and began work on May 27. But, as good communists,
students chose to make it as unlike the Statue of Liberty as possible, basing
their statue (replica on the right) on the work of Russian revolutionary
communist sculptor Vera Mukhina (above). The students were not at all a
homogenous group, but they were socialists.
8) On May 28th, 1989, Gene
Sharp, America’s top undercover street protest strategist, flew into Beijing
with his assistant Bruce Jenkins to offer help. “The students in the square
were operating with great commitment and bravery but they didn’t know what the
hell they were doing,” Sharp later wrote.
Gene Sharp and his assistant flew in on May 28 and stayed
until June 6, 1989.
9) As May turned into
June, the energy level dropped and there was need to bring things to a head.
Student leader Chai Ling gave her infamous talk, where she warned of a massacre
“which would spill blood like a river through Tiananmen Square”. She added that
she expected to die shortly – but confusingly also said that she no longer
intended to stay in China, but wanted to move to the United States. What did
that mean? It was baffling at the time, but it would all make sense later.
We now know that student
leaders were promised US passports, CIA-run safe passage out of China, and
enrolment in top US universities.
10) But there was a problem. Things were not coming to a head. The Chinese government was remaining remarkably restrained, as was the army. Because the main body of the protesters were asking for purer communism, people were politically on the same page – students and soldiers had good relationships, and even shared food and sang together.
Since all sides agreed that corruption-free communism was
what society needed, relations with soldiers were generally very positive.
Violence finally started
when a mysterious group of thugs, some from ethnic minorities, triggered a
fight in Muxidi, five kilometers away, attacking army buses with petrol bombs
and setting them alight, burning the occupants to death. This was unexpected,
because gasoline was rationed and hard for ordinary people to obtain. Soldiers
who managed to escape the burning buses were beaten to death. The word
“massacre” could be used for this atrocity—although that doesn’t fit the
western narrative, since it was soldiers who died. Other military men arrived
in Muxidi and, infuriated at the sight of their slaughtered colleagues, shot at
protesters (mostly unionists rather than students): there were many more tragic
deaths, this time of civilians.
The article is long, you can read the rest from the following link:
https://www.fridayeveryday.com/how-psy-ops-warriors-fooled-me-about-tiananmen-square-a-warning/
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