A student protester puts barricades in the path of an already-burning armored vehicle. A soldier who escaped the vehicle was killed by demonstrators.
Op The World’s Opinion Page van de door George Soros financieel gesteunde website Project Syndicate beweerde de mainstream-opiniemaker Ian Buruma op 2 juni 2019:
What happened in China after the protests were crushed points to another truth. China was not an outlier (uitschieter. svh) in 1989 at all. Illiberal capitalism has since emerged as an attractive model to autocrats all over the world, including in countries that succeeded in throwing off communist rule 30 years ago. The Chinese just got there first.
Buruma leidt zijn betoog in met de volgende opmerking:
What emerged intact from the massacre of defenseless students and other citizens in Beijing's Tiananmen Square was not communism, but a version of authoritarian capitalism on a grand scale.
An anti-government protester holds a rifle in a bus window.
Opnieuw spreekt Buruma van ‘de slachtpartij op weerloze studenten en andere burgers op Beijings Tianamen Plein,’ terwijl op dit plein in 1989 geen ‘massacre’ heeft plaatsgevonden, zoals eveneens verschillende westerse journalisten naderhand hebben bevestigd. Hoewel overal op het plein al wekenlang westerse cameramensen en fotografen bivakkeerden heb ik nergens beelden aangetroffen van Buruma’s ‘massacre.’ Ik heb slechts twee foto’s kunnen vinden waarop vier dode mensen op het Tiananmen Plein te zien zijn. De beroemdste filmbeelden van de studentenopstand in 1989 waren van een magere man met plastic tassen in zijn handen die in zijn ééntje een colonne tanks wist tegen te houden. Die beelden toonden een uiterst beheerst optreden van de Chinese autoriteiten. Voorts heb ik tientallen foto’s van westerse fotografen weten te vinden waarop uitgebrande pantserwagens van het Chinese leger staan afgebeeld. Maandag 3 juni 2019 zette de Amerikaanse journalist Brian Becker onder de kop ‘Tiananmen: The Massacre that Wasn’t’ het volgende uiteen:
At the time the Chinese government’s official account of the events was immediately dismissed out of hand as false propaganda. China reported that about 300 people had died in clashes on June 4 and that many of the dead were soldiers of the Peoples Liberation Army. China insisted that there was no massacre of students in Tiananmen Square and in fact the soldiers cleared Tiananmen Square of demonstrators without any shooting.
The Chinese government also asserted that unarmed soldiers who had entered Tiananmen Square in the two days prior to June 4 were set on fire and lynched with their corpses hung from buses. Other soldiers were incinerated when army vehicles were torched with soldiers unable to evacuate and many others were badly beaten by violent mob attacks.
These accounts were true and well documented. It would not be difficult to imagine how violently the Pentagon and U.S. law enforcement agencies would have reacted if the Occupy movement, for instance, had similarly set soldiers and police on fire, taken their weapons and lynched them when the government was attempting to clear them from public spaces.
In an article on June 5, 1989, the Washington Post described how anti-government fighters had been organized into formations of 100-150 people. They were armed with Molotov cocktails and iron clubs, to meet the PLA who were still unarmed in the days prior to June 4.
What happened in China, what took the lives of government opponents and of soldiers on June 4, was not a massacre of peaceful students but a battle between PLA soldiers and armed detachments from the so-called pro-democracy movement.
'On one avenue in western Beijing, demonstrators torched an entire military convoy of more than 100 trucks and armored vehicles. Aerial pictures of conflagration and columns of smoke have powerfully bolstered the [Chinese] government’s arguments that the troops were victims, not executioners. Other scenes show soldiers’ corpses and demonstrators stripping automatic rifles off unresisting soldiers,' admitted the Washington Post in a story that was favorable to anti-government opposition on June 12, 1989.
Uitgebrande pantserwagens van het Chinese Leger op 4 juni 1989, waarbij tevens talloze militairen werden vermoord.
The Wall Street Journal, the leading voice of anti-communism, served as a vociferous cheerleader for the ‘pro-democracy’ movement. Yet, their coverage right after June 4 acknowledged that many ‘radicalized protesters, some now armed with guns and vehicles commandeered in clashes with the military’ were preparing for larger armed struggles. The Wall Street Journal report on the events of June 4 portrays a vivid picture:
‘As columns of tanks and tens of thousands soldiers approached Tiananmen many troops were set on by angry mobs … [D]ozens 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 beaten to death, was stripped naked and hung from the side of a bus. Another soldier’s corpse was strung at an intersection east of the square.’
In the days immediately after June 4, 1989, the New York Times headlines, articles and editorials used the figure that ‘thousands’ of peaceful activists had been massacred when the army sent tanks and soldiers into the Square. The number that the Times was using as an estimate of dead was 2,600. That figure was used as the go-to number of student activists who were mowed down in Tiananmen. Almost every U.S. media outlet reported ‘many thousands’ killed. Many media outlets said as many 8,000 had been slaughtered.
Tim Russert, NBC’s Washington Bureau Chief, appearing later on Meet the Press said ‘tens of thousands’ died in Tiananmen Square.
The fictionalized version of the ‘massacre’ was later corrected in some very small measure by Western reporters who had participated in the fabrications and who were keen to touch up the record so that they could say they made ‘corrections.’ But by then it was too late and they knew that too. Public consciousness had been shaped. The false narrative became the dominant narrative. They had successfully massacred the facts to fit the political needs of the U.S. government.
‘Most of the hundreds of foreign journalists that night, including me, were in other parts of the city or were removed from the square so that they could not witness the final chapter of the student story. Those who tried to remain close filed dramatic accounts that, in some cases, buttressed the myth of a student massacre,’ wrote Jay Mathews, the Washington Post’s first Bureau Chief in Beijing, in a 1998 article in the Columbia Journalism Review.
Mathews’ article, which includes his own admissions to using the terminology of the Tiananmen Square massacre, came nine years after the fact and he acknowledged that corrections later had little impact. ‘The facts of Tiananmen have been known for a long time. When Clinton visited the square this June, both The Washington Post and The New York Times explained that no one died there [in Tiananmen Square] during the 1989 crackdown. But these were short explanations at the end of long articles. I doubt that they did much to kill the myth.’
At the time all of the reports about the massacre of the students said basically the same thing and thus it seemed that they must be true. But these reports were not based on eyewitness testimony.
In brand gestoken Chinese militair door volgens Buruma 'weerloze studenten,' die voor de democratie zouden zijn geweest.
Desondanks blijft de mainstream-broodschrijver Ian Buruma volhouden dat er dertig jaar geleden sprake was van een ‘massacre of defenseless students and other citizens in Beijing's Tiananmen Square’ door het bewind van Deng Xiaoping. Nu kan men veel zeggen over deze toenmalige Chinese staatsman, maar niet, zoals Buruma doet, dat hij een ‘autocraat’ was, dat wil zeggen: een ‘absolute heerser, een alleenheerser, een despoot of een dictator.’ Hij was weliswaar de leider van het land, maar dan alleen met goedkeuring van de communistische partij. Tijdens zijn regeerperiode kende het land van 1,4 miljard inwoners een radicale economische groei, die zich tot vrij recentelijk ongestoord voortzette, en de goedkeuring van zijn partij kreeg. Hetzelfde geldt voor Xi Jinping, sinds maart 2013 president van de Volksrepubliek China. Ook zijn bewind steunt op de macht van de communistische partij, waarvan hij sinds november 2012 secretaris-generaal is.
Eén van de slechts twee foto's die ik via internet kon vinden van de doden in 1989 op het Tienanman Plein, waar toen talloze westerse journalisten en cameramensen aanwezig waren.
De vraag is dan ook wat Ian Buruma als opiniemaker van de liberale en neoliberale ‘corporate press’ precies bedoelt met het begrip ‘autocraat.’ Was in zijn ogen ook president Obama een ‘autocraat,’ toen hij zijn verkiezingsbelofte ‘change we can believe in’ niet na kwam en als eerste beleidsdaad de financiële macht meer dan 700 miljard dollar toeschoof nadat westerse bankiers de wereld in een ongekende kredietcrisis hadden gestort? Al dat belastinggeld was nodig om het vertrouwen te herstellen in de ‘banksters,’ die ontelbare miljarden aan niet bestaand geld in omloop hadden gebracht, en daarvoor de Amerikaanse samenleving lieten opdraaien, inclusief de meer dan 861,664 Amerikaanse families die hierdoor alleen al in 2008 hun huis verloren.
Het was al in de zestiende eeuw, aan het begin van de moderne tijd, dat de Franse filosoof Michel de Montaigne vaststelde dat ‘de publieke welvaart vereist dat mensen elkaar verraden, en bedriegen, en massaal vermoorden,’ om daaraan toe te voegen dat: ‘En vérité, le mentir est un maudit vice. Nous ne sommes hommes, et ne nous tenons les uns aux autres que par la parole.’
De leugenachtigheid van het liberale c.q. neoliberale systeem heeft niet alleen de vervreemding grenzeloos gemaakt, maar ook de algehele samenhang in de wereld vernietigd. Het gevolg is dat de door Buruma bewonderde neoliberale ideologie een werkelijkheid heeft gecreëerd waarbij:
We have three people in this country owning more wealth than the bottom half of America,
aldus onlangs senator Bernie Sanders, die meedingt naar de Democratische kandidatuur voor het presidentschap. Volgende keer meer over de fake news van de westerse 'corporate press.'
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