A few US journalists who reported a massacre later retracted the claim, including the New York Times' Nicholas Kristof. Looking at the evidence 15 years after the alleged massacre, Robert Marquand wrote in the Christian Science Monitor that "There was no massacre of students on the Square.""
Among the responses to the article is an offer by a journalist to make available to you free of charge for this month of June an online copy of his book. I have not read the book, and I do not know the journalist. However, in my experience the only people who swim against the stream are people who are fighting for the truth. Swimming against the stream is not the way to further one's career.
I am not an expert on Tiananmen Square. I did speak to high government officials and to graduate students in Beijing in 2006, and they said that there was no massacre. There was some violence off the square where police were attacked with Molotov cocktails as were the unarmed police in Kiev.
In case you might think that such a story as the Tiananmen Square Massacre could not be concocted, keep in mind that the US government repeatedly told the US public that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, that the US government sent Secretary of State Colin Powell to lie to the UN about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and that Powell has publicly expressed his shame at allowing himself to be used in such a sordid way, and that the print and TV media echoed endlessly the Bush regime's lies. The New York Times allowed Judith Miller to drive the momentum toward war with her false reports.
Remember, too, the government's and media's lies about Iranian Nukes, Assad's use of chemical weapons, the lies about Gaddafi, and the ongoing lies about events in Ukraine. The massacres of civilians in eastern and southern Ukraine by the Kiev government that are occurring as I write are real, and there is no protest from Washington or from European capitals.
The transition from communism to capitalism in China and the move to more open government left China in a vulnerable position. I suspect that Washington tried to take advantage of the opportunity to embarrass the government and possibly even to overthrow it. Washington's successful coup in Ukraine is the model. The students in Tiananmen Square were the PR part of the plan, but there were armed elements, as in Ukraine, whose purpose was to introduce violence. Only the Chinese did not fall for it. The government dispersed the students peacefully but put down the armed components elsewhere in the city with force.
I leave it to you to inform yourself and to make up your own mind. You might find Wei Ling Chua's book helpful in that regard.
Tiananmen Truth: free book to counter media disinformation (limited time only, please spread the message)
By Wei Ling Chua
The annual Global Attitude Survey (2002 -- 2013) conducted by the Washington based independent think tank, The PEW reveals that since 2005, the Chinese government has consistently enjoyed the world's highest level of citizen satisfaction at above 80%, while most Western governments received a mere 30% or below.
At a time, when the Chinese government enjoys a rising people satisfaction from 82% in 2012 to 85% in 2013, the Washington Post published an article on June 4, 2014 under The Post's View titled "Despite China's economic growth, its people's discontent can't be stifled." The National Interest also ran an article titled "Tiananmen: Could It Happen Again?" with the same depressing tone again the popularity of the Chinese government.
While it was reported in 2004 by The Christian Science Monitor that the Human Rights Watch decided not to publish in 1989 their own 52-page eye witnesses' report that confirmed the Chinese side of the story, the Human Rights Watch continues to release articles to my (subscriber) inbox 25 years later with titles to suggest a massacre at Tiananmen Square. This is the latest example: "Q&A: Witnessing The Aftermath of The Tiananmen Square Massacre."
Go to Paul Craig Roberts to read the rest of Wei Ling Chau's article.
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