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The Putsch Pirates of the Potomac -- Part One

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With all this in mind, the recently released book Ukraine: ZBig's Grand Chessboard & How the West Was Checkmated, by Natylie Baldwin and Kermit Heartsong, is illuminating for a host of reasons. This, not least because -- along with refuting a good deal of the accepted narrative surrounding the event -- tellingly for our purposes herein it dispels any notions that 'T-Square' was indeed an organic, home-grown protest/resistance movement fuelled internally by student-led frustration and anger with the pace of political reform in the post-Mao era.

Their book in fact posits Tiananmen as a another 'case study' of Uncle Sam's long cherished tradition of stirring the geopolitical pot -- fomenting political, economic and social disruption and chaos in countries it sees either as a threat or for some ulterior motive whose respective government (or leader) of the day it wishes to discredit or undermine, and then regardless of the outcome, very effectively portraying it as something quite different from what it actually represented.

Put simply, the events in Beijing of that year "bore all the hallmarks" of what came to be known as 'color-coded' revolutions, essentially coups d'etat cooked up and covertly stage managed by the United States with the express purpose of relieving the target country's government of the day of the burdens of power and replacing it with one more amenable to the perpetual motion feast that represents at any given time Washington's political and economic dictates.

In the case of China, the U.S. wanted to oust Deng Xiaoping -- the redoubtable Chairman Mao's wily successor -- and replace him with Zhao Ziyang, someone within the ruling Politburo the putsch pirates of the Potomac presumably viewed as perhaps more simpatico with said "dictates". It is also reasonable to suspect that with everything that was going down in Eastern Europe at that time, the 'putsch-meisters' experienced a geopolitical 'our time has come' zeitgeist moment, and accordingly hoped to capitalize on the broad anti-Communist, pro-democracy/pro-Western fervor of the times by exporting it to China. Nothing ventured, nothing gained as it were!

Baldwin and Heartsong -- the broader themes of whose book we shall return to in Part Two -- report that the "color revolution" playbook, in effect became the putsch pirates weapon of choice for facilitating regime change in the target nation du jour. Yet they emphasize that despite the claims of Western governments and the MSM about the events in Tiananmen, 'the Chinese government's version of the truth was indeed accurate, and that no massacre had ever taken place'. [My emphasis].

To support this extraordinary revelation, the authors cite a July 1989 cable released by Wikileaks in 2011 sent from Chilean diplomat Carlos Gallo -- who himself witnessed the events on the day -- to his U.S. counterpart. Although space limits a detailed dissection of Gallo's account (which does not necessarily refute people were killed and injured in the eventual crackdown), it is significantly at odds with Western versions. At the very least it places the events of T-Square in a wholly different context, and gives us a vastly different perspective on the final outcome and the decisions taken by the Chinese authorities.

Yet whilst the attempted Beijing putsch failed spectacularly, from a propaganda perspective though it succeeded admirably (the condemnation of the Chinese government's actions was universal and as noted, the official Western narrative of a 'brutal', 'repressive', 'wholesale' "massacre" remains intact), and moreover it crucially afforded a proving ground for similar activities going forward in other countries. Despite the setback in Beijing, the color 'revolutionaries' were on a roll. They'd learnt their lessons well.

(It's entirely plausible the Chinese learnt one or two lessons as well, but such speculative musings -- whilst nevertheless valid and enticing -- are perhaps best left for another time.)

As noted by Baldwin and Heartsong, "color revolutions" represent then something of a subset of "swarm warfare", designed to insidiously infect like a virus the social, political and economic institutions of the target nation. As the contagion spreads, swarm warfare,

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Greg Maybury is a Perth (Australia) based freelance writer. His main areas of interest are American history and politics in general, with a special focus on economic, national security, military and geopolitical affairs, and both US domestic and (more...)
 

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