For decades, Western media have been narrating the same story about China being this brutal “dictatorship” whose people are killed at the hands of the criminal communist regime, giving the Tiananmen Square massacre as a prime example of the brutality of the Chinese government, wherein supposedly scores of students were killed at the hands of the People’s Liberation Army. However, a new book emerged proving that these claims are false and have no foundation to them except for Washington’s aspirations to tarnish the image of the Chinese Communist Party.
Atrocity Fabrication and Its Consequences: How Fake News Shapes World Order, a new book by A. B. Abrams, highlights that there never were any killings in the infamous Tiananmen Square back in 1989 as had been spread by Western propaganda for decades, and it was revealed that the entire affair was but a mere attempt at showing China as the villain in the geopolitical arena. The book underlines that no killings, let alone a massacre as is proclaimed, took place in Tiananmen Square.
How did the U.S. succeed in manipulating the mainstream narrative and have millions upon millions of people believe that China initiated a mass murder of its own people—young college students—crushing them with tanks and shooting them down with machine guns? The answer is simple: the manipulation of public perception through the press. This could be done using media out of context and providing an incomplete version of the truth.
For example, the most infamous piece of media “documenting” the crime to ever exist is a video showing a tank marching onto a person alleged to have been a student, and right as the tank gets close enough to the young man and stops, the video is cut, with there being some text accompanying the video hinting or proclaiming that the tank went on to run over the protester. However, that could not be further from the truth. In reality, other protesters rushed to the scene and accompanied him from there as the tank was standing in place waiting for him to comply and get out of its way.
The book argues that all the acts committed by the United States were in a bid to “justify wars of conquest and exploitation” and generate multi-billion-dollar profits for the notorious military-industrial complex, as reported by CovertAction Magazine.
Abrams highlighted that the Tiananmen Square protests initially took place not as a push for Westernization or the downfall of the Chinese government. Instead, their primary focus was on reinforcing the principles of China’s 1949 Communist Revolution and addressing the issue of corrupt officials who had deviated from Maoist principles.
This movement encompassed not only students but also a significant number of workers, who exhibited a stronger anti-CCP stance. Their collective objective aimed at the establishment of a socialist democracy within the framework of the movement.
The book cited a cable from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing that WikiLeaks published in 2016. The leak included reports on the eyewitness account of a Chilean diplomat and his wife who were present when the PLA made it to Tiananmen Square to disperse the protesters. The pair made it in and out of the square numerous times without any harassment and observed no mass firing of weapons into the crowds. They never saw any use of lethal force, to begin with.
Moreover, the book cited former Washington Post Beijing Bureau chief Jay Mathews who, in 1998, admitted that “all verified eyewitness accounts say that the students who remained in the square when troops arrived were allowed to leave peacefully.”
It also cited Reuters correspondent Graham Earnshaw, who spent the night of June 3-4 at the center of Tiananmen Square and reported that most of the students left the square peacefully with the remainder of them being persuaded to do the same.
As is customary, the main source the Western media used to claim that a massacre took place was an anonymous student from Qinghua University making claims to the Hong Kong press, who then made it to the British media.
Still, BBC‘s Beijing correspondent James Miles said there was no massacre.
“Western reporting had conveyed the wrong impression and protesters who were still in the square when the army reached it were allowed to leave after negotiations.”
The narrative was also completely spun out of proportion, with the perpetrators being painted as the victims of a crime that was never committed in the first place. The book underlined that those who did die in Beijing during the events lost their lives in street battles between the PLA and insurgents far from the square. Reports from the U.S. Department of State underlined that the unarmed PLA officers were attacked with petrol bombs, burning many alive.
Uyghurs, another ‘crime’ China committed
The hoax built around Tiananmen Square was a blueprint for U.S. media campaigns aimed at showing the Chinese government in a bad light, as Washington went on to accuse Beijing of perpetrating a genocide against the Uyghur people in Xinjiang province.
The book stressed that the claims about the so-called Uyghur genocide relied on nothing but hardline extremist U.S.-funded anti-China groups. Namely, they were funded by the CIA-affiliated National Endowment for Democracy, which was tasked with carrying out what the notorious spy agency had done alone under the covers for decades.
Amid the claims of Beijing genociding the Uyghurs, the Uyghur population in Xinjiang saw an increase of 25% between 2010 and 2018 instead of the population experiencing a contraction. Even facilities the West claimed to have been “concentration camps” in which Uyghurs were killed en masse and “brainwashed” or “indoctrinated” appeared to have been a logistics park, a regular detention center, and elementary and middle schools.
Xinjiang looks good, safe, and secure, and all the people I spoke with seemed happy about it, former London Metropolitan Police Officer Jerry Grey, who spent a lot of time traveling in Xinjiang, said.
“Uyghurs in China have been growing faster than the majority Han Chinese in part because they weren’t subject to the one-child policy, they have 20,000 mosques built […] Uyghur children can get into top universities easier than Han Chinese, and have halal foods prepared for them in canteens and they have a prayer area on campus,” Daniel Dumbrill, a Canadian businessman and Chinese political analyst said.
“Portraying an adversary as committing particularly egregious crimes, especially when one intends to initiate military action or other hostile measures against the adversary, has consistently provided an effective means of moving public and international opinion and justifying [US imperial] actions,” Abrams said in his book.
Yugoslavia
The book also shed light on the U.S. propaganda focused in the 1990s on Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic, a socialist who sought to keep Yugoslavia together, accusing him of genocide in Kosovo and elsewhere.
Milosevic, a socialist, aimed to maintain the unity of Yugoslavia and prevent its fragmentation. This effort was driven by his desire to counteract Western nations’ potential expansion of influence and the establishment of U.S. military bases in a strategically vital area.
Interestingly, the most severe instances of ethnic cleansing during the war were actually executed by the Croats through Operation Storm, a plan devised by the CIA.
The Clinton administration additionally provided support to the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which sought to establish an ethnically homogeneous Albanian state. This endeavor involved targeting Serbs and other minority groups.
Financing from the drug trade played a significant role in sustaining the KLA, leading the State Department to label it a “terrorist organization”. The NATO North Atlantic Council identified the KLA as the primary instigator of violence in Kosovo.
The narrative of genocide and the Serbs running concentration camps once again heavily relied on the testimony of an individual who openly admitted to not witnessing any killings—propagandist reporter Roy Gutman. This account was eventually discredited when a British journalist visited an alleged death camp, discovering that the inmates had voluntarily sought refuge from the nearby conflict in surrounding villages.
Yugoslavia was a highly successful state that united numerous contemporary Baltic nations under the banner of communism, and it met its demise when the United States and NATO waged a war against it, killing hundreds of civilians in the notorious bombing campaign it launched on the country in order to “sow democracy” there.
Syria
The same man who was one of the main reasons behind the collapse of Yugoslavia was almost able to do the same with Syria. Gutman played a major role in another similar war launched over a decade later against Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad.
The propaganda effort pushed by Gutman was similar to the one he peddled earlier, with it including the mass murder of people at the hands of the government without any evidence backing up these claims.
Western media and regimes falsely accused Al-Assad of carrying out attacks with chemical weapons against his own people while the attacks were likely carried out by U.S.-backed terrorists.
Back in November, the Grayzone website published a series of leaks that expose how senior officials of the OPCW censored this explosive finding in the Syrian city of Douma.
In its investigation, the website stated that “in the early days of the OPCW’s investigation of an alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria, expert toxicologists ruled out chlorine gas as the cause of death for more than 40 civilians reported at the scene.”
The Korean War: Another ‘atrocity’
The Korean War, a war peddled by the United States that wound up splitting one people into two, was presented to the public as a “humanitarian intervention” aimed at rescuing the local population from communist forces. To establish this narrative, the Pentagon sponsored a propaganda film, titled The Crime of Korea narrated by Humphrey Bogart. This film falsely attributed atrocities committed by the South Korean government, with U.S. support, to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
This narrative gained traction within the U.S. media and significantly bolstered the perception of the war as “morally justified”. An influential Time magazine column titled “Barbarity” furthered this perspective by describing a communist massacre in Taejon, which subsequent investigations revealed was actually perpetrated by South Korean troops allied with the U.S.
Charles E. Potter, Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Korean Atrocities and appointed by Senator Joseph McCarthy, notorious for McCarthyism, which was responsible for the persecution of anyone even thought to be affiliated with any leftist organization or held any left-wing beliefs, emphasized the inhumane acts committed by U.S. adversaries. He recounted gruesome incidents, such as a “Red Chinese” nurse using garden shears to sever a GI’s toes without anesthesia and American POWs being subjected to torture with bamboo spears and confinement in small iron cages until death, with maggots infesting their eye sockets.
However, the accounts presented by Potter contradicted the testimonies of American and British POWs, who indicated that their treatment by captors was generally decent, although they had to attend lectures on communism.
Meanwhile, U.S.-run POW camps subjected DPRK and Chinese prisoners to severe brutality. These inmates were massacred for singing revolutionary songs and subjected to violent coercion to renounce repatriation to their homelands. This strategy aimed to score Cold War propaganda points by portraying defection to the West as a desire born out of the perceived superiority of its political-economic system.
The campaign of propaganda against the DPRK extended well into the 21st century, with increasingly extravagant made-up tales to portray the country in a negative light. Many of these stories were propagated by DPRK defectors, some of whom were influenced or incentivized by South Korea and possibly the CIA.
Shin Dong-hyuk, a defector, collaborated with Washington Post correspondent Blaine Harden to write a highly successful book Escape From Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West. However, this account was later revealed to be a fabrication.
Yeonmi Park, another defector, who charges a speaking fee of $12,500 on Western media outlets, even made the ludicrous claim that her friend’s mother was executed for watching a Hollywood movie.
Lee Soon-ok, yet another defector, testified before a House committee in 2004 that she had witnessed Christians being tortured and burned to death in DPRK political prisons. However, the head of the North Korean Defectors’ Association, Chang In-suk, contradicted this, asserting that Lee was never a political prisoner.
Abrams noted that fabricated reports about DPRK state executions of prominent figures often coincided with the surprising reappearance of these supposedly deceased individuals on camera.
In a CNN report from May 2015, it was alleged that DPRK leader Kim Jong Un had ordered the poisoning and killing of his aunt, Kim Kyong Hui. However, Mrs. Kim appeared in public in January 2020, highlighting the inaccuracy of the claim.
Abrams suggested that these false defector testimonies and biased media coverage were embraced in the West due to the “self-gratification” they provided, seemingly affirming the notion of Western superiority over the least Westernized state. Additionally, they often served as justifications for hostile policies, including economic sanctions, against the DPRK.
The book talks about the demonization of the Russian and Vietnamese governments, as well as that of Libya and Iraq in a bid to validate the Gulf War, while also revisiting numerous cases of U.S. propaganda aimed at subverting its foes while giving impetus to itself and its beliefs in a bid to uphold the unipolar system that it has been trying so hard to keep propped up—to no avail. The recounting of the countless crimes committed by the United States comes as no surprise to many as the latter has done so for decades, and continues to do so, exploiting its hold on the media to give itself the moral high ground over its geopolitical enemies.
(Article courtesy: CovertAction Magazine and Al Mayadeen, an Arab Independent Media Satellite Channel based in the Lebanese capital Beirut.)
