On Oct. 25 Vote for Guy Fawkes: The only man ever to enter Parliament with honest intentions
Revolutionary Socialist Alliance, Brisbane, Queensland, 1969
(via classe)
Tiananmen Square ‘massacre’ was a myth
By Deirdre Griswold, Workers World
Not one U.S. newspaper, television or radio outlet has reported or commented on these cables released by WikiLeaks, nor on the Telegraph story about them. It is as though they fell into a bottomless chasm.
Is it because the media here don’t believe the report is credible? Hardly.
The New York Times knows it’s credible. Their own Beijing bureau chief at the time, Nicholas Kristof, confirmed it in an extensive article entitled “China Update: How the Hardliners Won,” published in the Sunday Times magazine on Nov. 12, 1989, five months after the supposed massacre in the square.
At the very end of this long article, which purported to give an inside view of a debate within the Chinese Communist Party leadership, Kristof stated categorically: “Based on my observations in the streets, neither the official account nor many of the foreign versions are quite correct. There is no massacre in Tiananmen Square, for example, although there is plenty of killing elsewhere.”
Had there been fighting in Beijing? Absolutely. But there was no massacre of unarmed students in the square. That was an invention by the West, intended to demonize the Chinese government and win public sympathy for a counter-revolution.
The turn toward a market economy under Deng Xiaoping had alienated many workers. There was also a counter-revolutionary element trying to take advantage of popular grievances to completely restore capitalism.
The imperialists were hoping the struggles in Beijing would bring down the Chinese Communist Party and destroy the planned economy — similar to what was to happen two years later in the Soviet Union. They wanted to “open up” China, not to truth, but to the looting of the people’s property by imperialist banks and corporations.
After much wavering at the top, the army was called out and the uprising crushed. China was not broken up like the Soviet Union; its economy has not imploded nor has the standard of living declined. Quite the opposite. Wages and social conditions have been improving at a time when workers elsewhere are being forced backward by a severe capitalist economic crisis.
Despite deep concessions to capitalism, foreign and domestic, China continues to have a planned economy based on a strong state-owned infrastructure.
(via classe)
