Hello and welcome to the Iron Fist Velvet glove podcast, episode 457, a special one for you, dear listener.

It's just me, Trevor, AKA the Iron Fist.

No Scott, no Joe.

Because on this occasion I'm going to be talking to you about Tiananmen Square and the allegations around that incident and trying to get to the bottom of what really happened.

And that's going to require me basically reading out to you various reports.

And it doesn't really, it's not going to be really suitable for a panel discussion.

So I spoke to, well, I messaged Scott and Joe and said, let me have my full rant on Tiananmen Square in this episode and then next week they can chip in with their comments and thoughts about what I've got to say.

So.

So it's going to be a long one.

Sit back and relax.

On this one, I have to say my original thoughts were that I was hoping to show that maybe the incident wasn't as bad as what it seemed to be.

And you know, cut the Chinese some slack because they've done a lot of good things over the past 70 years in getting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.

But incredibly, as I investigated this topic, I found that it basically matches the sorts of things that we've been talking about over the past couple of years, in particular, which is American foreign policy and involvement.

Yes, America was involved in this episode trying to initiate a color revolution.

And it also involves cover up in the media and a propaganda war.

So I was surprised by that and maybe I shouldn't have been.

Some of you may be thinking, oh, there's Trevor, jumped on his favorite hobby horse again and he's often running with some strange conspiracy theories.

But I can assure you that what I will talk to you about in this episode is, is well documented by multiple sources.

And while I have my prejudices and biases, I think you'll see that there's plenty of evidence for what I'm talking about.

Anyway, let's kick off with a review of my discussion with Scott from episode 454, which was basically the genesis of the episode you're about to listen to.

So it doesn't mean that you can't criticize other cultures.

But I think he's saying two things is just because it's different and it's not a western style democracy, we shouldn't be so arrogant to say it's not as good as ours.

And secondly, this has to come from within.

Change has to come from within and can't be imposed externally.

Yeah, the last time they tried that, they were gunned down in the streets.

Scott, how many stories have you heard over the years about various events.

Square was bullshitted.

How, how many people died in Tiananmen Square?

I don't know.

A thousand?

I don't know.

2.

I couldn't tell you how.

How many, how many other, bigger atrocities have been committed by every other country on the planet.

Yeah.

Since that time.

But, you know, it' of those things you're talking about it flowering from within.

The last time they tried, they were gunned down in the streets.

Scott, It's a, it's not the story that you think it is.

Tiananmen Square.

Okay, no worries at all.

So they weren't actually killed in Tiananmen Square.

It was in surrounding streets.

But, but even if you took all of that as gospel and you weighed up what happened there with what has happened in other countries, like no country is perfect to just say, oh, fucking forget about the millions of people dragged out of poverty and the enormous changes in the country because of 2,000 people killed in a demonstration, when thousands are killed in every Western country every few years in various things.

It's just really unfair.

I think that the Western countries are probably involved in atrocities against other countries, not necessarily against their own people.

I mean, America, the lack of health care kills millions, but yes, it does.

Killing dissidents in their own countries all over the place, one way or in one way or another.

So where is that happening, though?

Well, you.

It.

So it's not happening in any Western countries.

I'm not aware of it.

Right.

People are not getting locked up.

Yeah, you've got some people that are being locked up for sure.

They're being imprisoned here in Australia, and that is wrong.

And then.

Well, the fact that they're killing foreigners and not their own people then is just okay.

No, but I just don't think that's.

I don't think that's the same thing as what the, what you, what you're trying to do is you're trying to get a, an equivalent argument there against the west compared to China.

And I just think to myself, they're two completely different things.

Yeah.

So I, I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you hang your hat on if Tiananmen Square didn't happen, what would your view of China be?

Well, my view of China would be okay, you know, it's, it's, it's a, it's a country that has moved.

You know, it has done incredibly well dragging out hundreds of millions of People out of poverty, there is no doubt there.

They have achieved a hell of a lot.

They have got themselves on the road to being self sustaining and everything else.

They have done all that, and they should be applauded for that.

However, they are also involved in some questionable actions in the South China Sea.

They are involved in invading Tibet.

They.

I don't know what's happening with the Uyghurs, but something is happening out there.

It's one of those things they.

Are you expecting perfection from them that you don't expect from other countries?

No, I'm expecting perfection from all of them.

Right.

But you seem to hold them to a higher account or you.

I don't think I'm more critical.

I'm more critical of them, for sure, because, you know, they.

They shot their own students in Tiananmen Square.

You know, it was a very brutal crackdown, which was completely unnecessary because all they were wanting was.

Was democracy, and they were shot for it.

And they use their own army against their own people, which is not a very nice thing to do.

Hmm.

All right.

I'm gonna have to do a Tiananmen Square episode.

I can tell.

You can do that if you want to.

That's no problem at all.

Then you're probably gonna.

You're probably gonna piss over everything I've just said, which is fine.

You know, I.

Well, I am planning to piss over everything you just said.

That is true, Scott.

You've picked me there.

But hey, before we get on to further details about Tiananmen Square, one of the things that came from that discussion was.

Was really Scott talking about how this was a government taking action against its own people, which was particularly reprehensible.

And I was struggling for examples of that from other countries, if you like.

And in the days following that discussion, I got a message from Mark Clavell, one of the listeners, and he pointed me to a few incidents which I'll refer to now before we get into the weeds on Tiananmen Square.

So Mark wrote to me and said, for Scott, the history of university students being killed during demonstrations in America, particularly in the context of the 20th century, includes several tragic incidents that have marked significant moments in American social and political history.

Here are some notable events.

Number one.

Kent State shootings, 1970.

Details.

During an anti Vietnam War protest, members of the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd of students, killing four and wounding nine.

The students killed were Alison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Shara and William Schroeder.

This event, often referred to as the Kent State massacre, triggered a Nationwide student strike and significantly influenced public opinion regarding the Vietnam War.

Same year Jackson state killings.

Just 11 days after the Kent State incident, police opened fire on a group of students protesting against racial injustice, killing two Philip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green and wounding 12 others.

And then in 1968, two years earlier, the Orangeburg massacre at South Carolina State University.

This was one of the earliest incidents where students were killed during protests.

This event followed a series of protests over the desegregation of all white bowling alley.

Highway patrolmen and local police fired into a crowd of students, killing three Henry Smith, Samuel Hammond Jr.

And Delano Middleton and wounding 28 others.

So thanks, Mark, for that example of a western government which killed its own citizens who were protesting.

Okay, back to the main topic at hand.

So for younger listeners, you may not be aware of quite a famous incident in political history.

When Bob Hawke was talking to the press about the Tiananmen Square massacre and he gave a graphic description of what he thought had happened.

And no doubt Scott has that in mind when he thinks about China and its human rights record.

I'm going to play a clip of that Bob Hawke speech right now.

When all those who had not managed to get away were either dead or wounded, foot soldiers went through the square bayoneting or shooting anybody who was still alive.

They had orders that nobody in the square be spared, and children and young girls were slaughtered as mercilessly as the many wounded soldiers from other units there.

Anti personnel carriers and tanks then ran backwards and forwards over the bodies of the slain until they were reduced to pulp, after which bulldozers moved in to push the remains into piles, which were then incinerated by troops with flamethrowers.

Incredibly, despite the horrors and the risks, we have witnessed acts of indescribable bravery on our television screens.

A lone man standing in front of a row of tanks, the strength of his will stalling the might of armor as it rolled down a Beijing street.

Young people confronting lines of armed troops not in anger but in disbelief that an army could unleash force on its own people with such cruelty.

Thousands have been killed and injured, victims of a leadership that seems determined to hang onto the reins of power at any cost, at awful human cost.

A pretty graphic description, I think you'll agree.

The only problem is it is completely false.

None of that happened at all.

Bob Hawke believed what he was saying because he had received a report from our embassy in China, which was relying on reports from the British embassy.

But it was complete.

Even more incredibly, within a few days after the so called Incident.

Numerous journalists and Westerners knew that this account of bodies being run over, mashed up 10,000 of them, and then torched was a complete fabrication.

Yet a fixing of the story and a revealing of the truth never happened.

But it's easy to see how people like Scott can remember that speech and take it to heart and form a view of the Communist Party of China.

So in this episode, I'll attempt to set the record straight.

You might be worried that I'm going to be quoting Chinese government sources as a means of toning down the severity of what happened, but I don't have to.

There's plenty of Western sources that will debunk the common narrative.

For example, here's a quote.

As far as can be determined from the available evidence, no one died that night in Tiananmen Square.

Who would make such a blatant propagandist claim?

Chinese Communist Party?

Nope.

It was J.

Matthews, who was Washington Post's Beijing bureau chief in 1989, and he wrote this for Columbia Journalism Review.

Here are a few more examples of what Western journalists said about what happened in Tiananmen Square in June 1989.

CBS News we saw no bodies, injured people, ambulances or medical personnel.

In short, nothing to even suggest, let alone prove, that a massacre had occurred in Tiananmen Square.

Thus, wrote CBS News reporter Richard Roth, BBC News I was one of the foreign journalists who witnessed the events that night.

There was no massacre on Tiananmen Square.

BBC reporter James Miles, who wrote in 2009 the New York Times, June 13, 1989 reporter Nicholas Kristof, who was in Beijing at that time, wrote, state television has even shown film of students marching peacefully away from the Tiananmen Square shortly after dawn as proof that they, the protesters, were not slaughtered.

In that article, he also debunked an unidentified student protester who had claimed in a sensational article that Chinese soldiers with machine guns simply mowed down peaceful protesters in Tiananmen Square.

Reuters Graham Earnshaw was in the Tiananmen Square on the night of June 3rd.

He didn't leave the square until the morning of June 4th.

He wrote in his memoir that the military came, negotiated with the students and made everyone, including himself, leave peacefully, and that nobody died in the square.

But did people die in China?

Yes, probably.

About 200 to 300 people died in clashes in various parts of Beijing around June 4, and about half of those who died were soldiers and cops.

I'll get to that later.

WikiLeaks A WikiLeaks cable from the US embassy in Beijing sent in July 1989 also reveals the eyewitness accounts of a Latin American diplomat and his wife.

They were able to enter and leave the Tiananmen Square several times and were not harassed by troops remaining with students until the final withdrawal.

The diplomat said there were no mass shootings in the square or the monument.

What about the tank man?

Well, if you watch the whole video, you can see that the tank stopped and even let the tank man jump on the tank.

He eventually walked away unharmed.

By the way, it's obvious from the footage that the tanks were leaving the vicinity of Tiananmen Square, not heading towards it.

Let's go to a source that is a bit closer to home.

Gregory Clark was the first post war Australian diplomat, trained in Chinese with postings to Hong Kong, Moscow and the UN before retiring in protest against the Vietnam War.

After PhD studies at the ANU, he became Japan correspondent for the Australian.

A spell in Canberra's Prime Minister's department led to professorships at Tokyo's Sophia University and Emeritus President of Tamar University, Tokyo.

He wrote an article that appeared in the John Meningieu blog and I'll just read a few paragraphs from that.

We are told that on the night of June 3, 1989, there was a massacre of protesting students in Beijing's iconic Tiananmen Square.

The New York Times story reduced Bob Hawke to tears.

Troops with machine guns mowing down hundreds of peacefully protesting students at the center of the square.

To get the true story, begin by entering the word Tiananmen in Google Search.

There you will find some strange, unexplained photos of large Chinese crowds gazing at the corpses of gruesomely lynched, incinerated or mutilated Chinese soldiers.

The photos clearly cannot be faked, so why the lack of Western media attention?

A bit further on, he goes on, as the regime struggled with how to solve mounting problems caused by the lengthy student occupation in the square.

The authorities, presumably believing their own propaganda about the regime loving masses, had the brilliant idea sarcasm there of using buses and subway trains to send in unarmed soldiers to clear the students from the square.

In retrospect, however, sending in unarmed soldiers was a very bad idea.

The square was surrounded by some very unloving crowds that had been gathering in the days and weeks beforehand, some armed with Molotov cocktails.

Those unarmed regime soldiers were an open invitation to attacks of the most gruesome kind.

The US Embassy reports have described elderly ladies at subway exits telling the soldiers to go back to their families.

Today we only look at the photos of dozens of burned out vehicles in the Beijing streets to have some idea of what did happen.

The people with the Molotov cocktails would have done their thing and the unarmed soldiers inside would have been incinerated in droves.

And again, there are photos to prove it.

Badly burned soldiers sheltering in doorways and on overpass staircases.

He then goes on, well, what happens when you incinerate soldiers and string up their charred bodies for public display?

The formerly unarmed soldiers ceased to be unarmed and set out to wreak a violent revenge on anyone or everyone who they think might have been involved in the earlier gruesome atrocities.

So he's saying that was the real story of Tiananmen.

Unarmed soldiers burnt to a crisp and strung up in neighboring streets and then the military police arming up and retaliating.

In his article he complains about the lack of media attention of the atrocities committed by some of the protesters towards the soldiers.

He says the US Embassy report of a Chinese soldier being killed by students as he approached Tiananmen Square never got coverage.

An Australian Embassy report of a disemboweled soldier in front of its premises wearing nothing more than a penis in his mouth seems to have done little to warn our ABC that the Tiananmen story has two sides.

For some reason, when it comes to reporting China, our Western media feel free to see only the side they want to see, even when it is invented.

I'm now going to move to an article that appeared in the World affairs blog and under the subheading so what exactly happened in Beijing in 1989?

The article reads as follows.

To understand the chaos, let's start with the two most important people in this story.

Hu Yaobang was the chairman and General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party.

He was a reformer and was liked by young people and he died on April 15, 1989.

Without his death, there would probably have been no drama in China that year.

College students initially gathered at the Tiananmen Square only to mourn his death.

Within a day or two after Yaobang's death, the USA realised that hundreds of thousands of young people would be congregating in Beijing.

It was the perfect time for a coup since the rest of the world was dismantling communism that year.

Thus, on April 20, five days after Yaobang's death, James Lilly was appointed as the US Ambassador to China and he was a 30 year veteran from the CIA.

Dear Listener, it was no coincidence that five days later a CIA veteran was appointed US Ambassador.

An article from the Vancouver sun described the role of the CIA.

The Central Intelligence Agency had sources among Tiananmen Square protesters.

And for months before the protests, the CIA had been helping student activists form the anti government movement to help the US Intelligence.

There were two important people, George Soros and Xiao Yingzhang.

Maybe that's Zhao Xinyang.

Anyway, Soros is legendary for organizing grassroots movement, and he donated a million dollars, which was a lot of money in China in those days, and he donated it to the Fund for the Reform and Opening of China.

And that was in 1986.

So over the next three years, the Soros group had cultivated and trained many pro democracy student leaders who would spring into action in 1989.

The Ned National Endowment for Democracy that we've talked about before also opened offices in China in 1988.

And it's another regime change organization that we've talked about.

And who would allow all these Western fake NGOs?

Well, Zhao Qian, who was the Premier of China and the General Secretary of the Communist Party.

Incredibly, he was a big fan of privatization.

And Milton Freeman, what was he doing in the Communist Party?

His close advisor, Chen Yizi, headed China's Institute for Economic and Structural Reform, an influential neoliberal think tank.

Goodness me.

Even China was beset by neoliberal think tanks.

So by late May, students on the extreme spectrum were openly calling for the removal of Jiang Jiabing, overthrow the Communist Party and making Xiao Ziyang the new capitalist democratic leader of China.

Another Westerner who played a significant role in the Tiananmen Square agitations is Gene Sharp, the author of Color Revolution Manuals and the subject of an acclaimed documentary called how to Start a Revolution.

He was in Beijing for nine days during the protests and wrote about it.

Of course, he didn't reveal his role, but it's not hard to imagine.

He worked closely with the Pentagon, the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy, et cetera, for decades and has a record of fermenting uprisings all over the world.

He arrived in China in time for the mischief.

So during the few weeks of the Tiananmen protest, millions of dollars flowed in from us, uk, Taiwan, Hong Kong to support the Color Revolution.

Propaganda also played a key role.

The Voice of America, that radio station was broadcast every day during these few weeks to spread all kinds of fake news and anti CCP propaganda.

So the influence of Westerners in the square is obvious when you look at the large signs, many of them in English expressing American ideals.

I mean, what kind of Chinese student protester would in English have a sign saying give me democracy or give me death?

Anyway, a couple of Other important facts the government did not impose martial law until May 20, and there were no major clashes between the military and the people until the very end.

In the next article I'm going to give you some accounts by individuals of what exactly happened, but I'll just finish off with this particular article because it says in one part here a massacre was needed to bring down the Communist Party.

When it didn't happen, the narrative of massacre was created because perception is reality.

History is written by winners, and the people with the best narratives are winners.

It's a feedback loop.

Got another article here, this one by Nuri Vitachi, again printed in the John Menadieu blog.

How Psyops Warriors Fooled Me About Tiananmen Square A Warning the myth of the Tiananmen Square massacre is arguably the most successful disinformation campaign of modern times, according to Western and Eastern sources.

So much so that proud psychological warfare specialists recently used it to advertise their news manipulation skills.

As everyone knows by now, there's always been two dramatically different tales about what happened in Beijing in 1989.

One is the horrific tale of the massacre, saying that brutal soldiers entered the public square and machine gunned 10,000 peaceful student protesters.

They pulped the bodies by running over them with tanks before piling them up, burning them with a flamethrower.

The other version says nobody died in Tiananmen Square, although there was violence elsewhere causing the death of about 300 people, most of whom were not students but soldiers.

This right of this article says me.

I religiously believed the first for decades.

I went to Victoria park with my candle almost every year in June for 30 years until I did the research and realized that almost all serious sources, Western and Chinese, now support the second version.

The writer gives 35 Tiananmen facts you need to know, and I'm just going to pick and choose some of these because it doubles up on stuff that I've already said.

1 In 1988 an office was set up in China by a relatively new organisation with an innocent name, the National Endowment for Democracy.

It was a CIA spin off designed to build relationships with anti government activists overseas for the purpose of spreading disinformation and destabilising communities in the interests of the usa.

In the following months, CIA agents helped Chinese student activists form an anti government movement and even provided typewriters, fax machines and other equipment to help them spread their message.

This information, by the way, came from a US official.

A key player was Colonel Robert Helvey, a 30 year Pentagon veteran of destabilization operations in Asia.

He trained in Hong Kong.

The student leaders from Beijing in mass demonstration techniques which they were to subsequently use in the Tiananmen Square incident of June 1989.

This is according to a highly detailed academic paper by B.

Raman, the former director of India's Foreign Intelligence Agency.

When protests broke out in China in April, demonstrators were not calling for democracy, but purer socialism, free of corruption and inequality, which were endemic at the time.

Students carried pictures of Chairman Mao and sang the Chinese national anthem repeatedly.

But Western hybrid warfare has two key locate and amplify genuine local grievance and then rebrand them as calls for Western liberal democracy and freedom.

Students called for corruption, free communism, carrying Mao pictures and seeing the national anthem.

They needed their message to be rebranded.

The U.S.

state Department withdrew Ambassador William Winston Lord and replaced him with James Lilly, a veteran CIA agent who had run operations smuggling people in and out of China.

The Chinese protesters were advised by persons unknown to add the word democracy in English to their banners and to say they were calling for freedom rather than their actual goal, a purer form of communism.

As Westerners became involved, the messages changed to Western ideals written in English language.

Thus we've got signs with the well known saying, give me liberty or give me death.

On May 28, Gene Sharp, America's top undercover street protest strategist, flew into Beijing with his assistant to offer help.

I've mentioned him before.

We now know that student leaders were promised US passports, CIA run, safe passage out of China and enrollment in top US universities.

But there was a problem.

Things were not going to a head.

The Chinese government was remaining remarkably restrained, as was the army, because the main body of the protesters were asking for purer communism.

People were politically on the same page.

Students and soldiers had good relationships and even shared food and sang together.

But violence finally started when a mysterious group of thugs, some from ethnic minorities, triggered a fight in Mushidi, five kilometres away.

Dear listener, I'll give you much more detail about that in the next article, but in this one it goes on attacking army buses with petrol bombs and setting them alight, burning the occupants to death.

This was unexpected because gasoline was rationed and hard for ordinary people to obtain.

Soldiers who managed to escape the burning buses were beaten to death.

The word massacre could be used for this atrocity, although that doesn't fit the Western narrative, since it was the soldiers who died.

Other military men arrived in mushite and, infuriated at the sight of their slaughtered colleagues, shot at protesters who were mostly unionists rather than students.

And there were Many tragic deaths, this time of civilians.

Back in Tiananmen Square, in the early hours of June 4, soldiers arrived, called on students to leave.

Student leader Feng Gongji worked to gauge the protesters opinions and concluded that the majority wanted to leave.

So I announced the decision to leave, he said.

Students left peacefully.

At a different location on the periphery of the square, a fright broke out in which a soldier was killed, leading to some violence.

According to a declassified report from the US Embassy, one student protester, a friend of the present writer, watched one man lose his life.

In the following skirmishes, several lives were lost.

But in the square itself, the only gunfire came from bullets used to silence the sound system.

Now this is where it gets strange.

Over the following hours and days, a very different story was circulated saying that the peaceful pro democracy demonstrations in China had come to a violent and bloody end.

A cable from the British Embassy said the students in the square had been massacred with machine guns, their bodies pushed into piles with bulldozers and then incinerated by troops with flamethrowers.

A report was also sent out by the Australian Embassy delivering almost exactly the same information.

And by the way, that's what Bob Hawke was relying on.

Madrid's Ambassador Eugenio Bragola was filled with righteous anger.

He noted that Western journalists were reporting the massacre as fact from their hotel guest rooms, while Spain's TVE channel had a television crew physically in the square that evening and knew it was false.

In fact, most diplomats knew the deannamon Square massacre story was fake.

Within a few days, certainly within a week, it was clear that the information about what happened in the square itself was incorrect.

Professor Richard Rigby, a staff member at the Australian embassy in 1989, told reporters on an ABC News show, US embassy officials interviewed a Chilean diplomat who had been present in the square at the time of the alleged massacre.

He confirmed that no such thing happened.

The officials kept the information secret until it was exposed by Julian Assange's WikiLeaks operation in 2011.

Many diplomats strongly suspect that the Tiananmen Square fiction was a black op.

Australia's Professor Rigby later said, I cannot entirely rule out the possibility that we were being fed some sort of a line.

That of course was exactly what had happened.

The mystery report was very likely the work of US and UK black information authorities ever keen to plant anti Beijing stories in unsuspecting or cooperative media.

Said Gregory Clark, a British born Australian diplomat.

He's the guy that I quoted at the very beginning.

In 2017, diplomatic papers quietly declassified by the British government showed that it was British Ambassador Sir Alan Donald in Beijing who had spread the debunked news that a minimum of 10,000 citizens died.

The BBC and other media continues to present this as if it was a credible fact from a credible source rather than a piece of discredited fiction, almost certainly from a black op.

And the final point made in this article?

What to do?

It appears there's nothing that can be done.

Western media simply swallows disinformation about mainland China or Hong Kong and spits it out as fact and continues to do so on a daily basis.

Gregory Clark Again I quoted early on notes the incalculable harm to humanity done by by CIA, MI6 black information, massacre myths and Western media gullibility.

They have prevented and continue to prevent any sort of accurate understanding of the recent history of the most populous community on earth, he wrote.

A major lesson from all this is the need to control our Western black information operations.

Few seem to realize the depth of their penetration in Western media.

And now onto the final, most personal, longest, and I think most revealing article of all of these is by Larry Romanoff and he's a retired management consultant and businessman.

He's held senior executive positions in international consulting firms and owned an international import export business.

He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai's Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes.

He lives in Shanghai, currently writing a series of 10 books generally related to China and the west, and his writing has been translated into more than 20 languages and is available on more than 100 foreign language websites around the world.

And in his article he says in one part here I live in China and was for many years the editor of a widely read newsletter that gave me trusted access to about 2,500 middle and high level corporate executives who were university students in China during the period in question, many of whom were involved in the student movement and more than a few of whom were at Tiananmen Square.

I've spoken to many of them at length about the student movement and the events of the time.

So that's his credentials.

All of it could be complete bullshit.

I have not had the time to verify it, but on the face of it seemed legit.

His account seems to be the most revealing and now that you've armed with the information I've already given you, let's dive in.

It's going to take a while.

Settle back and relax.

He quotes from some people and I've taken the trouble to use some fake AI voices for the quotes just to Spice things up so you're not listening to my voice the entire time.

But anyway, here we go.

There are few places in China that seem more burned into the consciousness of typical Westerners than Tiananmen Square, and few events more commonly mentioned than the student protests of 1989.

But the stories are wrong on several levels.

It was never reported in the Western media that there were two separate events that occurred in Beijing on June 4, 1989.

One was a student protest that culminated in a sit in in Tiananmen Square.

The other was a one day worker strike that occurred, perhaps not by chance, also on June 4, when a group of workers, unhappy with their lot in life, organise their own protest independently of the students in a different place.

For reasons that will become apparent, the workers protest is the necessary focus for understanding the events of that date.

So I will begin there.

The Workers Revolt A group of workers gathered and barricaded several streets in Mushidi, an area in Beijing, five or six kilometers from Tiananmen Square.

The barricades attended by several hundred mostly adult workers with an undetermined few young people.

However, there was a third, quite large group present that to my knowledge has never been clearly identified, though it's obvious from the photos they were not workers and certainly not young students.

Thugs or anarchists might be an appropriate adjective, but the facts seem to support the conclusion and my own personal judgment, that they were mercenaries.

The government sent in busloads of soldiers accompanied by a few APCs to clear the barricades and reopen the streets to traffic.

The violence began when the third group, this is the mercenary group, attacked the young men attempting to clear the barricades.

The attackers were well prepared, armed with at least hundreds and perhaps thousands of gasoline bombs, and immediately torched dozens of buses and the few APCs with the soldiers still inside.

Many soldiers in both types of vehicles escaped, but many others did not, and many burned to death.

There are countless photos of dead soldiers burnt to a crisp, some hung by the thugs from lampposts, others lying in the street or on stairs or sidewalks where they died, others hanging out of bus Windows or the APCs having only partially escaped before being overcome by the flames.

There are documented reports and photos showing that the group of thugs managed to get control of one apc, drive it through the streets while firing machine guns over the turret on the turret.

It was only then that it was only then that the government sent in armed soldiers and military equipment.

Government reports and independent media personnel generally claim a total of 250 to 300 civilian deaths before the violence subsided, but a similar number of soldiers had already been killed.

When police or military are attacked in this way, they will surely use force to defend themselves and cannot be faulted for that.

If you or I where the military commander on the scene, watching our men being attacked and burned to death, we would have done the same thing.

From everything I know, I can find no fault here.

This is the writer now.

He's got here an eyewitness report from someone who was there.

And this is an excerpt from the book Tiananmen Moon and Dear Listener.

I'm going to insert a recording of somebody else reading this eyewitness report.

There was a new element I hadn't noticed much of before.

Young punks, decidedly less than student like in appearance.

In the place of headbands and signed shirts with university pins, they wore cheap, ill fitting polyester clothes and loose windbreakers.

Under our lights, their eyes gleaming with mischief, they brazenly revealed hidden Molotov cocktails.

Who were these punks in shorts and sandals carrying petrol bombs?

Gasoline is tightly rationed, so they could not have come up with these things spontaneously.

Who taught them to make bottle bombs?

And for whom were the incendiary devices intended?

Someone shouted that another APC was heading our way.

My pace quickened as I approached the stalled vehicle, infected by the toxic glee of the mob.

But then I caught myself.

Why was I rushing towards trouble?

Because everyone else was.

I slowed down to a trot in the wake of a thundering herd of one mass mind breaking with the pack, I stopped running.

Someone tossed a Molotov cocktail, setting the APC on fire.

Flames spread quickly over the top of the vehicle and spilled onto the pavement.

I thought, there's somebody still inside of that.

It's not just a machine.

There must be people inside.

Someone protectively pulled me away to join a handful of head banded students who sought to exert some control.

Expending what little moral capital his hunger strike signature saturated shirt still exerted, he spoke up for the soldier.

Let the man out.

He cried.

Help the soldier.

Help him get out.

The agitated congregation was in no mood for mercy.

Angry blood curdling voices ricocheted around us.

Kill the motherfucker.

One said.

Then another voice, even more chilling than the first, screamed, he is not human.

He is a thing.

Kill it.

Kill it.

Shouted bystanders.

Bloody enthusiasm now whipped up to a high pitch.

Stop.

Don't hurt him.

Meng pleaded, leaving me behind as he tried to reason with the vigilantes.

Stop.

He is just a soldier.

He is not human.

Kill him.

Kill him.

Said a voice.

Get back.

Get back.

Someone screamed at the top of his lungs.

Leave him alone.

The soldiers are not our enemy.

After the limp bodies of the soldiers were put into an ambulance, the thugs attacked the ambulance, almost ripping off the rear doors in an attempt to remove the burned soldier and finish him off.

After that, charred bodies of soldiers were hung from a lamppost and a large amount of ammunition was taken from the apc.

The violence at Mushidi is really quite incredible.

The photos that you're seeing on the app in the chapter images are incredible, and the thought that university students would.

Would attack in such a way is just incredible.

Can we imagine our own university students burning unarmed soldiers, National Guard people and and mutilating their bodies and stringing them up from lampposts?

If we can't imagine our own university students doing that, why can we imagine Chinese university students can?

It's just because we're.

That's a racist thought anyway.

Here's an excerpt from a government report on the workers riot.

This is probably the first piece of evidence I'm giving you that's not Western based almost, but here we go.

Rioters blocked military and other vehicles before they smashed and burned them.

They also seized guns, ammunition and transceivers.

Several rioters seized an armored car and fired its guns as they drove it along the street.

Rioters also assaulted civilian installations in public buildings.

Several rioters even drove a public bus loaded with gasoline drums towards the Tiananmen Gate Tower in an attempt to set fire to it.

When a military vehicle suddenly broke down on Chang'an Avenue, rioters surrounded it and crushed the driver with bricks.

The rioters savagely beat and killed many soldiers and officers.

At Chongwenmen, a soldier was thrown down from the flyover and burned alive.

At Fushengmen, a soldier's body was hung upside down on the overpass balustrade after he had been killed near a cinema, an officer was beaten to death and his body strung up on a burning bus.

During the counter attack, some rioters were killed, some onlookers were hit by stray bullets, and some wounded or killed by armed ruffians.

According to reliable statistics, more than 3,000 civilians were wounded and over 200, including 36 college students, were killed.

As well.

More than 6,000 law officers and soldiers were injured and scores of them killed.

Cables from US Embassy in Beijing confirmed the basics of this report as well as the casualty estimates.

Though conclusive, direct evidence is still thin, it appears a certainty the revolt had considerable outside help.

In addition to the curious timing there is too much evidence of advance preparation for violence and supply of the weapon.

Reused gasoline was tightly rationed at the time and unavailable in the volume required for this event.

Black Hands arranged the supply lines and provided instructions for the manufacture and use of the gasoline bombs, which were almost unheard of in China before that time.

There are also too many signs of external incitement in the still unidentified third group, whose violent actions in no way represented the sentiment of the attending public.

The enormity of violence unleashed at Rashidi requires considerable prior emotional programming and could not possibly have originated spontaneously from a simple workers strike, almost a guarantee of external interference.

Disaffected citizens in any country may parade and protest from real or imagined grievances.

But burning young soldiers to death and stringing their charred bodies from lampposts are not the acts of naive students wanting democracy or of workers protesting an inadequate social contract.

They are almost always the result of substantial programmed incitement from behind the scenes, usually directed at regime change.

So, turning back to the student protest briefly, the students congregated in the square and waited for an opportunity to present various petitions dealing with social policy, perceived corruption, idealism, in fact, the same things that we as students all had on our list of changes we wanted to make in the world.

Since the government did not immediately respond, the students camped in the square and waited.

Government officials held talks with the students for several weeks and finally set a June 4 deadline for evacuation of the square.

Soldiers were sent to the square on the day prior, but they were unarmed and carried only billy sticks.

By all reports, there was no animosity between the students and the soldiers.

Neither had a philosophical dispute with the other, nor did they see each other as enemies.

In fact, photos and reports show the students protecting the soldiers from angry bystanders.

Discussions were held between the students and the soldiers at repeated times during the evening and throughout the night.

Almost all the students were persuaded to leave the square during the evening, and the small remainder left the following morning.

Tanks and bulldozers did enter the square the following morning, flattening all the tents and rubbish that had piled up during the previous three weeks, pushing the garbage into huge piles and setting them afire.

This was the apparent origin of claims of thousands of students were crushed and subsequently burnt.

There's overwhelming documented evidence that a multitude of, from a multitude of reputable sources, that no violence occurred in the square and no students were killed, and that there never was any Tiananmen Square massacre.

So let's turn to the forces lurking in the shadows.

It seems Plausible that the student movement in China during the 1980s May at its origin have generated spontaneously.

But there is no shortage of evidence that the entire movement was quickly hijacked by agencies of the US government long before the students gathered at Tiananmen Square.

It has taken some time to open locked doors and ferret out details.

But it is no longer in dispute that the leaders of Chinese of the China student movement were trained in Hong Kong and Guangdong by Colonel Robert Harvey, an officer of the Defence Intelligence Agency of the pentagon who spent 30 years instigating revolutions throughout Asia on behalf of the military and the CIA.

There is little reason to question the assertion that a major part of US foreign policy then as today, lay in attempts to destabilize China and perhaps instigate a massive revolution that would open the door to US influence and control.

It's increasingly clear today that the student movement in 1989 was a major part of that strategy.

This is the part in the article where he says that he lives in China, has access to 2 and a half thousand middle and high level corporate executives who were university students in China during the period in question.

And he says, I've spoken to many of them at length about the student movement and the events of the time.

In addition to confirming my observations and conclusions, their comments and testimony strongly suggest that the very idea of a mass confrontation with the government and the selection of Tiananmen Square as the venue did not originate with them, but were orchestrated from somewhere outside.

It's necessary to understand that the student movement in China in 1989 was categorically not a pro democracy movement.

At its origin, the student protest was primarily pragmatic civics and secondly, Chinese cultural.

The students visioned themselves intellectual protesters, not political activists with no thought of their government replicating the political structure of the West.

From my discussions with many former students, the references to democracy were imposed on them by their CIA handlers as the best method of realising their practical and cultural ends.

And these cultural ends were not necessarily very deep.

Wu Xiajie, one of the student leaders, responded to questions about his participation by saying, in different words, because we wanted to wear Western brands and take our girlfriends to bars like the Americans do.

Many of the students with whom I spoke, particularly those who are actually present at the square, have told me of the supplies provided for them by various US government sources.

They especially mentioned the countless hundreds of Coleman camp stoves which at the time were far too expensive for students in China to acquire.

And many commented on the well established supply lines of these and other items Adding to the student supplies were manuals, instructions, training, strategy and tactics, and the patently inflammatory rhetoric of the Voice of America broadcast from Hong Kong.

It is not possible to sensibly challenge the assertion that the puppet masters were American.

Most university students of that day will tell you of the influence of the Voice of America and the picture it painted of freedom and democracy.

They tell of listening to the Voice of America in their dorms late into the night, building in their imaginations a happy world of freedom and light.

The Voice of America.

They also confirm that the Voice of America was broadcasting to the students 24 hours a day from their Hong Kong station during the weeks of the sit in at Tiananmen Square, offering provocative encouragement and giving advice on strategy and tactics.

One of the original participants in the student sit in was wrote.

We settled down and continued with our study.

We dated, found our loved ones, and many sought to go abroad.

By the time we graduated, there was almost no discussion about the student movement and we no longer listened to the Voice of America.

One thing I have been kept thinking was the role of the Voice of America.

Many students were the fans of the radio station before, during, and shortly after the student movement.

Even when we were on the square, many students were listening to their programs as if only they could tell us what was going on.

I remember at one stage I realized how stupid I was.

Another student made these.

But it was true that the 1989 student movement was being manipulated by someone, wasn't it?

The students had nothing but emotions and superficial knowledge of politics.

We started only demanding the cleaning up of corruption by officials.

Yet the slogans were somehow led through a transformation into one's demanding democracy.

There is a huge difference in political implication between these two classes of demands.

So what was democracy?

What kind of democracy was practiced in the West?

What kind of democracy would befit China?

Frankly, I.

We didn't have clue.

In other words, I didn't know what I really wanted.

I simply had this resulting impulse to go onto the street and shout slogans.

It was as if I participated just to participate.

And I was moved by the simple fact of experiencing a student's movement.

And then things got out of control.

But because the student leaders refused to change stance, the students wouldn't back off.

So the whole thing dragged on.

Yet a miracle happened.

Those leaders somehow managed to escape unharmed.

For many years since 1989, I had been reluctant to accept that I and the other students were actually so stupid and naive to be truly manipulated by others behind the scene.

The perception in the west and Also in China has always been that the student congregation in Tiananmen Square was spontaneous, idealistic and above all, peaceful.

It may at its origin have been idealistic, but it was in no way spontaneous.

And by May and June, the underlying peacefulness was rapidly coming to an end.

In 1995, two American filmmakers at the Longbow Group, Dr.

Karma Hinton and Richard Gordon, released a now famous documentary on Tiananmen Square titled the Gate of Heavenly Peace.

Chai Ling, the Tiananmen students, self proclaimed Supreme Commander, for years, pursued lawsuits against the film company, primarily because the documentary included incriminating video dated 28th of May 1989 of her.

In an interview with American journalist Philip Cunningham, this is not her voice, but this is Reading the transcript of what.

She said, the students kept asking, what should we do next?

What can we accomplish?

I feel so sad because how can I tell them that what we are actually hoping for is bloodshed?

For the moment when the government has no choice but to brazenly butcher the people.

Only when the square is awash with blood will the people of China open their eyes.

Only then will they really be united.

But how can I explain this to my fellow students?

I can't say all this to my fellow students.

I can't tell them straight out that we must use our blood and our lives to call on the people to rise up.

Of course the students will be willing, but they are still such young children.

And what is truly sad is that some students and famous, well connected people are working hard to help the government to prevent it from taking such measures for the sake of their selfish interests and their private dealings.

They are trying to cause our movement to collapse and get us out of the square before the government becomes so desperate that it takes action.

As the writer of this article says, if this isn't clear, Chai Ling is openly stating her intention to provoke the government to a violent military solution, filling Tiananmen Square with the blood of the students for the express purpose of uniting the people to incite a widespread political revolution.

She then laments that she can't reveal to the students their lives are meant to be sacrificed for this cause.

And what is truly sad is that some people, for selfish interests, are seeking to avoid bloodshed.

The interviewer Cunningham then asked, are you going to stay in the square yourself?

And she replied, no, I won't, because.

My situation is different.

I want to live.

I believe that others have to continue the work I have started.

A democracy movement can't succeed with only one person.

I might as well say it.

You, the Chinese you are not worth my struggle.

You are not worth my sacrifice.

In the video there is damning reference to America's cold bloodedness in directing the student protests.

A literal confession by Chai Ling that after the students had already voted to end their protest and leave the square, her Hong Kong handlers still pushed her and the students to remain in the square and continue to agitate until they provoked their own bloodshed, encouraging them to sacrifice their lives as the only way to attract the world attention and sympathy which had somehow now become crucial to their cause.

Transcripts and video of her entire interview along with the reader comments are available online.

So the American plan was to incite the students to not only irritate but eventually enrage this Chinese government sufficiently to provoke a violent crackdown against the students, with the expectation this would in turn provoke the general population into a color revolution resulting in the overthrow of the government and the collapse of China.

In accord with this plan, the students were pushed to begin demanding democracy, quickly followed by insistent and intractable demands that the government step down.

As part of the process, the students were given details on the construction of a huge papier mache Goddess of Democracy statue in the square and intelligence summary prepared for U.S.

secretary of State James A.

Baker.

The hope was noted that the statue would anger top leaders and prompt a response stating that the students, or more likely the U.S.

government, hoped the erection of the statue would provoke an overreaction by authorities and breathe new life into their flagging movement.

In all cases, in all countries, students and young people are co opted into a US attempt at regime change.

Westerners may not easily appreciate that Beijing in 1989 was not different in any material aspect.

After the government declared martial law, Chai Ling's American puppet masters rapidly escalated their offensive by having her distribute leaflets inciting armed rebellion against the government and calling upon students and general public to organise armed forces and oppose the Communist Party.

China was spared a national catastrophe primarily by the patient and non threatening stance of the government which served to dampen the inflammatory rhetoric emerging from the Voice of America and the handlers in Beijing and the urging towards bloodshed by their stage managers in Hong Kong.

The result was that when the deadline approached for the evacuation of the square, the students abandoned their supreme commander and agreed to leave peacefully, meaning that the Americans simply ran out of time.

Intricate plans had been made in advance to spirit the student leaders out of China when the hoped for bloodshed began.

Operation Yellowbird was a Hong Kong based CIA scheme to help the leaders of the student protests.

End of the violence in Machidi to escape arrest under the diplomatic protection of the American Embassy, by offering political sanctuary, by the advanced issue of US passports and by arranging their escape from China.

The CIA was central in all this, but the UK MI6 and the French intelligence agencies were also involved.

When the protests failed and the students dispersed, the primary leaders fled, first to Hong Kong, then to the US and some of the leaders of the violence in Machine were helped to flee, while others were sheltered in the American Embassy in Beijing as well.

For their efforts to destroy their own country.

These student leaders were handsomely rewarded by the Americans with prestigious university degrees, good jobs and CIA salaries.

For continuing to incite political instability in China.

Chai Ling was given an honorary degree in political science at Princeton University and a job with the management consultancy of Bain & Co.

As well as being the salaried head of an NGO especially created for her and tasked with condemning China's then one child policy.

So the Americans succeeded beyond their wildest expectations with the violence in Machidi, but failed miserably in their main effort, which was the provocation of bloodshed in Tiananmen Square, because that was going to offer the possible prize of a revolution and an overthrow of the government.

The problem faced by the state government was that their success in Moshidi was not particularly useful from a political standpoint.

What the Americans wanted and badly needed the prize they were hoping for was photos of dead student bodies and student blood in the streets, since these infallibly draw universal condemnation.

But with the peaceful resolution of Tiananmen Square, these didn't exist.

So they gathered the photos of the carnage and dead bodies from Mushidi and presented those to the world as evidence of a student massacre in Tiananmen Square.

A totally fabricated story without exception.

The Western media in all countries immediately published identical claims and photos, consistently omitting all the contrary, all the contradictory evidence.

Every photographer who took photos at Moshidi knew where he took them, and he and the media editors knew full well those photos were not taken in Tiananmen Square.

It is not possible that more than 200 newspaper editors and more than 100 TV station news managers in more than 30 countries miscaptioned the same photos in the same way by carelessness or accident.

This is why the Western media suppressed entirely the facts of the Vaughns in Machete and unanimously refused to publish photos of the soldiers burned to a crisp and hanging from lampposts.

They needed the facts and photos for their already planned Tiananmen Square student massacre story.

It's been 30 years since the June 4, 1989 student protest.

In spite of all the categorical documentation proving there was never any student massacre in China, the US government and its handlers refused to let go of their prize because of its powerful political propaganda value.

Having enabled the west for decades to define China as being ruled by the jackboot, the rifle and the thought police, it has been unquestionably one of the greatest propaganda victories in history, turning a U.S.

state Department sponsored colour revolution, albeit a failed one, into a whip that could lash China non stop for 30 years.

It was so successful that the Western media, led by the New York Times, but followed by nearly everyone, publish in June of every year a kind of anniversary story to continue to milk it for its residual propaganda value.

This false story has been hammered into the consciousness of Westerners for 30 years to the point where it is nearly impossible to discuss Tiananmen Square due to the enormous emotional baggage it carries.

If there was a massacre in Beijing on June 4, 1989, it was at Machidi, not at Tiananmen Square, and the massacre was of soldiers, not students, with all evidence indicating it was engineered by the U.S.

department of State and the CIA.

And that's the end of that article, dear listener.

And as part of this process, trying to find the Bob Hawke speech, I ran across an article from the 7:30 report from 2021.

And this just demonstrates while there was some backtracking of the story, there wasn't nearly enough backtracking of the story.

This is our ABC 730 report in 2021.

Until they were reduced to pulp.

I think those tears and what it meant for those events I don't think can ever really be forgotten by anyone.

Even with half an eye on Australian politics at that time.

For the first time the ABC can reveal the document Prime Minister Hawke read from that day.

It's a previously undisclosed Australian diplomatic cable obtained from the National Archive.

The cable describes soldiers of the 27th Group army massacring students, as well as civilians who were just watching proceedings from their apartments.

It says soldiers were shooting each other if they refused to fire on the students and includes an estimate that at least 10,000 people had been killed during the event.

Bob Hawke received the cable three days after the massacre and thought it meant his dreams of democratisation in China and a strong Australia China relationship were over.

The Tiananmen Square cable brought that all crashing down.

He was devastated when he read most particularly about the tanks.

He was devastated for basically for two reasons.

One was the horrendous.

The horrendous reports of the loss of life.

But the other very important thing was he saw it would be a disaster for China.

Hawke was so horrified by what he read, he decided to share it with the nation.

It would be a brave person to say to Bob, you know, take it easy, calm down.

He didn't want want to calm down.

He was so horrified that he wanted to convey that horror to the world.

Blanche d'Alpeje says that Prime Minister Hawke later realised the details of the cable he'd read on national TV were false.

He subsequently received another cable from the embassy retracting some of the claims in the first cable, specifically that tanks had run backwards and forwards over people, squashing them into the ground, and that the number killed was 10,000.

By this stage, Hawke had already read the speech and announced that 40,000 Chinese students who were in Australia at the time could stay without fear of being forced to return home.

The sight of him crying for them had a great emotional effect on the Australian Chinese community and many Chinese in China.

The Chinese Australian community never forgot it.

So much so that the day after the morning, in fact, after Bob passed away, there was a knock on the door at his home at Northbridge.

My partner and of the door, thinking it might be a family member or perhaps someone from the media, and it was a man who had been a student at that time and brought flowers.

And.

Said, sorry, but sent the most heartfelt letter saying, you have given us a beautiful life.

Thank you, Bob, we love you.

Tiananmen dashed Hawke's hopes for what China might become.

But unlike today, China did not attempt to punish Australia for criticising them.

If that kind of criticism was meted.

Out today, as we have seen in.

Criticism over Chinese policies in Xinjiang or Tibet or saber rattling over Taiwan, the reaction from the Chinese government is very swift and it's now taking the form of economic punishment of Australia.

So there is.

There is a fundament, there is a world of difference between the China that we were dealing with back in the early the late 1980s and the China of today.

Yeah, the China of 1989.

You could make up a complete bullshit story and like good little fellows, they'd sit there and take it.

And the goddamn China of today, when you make up a bullshit story about them, they actually get angry about it, those uppity Chinese, as if.

As if they're real people with real feelings who might be a bit pissed when their reputation is besmirched.

I mean, that is where we're at.

The 7:30 report in 2021 gives the impression, okay, there may not have been 10,000 people and they may not have rolled tanks over them, but it was still a massacre.

No retraction of that, but it's knowledge.

If you do any investigative reporting and instead of an apology to China for promoting a myth for 30 years, what you get is, oh, this fucking present day China, you know, if you say anything bad about them, they get all uppity about it, for fuck's sake.

That's where we're at.

They're a patient mob.

I don't know why they put up with us.

Anyway, that's the state of the world, dear listener.

That's the story on Tiananmen Square.

Hope you enjoyed that.

Well, I'll be back with Joe and Scott next week.

We'll probably go over this to some extent and then we'll talk about whatever's happened in the past couple of weeks at that point.

But talk to you then.

Bye.