Myth Making

I'm indebted to James Corbett for enlightening me about the myth of the so-called "Tiananmen Square massacre". To quote from his Steemit post:

The official story of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, dutifully parroted every anniversary by any number of finger-wagging diplomats and TV talking heads, is that it was the culmination of weeks of student-led protests against the Chinese government, and, as the bastion of truthiness tells us, involved "troops with assault rifles and tanks fir[ing] at the demonstrators trying to block the military's advance towards Tiananmen Square." The incident resulted in the deaths of "several hundreds" of the protesters. Or, was it 2,600? Well, the Chinese government refuses to discuss the subject (or even allow it to be discussed in China), so I guess we'll never know. 

. . . or will we? It may surprise those who blindly trust whatever they hear on TV that in fact we have had evidence for the past eight years that whatever took place in Tiananmen Square that fateful night 30 years ago was not the wanton massacre we have been led to believe. And this is not from Chinese Communist Party mouthpieces, but from US and Chilean diplomats who witnessed the events themselves. Even James Miles, the BBC's Beijing correspondent at the time, wrote a mea culpa in 2009, admitting that his reporting had "conveyed the wrong impression" and that in fact "[t]here was no massacre on Tiananmen Square."

 I checked out his links and it is indeed so. It's amazing how myths take hold and are perpetuated by the media. As Corbett points out, there was bloodshed on the streets of Beijing and there was loss of life but there was no massacre in the square itself. He goes on to say in a later Steemit post:

... this US/China conflict is being stage-managed from behind the scenes. The upper rungs of the globalist ladder have carefully built up China to be the bogeyman for the 21st century in the way they built up the Soviets to be the bogeyman for the 20th century. But in order to get the public on board with this conflict, they need to present the public with a narrative that makes sense of this new, imminent, existential threat. And just as the threat of Islamic terrorism has filled that role for the last two decades, the threat of the ChiComs (read: the TechnocracyComs) is here to fill that role in the coming decades ...

This seems true enough but I'm surprised how easy it is to get caught up in the propaganda and accept a story as fact when it is myth. Corbett is an insightful commentator on world affairs and I have been following him since 2015. His major failing in my mind is his clearly deliberate avoidance of any mention of Israel as a villain in world affairs. He's done this to avoid having his channel taken down and in the light of recent YouTube moves that's not a bad idea. Yet, it seems basically dishonest to avoid any denunciation of this rogue state. Of course, I'm being a bit extreme in my own denunciation because he has made comments about Israel and Zionists but they are "few and far between". Considering that Zionism has been the ruling narrative of the 20th Century and remains so in this century, such reticence is disappointing.

Corbett has his own website at https://www.corbettreport.com and he has a series of videos called #PropagandaWatch that draws attention to the insidious nature of propaganda. They are well worth watching.