"All Terrorists Are Muslim" (except those who aren't)

How many times have we heard this one before? "All right, we know all Muslims are not terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims, therefore it's right and proper to racially-cum-religiously (or in India,religiously, since we're of the same "race" if such a term can be used for india's many mongrel peoples) profile Muslims and target them for special attention."
One might say, after five years of the "War On Terror", "All right, already, give it a rest, will you? Your lies are so shoddy they no longer hold more water than a sieve." One might say that, but what one says will go in through one ear and out of the other, so let's just explode this myth. Properly.
First: If by "terrorism" we mean frightening people in order to make them knuckle down, then Al Qaeda or any other "terrorist" groups (Muslim or otherwise) can't hold a candle to any state entity, most of all not to the zionist pseudo-state of "Israel" or its mentor/protector, the United States of America.  I would just advise the votaries of this nation's/this "nation's" "war on terror/disproportionate response" to compare the fgures of innocents killed by either side. It might prove a revelation.
Second, those who claim that all terrorists are Muslim are quite deliberately closing their eyes to the reality. Even assuming we accept that only non-state actors can be terrorists, which is the world's strongest non-state "terrorist" entity, which controls large amounts of territory, carries out more suicide bombings than any other, even has a navy? Any answers? No? The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) of Sri Lanka, aHindu group which has repeatedly taken on the Sri Lankan army in conventional conflict and is responsible for the large scale ethnic cleansing of Muslims from territories it controls. 
A brief and far from complete list of other Hindu terrorist organisations:
The United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) of Assam, which targets non-Assamese, be they Hindu or Muslim.
The various Manipuri groups, most of which are Vaishnavite Hindu, including the Peoples' Liberation Army (PLA), People's Liberation Army of Kangleipak (PREPAK), and many others - there are estimated to be two dozen outfits  active in Manipur, of which two-thirds would be Vaishnavite Hindu.
The two factions of the United People's Democratic Solidarity of Assam.
The National Democratic Front of Bodoland in Assam.
The Kamatapur Liberation Organisation of West Bengal.
The Bajrang Dal, which hitherto murdered people with crude weapons but is now known to be constructing bombs as well.
OK, these are just the Hindu groups, now we have the Sikh groups (though they have mostly been crushed, they still exist and will try a comeback if the oppurtunity presents itself) - Khalistan Commando Force, Khalistan Zindabad Force, Babbar Khalsa International, and the like.
Then there are the Christian groups - right from the US backed anti-Castro Cuban terrorist groups and the right wing death squads active throughout Central and South America to the Lord's Resistance Army of Uganda and the Irish Republican Army; the Baptist Church financed insurgencies all over South East Asia, including the various factions of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland ( a member of the Isak Muivahfaction is here photographed at the outfit's headquarters at Camp Hebron) which proclaim their stated objective as "Nagaland for Christ"; and Kuki groups in India; there are probably a hundred Christian terror groups in this region.
The Jewish terrorists like the Haganah, Irgun, and the Stern gang which ethnically cleansed the Arab civilians from "Israel" and terror bombed hotels and offices;
Really, Islamic terrorism seems rather small potatoes compared to all this. Not that the facts will stop the bastards who want to pretend otherwise.
They never, ever, do.

Hijacking History and Winning Women

Amazing, all the things I did not know.

For example, jiminy whiz, I was ignorant that, among other things

- The Mayans, who I was unaware were still around in the late fifteenth century, performed human sacrifices and were stopped by the kindly, civilising influence of the conquistadores;

- That Thermopylae had been a glorious Greek victory, not a  bloody, stupid defeat.

 
- That the British burned colonists alive during the American Revolutionary War.

- It was the Americans who won World War II all by themselves, and that the German Enigma code was broken when a coding machine was captured by them along with a U Boat. For some reason I thought the British at Bletchley Park had broken the code after capturing U 110.

- That D Day was an American show, not much of a role for the British and French, and that the Russians sent men into combat unarmed;

- That Oskar Schindler was a philanthropic do-gooder who could not bear to see the pain of Jewish suffering, not an industrialist who used slave labour and who played a most minor part in the war, basically in order not to lose his slave labourers, and who saved a grand total ofeleven hundred Jews.

- That Vietnam was, well, maybe not quite a victory but not quite a defeat, at least not one that any patriot can call a defeat, since so many gooks were blown away by good honest freedom-lovin' ammunition;

- That the Munich Olympic massacre of 1972 was caused by terrorists murdering their hostages, not the criminal incompetence of German policemen whose wild shooting killed almost all the dead that day;

- That American soldiers in Somalia were actuated by feelings of brotherly love for the Somalis they were sent to help;

         

Undoubtedly, there are many more such that I am unaware of. But it’s my duty to be. After all, Apocalypso, The Patriot, U 571, The Longest Day, Schindler’s List, Enemy At The Gates, Blackhawk Down,Munich, or any of a myriad Vietnam films teach me history better than the encyclopaedias and other material invented by the “reality-based community.” Everyone else who loves freedom and would volunteer to be part of the battle against evil should join in. Hollywood is Democratic, not just democratic. Hollywood tells the truth.

Meanwhile, closer home…

Closer home, Bollywood says the ideal way to get a girl is to dog her steps, be obstreperous, trouble her every which way you can, make vulgar gestures at her, sing suggestive ditties, and she will at last be yours.

Closer home, Bollywood says the woman who is free and “loose” in the first half of a movie will become the quiet, domesticated Hausfrautowards the end.

And if she, horror of horrors, is not a virgin, it’s because she is the product of a broken home, and is fundamentally a good girl at heart. Marriage will redeem her in the end.

I believe in a world where one side is good

And victory over evil wins

I believe that the grass is blue

I believe that the sky is green

I believe all this, you know

‘Cause I saw it on the silver screen.   

I believe that does it.    

An Inconvenient Truth

From May 2007

(I'm stealing Malcolm's idea and inventing a new tag "hero" for Hugo Chavez)

Yesterday I was reading, in the newspaper, some “columnist” or other who, apropos of the faltering Nuclear Deal, said that it was in India’s interests to be on the right side of the world’s “sole superpower” rather than “jokers like Chavez”.

Some joker, Hugo Chavez.

Winner of repeated elections against an opposition overtly supported, funded and advised by Washington (his last election win, in 2006, was so emphatic, in an election that was so free and fair, that even Washington could not pretend it was fixed), restored to power in a popular revolution after a Washington-directed military coup against him, winner over Washington inspired industrial strife and organised street demos, he proves that if you have the people on your side, you can buck Bush and survive.

This is not a convenient truth.

This joker Chavez, by proving himself a beacon of hope for the poor, the neglected, the indigenous of Latin America, has set off a wave of left wing governments being voted to power.

To see the true value of this achievement, it is to be remembered that this was Uncle Sam’s bailiwick and that the US would have tolerated no challenge to its hegemony here; that no people here has the right to choose its own government if it is or might be inimical to Washington (Salvador Allende’s Chile, Grenada, Sandinista Nicaragua, and all the right wing regimes foisted on all these nations including Chavez’ own Venezuela). Chavez proved that people in South and Central America have the right to choose their own leaders, who will not sell out their timber, their oil, their water, their tin to the gringos up north for private gain.

This is not a convenient truth.

This joker Chavez has nationalised his oil industry and now is about to nationalise his banks as well, in a world where Washington is busy privatising its Iraqi colony’s oil supplies and in India public sector bank employees are fighting a rearguard action against privatisation (and while horror stories about the private banks’ harassment of customers, credit card overcharging, etc, are so legion the Supreme Court has taken note of it, somehow these stories never seem to make it to the main pages of newspapers or to the TV channels, and what a big surprise, huh?). Well, to get back to the point, this joker Chavez is on a nationalisation kick, defying history. Capitalism is the only way to progress and prosperity, right? Socialism means poverty, is it not so?

Well, guess again. Chavez, that joker, has paid off his nation’s debt and quit the World Bank (where Paul Wolfowitz, super-Bushie - and another big surprise there, huh? – is fighting desperately to save his job after being caught in flagrante delicto giving his girlfriend an illegal salary raise and a transfer) and the International Monetary Forum. How many small countries who have in recent days trodden the capitalist path written out for them in Washington have not sunk deeper into poverty? Is there a single one?

This joker Chavez proves socialism works.

This is not a convenient truth.

This joker Chavez, when he came to India a couple of years ago, got a hero’s welcome from students and common people, not the protests and the cold shoulder that met Bush last year. This proves you don’t have to come from a big country to be known, respected, and loved, much to the chagrin of the pro-US cabal in our Foreign Ministry.

That is not a convenient truth.

This joker Chavez is the only democratically elected political leader I know of who has, consistently, done what he promised to do after being elected back to power.

This proves that politicians who continuously plead the pressures of circumstances outside their control to show why they can’t fulfil their promises are lying. If they want, they can. If they don’t, it’s because they don’t want.

And that is one hell of an inconvenient truth.

In fact, this joker Chavez is a living inconvenient truth in himself.

The Two Deaths Of P C Ram

(From 2007)

Sometimes I think that given my track record at predictions I should take up astrology…

There was a man called Phul Chand Ram. An executive director of the Food Corporation of India, in charge of the North East Circle, he was a very high ranking official. Terrorists of the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) abducted him for ransom on April 17 along with his official chauffeur. They let the chauffeur go after a few days, on April 22, and demanded a ransom of 210 million rupees for Ram’s release, along with the release of two of their battalion commanders, who were in detention (if anyone is interested, the two are Mrinal Hazarika, former commander of ULFA’s 28^th Battalion, and Pallab Saikia of the outfit’s 27^th Battalion). As usual in India, nothing happened except a lot of political blame being swapped around. Ram remained in custody of the ULFA and the ULFA men remained in the state’s jails.

Then, twelve days ago, on June 30, the army declared that a body had been dug up from a shallow grave on a river bank and that it belonged to Ram. It was highly decomposed, but was promptly identified as Ram by his son, Pravin (who had “absolutely no doubts” that it was Ram), his maid (or as she said, “adopted daughter”) June Murmu, and by sundry Food Corporation of India officials. None of them had any doubts and the body was taken back to Delhi and cremated, while the army gloated that it had pressed the ULFA so hard that it had had no option but to kill Ram so as not to lose him to the army (as if that was something to be proud of – they pressed ULFA into killing the hostage! Wonderful! The military mind…bleh). In the meantime the entire media (in the East of the country, since the rest of the nation couldn’t care less) and no less than our nation’s not-so-beloved “prime minister”, Manmohan Singh, condemned the killing. So far so good.

Now the plot thickens. On July 3, the day of the cremation, ULFA declared that the body was not Ram’s, that Ram was very much alive and that he was in its custody, and that the dead man was an “army informer”. Since ULFA has a prior history of killing people and then claiming they were alive, nobody at first took it seriously, at all. Some challenged ULFA to let him speak to his family, knowing ULFA couldn’t exactly resurrect the dead. Still skin and hair samples taken from the corpse were sent to a lab for DNA testing – where the lab people said the samples were so badly handled they might prove useless for any and all purposes.

And then, on the sixth of July, the “dead” Ram himself phoned his family and talked to them for eight minutes, declaring himself to be alive and well and asking for the release of Hazarika and Saikia, the two ULFA in custody. This kind of…blew a hole…in a lot of carefully constructed stories. Now Pravin Ram suddenly said that he had been “confused” and may have “incorrectly identified” the body he had long since cremated as that of his dad.

Lovely, don’t you agree? I remember a friend asking me (facetiously) that since the funeral rights of the corpse had already been completed, just who would occupy Ram’s reserved place in heaven, the owner of the corpse or Ram himself. A really, really good question for the Hindu Right to ruminate over.

OK, so back to the old tale. India has a quite remarkably bad and inconsistent record of negotiating with terrorists. Sometimes it has rolled over and surrendered to all demands; at other times it has been soft at times when it should have been hard and hard at times when it should have been soft. Twice in the last few years, high profile terrorist hostage takings have resulted in craven surrender from India – in 1989 in Kashmir and in 1999 in Kandahar. Both times, terrorists were released from prison. All that happened was that the terrorists became bolder than ever. So this time it was quite a hot potato and nobody wanted to touch it. The state government said New Delhi was responsible; the national government in New Delhipassed the buck right back to the state. Wunderbar, as the Germans would say. Wonderful.

Meanwhile, as it became more and more difficult to pretend that Ram was actually dead, the army began to investigate just who the corpse might belong to. It came across the name of an army soldier named Sunil Kumar who was “missing.” It had just about declared that the dead man was Sunil Kumar when (going by the photos of the body, which was now of course a pile of ash) Kumar’s wife said the body was not Kumar’s…so who the hell was it?

Now, on the tenth of July, PC Ram himself wrote a letter to the state government asking for the release of the two ULFA men. Although the official stance was still that – pending proof – Ram was dead, no one could believe that – in any case the average Indian has learned not to take the Indian government seriously on anything. The chief minister of Assam, Tarun Gogoi, had spent the interim period safely abroad, so he could claim he had nothing to do with anything and hope to come out smelling of roses. 

[Now let me just take an interlude to explain that comment about astrology with which I began this post. I had predicted to my friend that the army would most likely kill Ram {of course as I’ve pointed out more than once in this blog, the Indian Army is legally (by the Armed Forces Special Powers Act) entitled to kill anyone on suspicion alone and can’t be challenged in court } if it came across him; he was just too damned inconvenient for too many people alive. My friend didn’t actually take me seriously then. All right so far?]

Then, on the night of July 11, in a village called Borkar Panitema, just 35 kilometres from the city of Guwahati, something happened. At 8.45pm, the power was cut off and a large military force swooped down on the village. Soldiers from the Army and two other forces – the Border Security Force and the Central Reserve Police Force – blocked all roads leading out of the village, while men of the Assam Armed Police raided the house of a farmer, Gobinda Deka. According to neighbours, there was an outburst of firing that lasted for ten minutes, followed by a lull. And then there was sporadic firing that continued for three hours.

Somewhere around midnight, police (going by their account) finally entered the house after crushing all resistance and found three bodies – two were of ULFA terrorists of the 709^th Battalion, identified as Rahul Deka and “Bullet” Changmai. The third corpse was of PC Ram, with sundry wounds and a bullet in his head.

The police and army said they had no way of knowing that Ram was there and it was quite a routine operation, and he was “killed in the cross-fire”. Quite a reasonable explanation?

Not on your life.

In fact there is no reason to believe what the army and police have said. Their account stinks to high heaven.

Let’s see why.

First off – the owner of the house, a farmer called Gobinda Deka, said the ULFA group had been moving round the district for all of two months and was not exactly unknown to the villagers. There had been three terrorists and an elderly man who was not too well and whom the villagers had taken to be a senior ULFA commander. The team, he said, had turned up in his house the day before the assault and forced him to give them shelter. One of the three ULFA had left by bicycle just an hour before the attack; the other two, when the attack started, had forced Deka, his wife, and his son to another room where they suffered not a scratch.

Now the Assam police and the Army have – by their own account – quite a good intelligence net; who is going to believe that they knew (as they said) that an ULFA team was present at the particular time and in the particular house, but didn’t know who was part of it? They should certainly have known whether a senior ULFA leader was in country; if not, the elderly man could only be a captive, and the only captive right now was Ram…and don’t forget they certainly could identify the dead ULFA by name and unit almost immediately. That requires a good intelligence input!

Then, the two ULFA men were armed with two AK56 rifles, an M20 pistol, two hand grenades, and an improvised explosive device – not to mention plenty of ammunition. Yet the army and police say that although they fought for three hours, they only fired “about a hundred rounds” of ammunition and did not use the grenades. And they didn’t manage to kill or injure any one of the attacking force. This is rather remarkable in view of the fact that the attackers used parachute flares for illumination (suicidal against defenders in a position like a house, since the defenders would be hidden and it would be the attackers who would be illuminated) and would have been lovely targets as they charged across the courtyard (look at the graphic and picture above).

Of course, we mustn’t forget that Gobinda Deka and his family are thoughtfully bundled into a room by the ULFA, right across the courtyard, so as to be out of harms’ way; but the ULFA men don’t try and escape, with or without their captive? Give me a break.

I think I should state something here: ULFA men are not jehadis or suicide terrorists. Compared even to groups like the Kashmiri terrorists, they put up remarkably little fight and tend to surrender or flee after firing off a few shots.Assam’s detention camps have held many thousand ULFA over the years, most of whom surrendered without firing a shot. Remember this.

All right, so far all I’ve done is speculate. Fine. So I’ll offer facts.

Take a good look at the picture above. I’m sorry that the quality isn’t any better but I scanned it straight off the newspaper (The Telegraph) since I couldn’t find it on the net. All the proof you need is in the photos, if you want to see it.  

The upper of the two pictures is of the outside of the room in which the two ULFA men and Ram were holed up. Remember what the police said? They fired at the room for three hours. Good. Take a real good look at the room. Does it look like someone fired at it for three minutes, let alone hours? I can count something like eight bullet holes in the walls…

Either the police were incredibly bad shots, literally unable to hit the side of a barn, or there is something rotten in the state of Denmark.

Then, take a look at the lower photo. If you need clinching proof, it is here. The photo depicts the corpses of the two ULFA killed. Look at them. Both are under beds. The head and shoulders of one man protrude from under one bed while the legs of the other are all that are outside the other bed. Right?

Now how the hell were they fighting back against the police from positions under beds, and how the hell did the police kill them there from outside? You can see the blood pooling round the head of the nearer corpse. Don’t tell me that the man was shot in the head and then got down on the floor and scooted backwards underneath to die. I can’t, with the best will in the world, believe it.

(While I’m on the subject, Ram was under a bed as well.)    

So, what actually happened? To reconstruct the likely course of events, let’s remember what the villagers said.

First, the power went off.

Then, there was heavy firing for ten minutes, followed by a lull.

After that, there was sporadic firing for three hours, after which the police declared the operation over.

Good.

It seems to me that what must have happened was this. The army and police made a combined operation to try and solve the Ram problem, and Ram was one hell of a problem (why, I’ll discuss again in a minute). Anyway, the operation may have been an honest attempt to rescue Ram, but may have gone wrong because of the usual Indian inefficiency, or it may have been planned that way.

What in any case must have happened was this: the team that attacked the house, whether of the army and police, made a successful initial attack, got inside the room without trouble, totally taking the ULFA by surprise. They were still trying to duck for shelter under beds when they were shot dead (notice the pyjamas and bare feet of the second corpse – he wasn’t anticipating combat). Someone also thoughtfully shot PC Ram – perhaps by accident or perhaps they thought him to be an ULFA (didn’t he holler or identify himself?) or just maybe by design. Anyway, they did shoot him.

So now you have a hostage rescue situation where you’ve successfully terminated the hostage. What do you do?

During that lull in the fighting, some real brainstorming must have gone on…

So they began a cover up – a staged encounter with soldiers firing in the air for hours, with a tutored account from the Deka family in exchange for not taking action against them for harbouring terrorists . Then they could claim that they didn’t deliberately kill Ram, that it was an accident; and that is why the house is virtually undamaged instead of looking like a sieve, and that is why the corpses are where they are.

And a couple of corroborative proofs - first, take a look at the AK56 rifle in the photo. It's the model with a folding stock. As you can see, the stock is clearly folded. Now the purpose of a stock on a rifle is to stabilise it during firing; no one in his right mind is going to fight for hours with the stock still folded. Either the police or army folded the stock of the rifle before the photo, or else the ULFA didn't actually get the chance to fight. Someone is lying, either way.

Then again, if you've ever seen a Hollywood film, you know what happens when a criminal or terrorist is holed up and surrounded by police, don't you? The loudhailers and appeals to surrender? Well, this also applies to real life - I recall the BBC telecasting a real-life anti-terrorist operation in Kashmir whre two terrorists surrounded in a house surrendered after they were told they were cut off and their situation was hopeless. In fact, asking terrorists to surrender is standard practice. How come none of the accounts of this little episode mentions any attempt to get these ULFA to surrender? Answer: they were already dead. Of course the police could have faked a surrender call by loudhailer, but nobody accused our security forces of being either intelligent or imaginative. The whole operation was incredibly ham-handed from the beginning.

I believe that about wraps it up.

Now to get to the point of the motive. Why is Ram better off dead?

Well, everyone benefits.

The state government is relieved of one hell of a problem – what to do to get Ram freed. They couldn’t release the ULFA men without getting into political trouble; and Ram’s family was creating a ruckus to make sure he wasn’t killed again.      

The army is relieved of the accusation of incompetence; they were chasing Ram all over the Bhutan border, found his body in a grave, declared him dead, and here he was right under everyone’s noses, hiding in plain sight. How horrible. Better get rid of the ULFA team, and if you get rid of Ram as well, fine. At least he can’t give away what he picked up of military inefficiency…

ULFA is ecstatic. All it has lost is two completely expendable foot soldiers; what it has gained is a propaganda victory, because the Assam opposition is already making a ruckus about how the state government allowed the hostage to die, and ULFA is now going to make propaganda rhetoric about the brutality of the Indian armed forces. It’s not as big a victory as the release of its battalion commanders, but it’s no small potatoes either.

The only one who really loses out is Ram himself. Even his son has been promised an executive job in the Food Corporation of India by way of compensation. And Ram might have - if he survived - had questions about the alacrity with which the family identified someone else's body as his.

So there you are. It’s a story full of treachery and betrayal and manufactured evidence; and it’s only because it didn’t happen in Kashmir or Delhi that the fabrication isn’t collapsing under its own weight. No one really gives a damn about the North East, so no media outlet is really interested in this episode at all.

Oh well, at least I can play detective once in real life. I wonder if you think my solution was the correct one?    

The Tiananmen Square "Massacre": A New Look

(Before I begin: I suspect I may be about to upset a great many applecarts with this article; if I do so, you may not agree with my conclusions, but at least I will have made you think. And for that I do not apologise. All sources have been cited at the end of the article and are available on the internet.)

I belong to a school of thought – probably there aren’t very many of us – which holds that so-called “iconic” individuals and occurrences in history, things that are so taken for granted that to question them is tantamount to sacrilege, need revisionist historical analysis. If, after that revisionist historical analysis, the original version, or some semblance thereof, holds up, fine. But if one finds that the revered original version is critically flawed, one usually has clear indications from the flaws of just why it’s allowed to survive at the expense of the truth.

I intend, therefore, to submit to critical examination one of the “defining” occurrences of our time, the so-called Tiananmen Square “massacre” that is said to have occurred on the night of 4 June 1989, just twenty years and six months ago. I intend to prove my hypothesis that the actual course of events was deliberately misreported and propagandised in the Western media. I intend to attempt to prove my hypothesis that the Chinese government of the time acted correctly and in the best interests of the Chinese people and the Chinese nation by cracking down, in whatever form, on the demonstrations. And I intend to try and prove my contention that destroying the protests was of immense positive significance to the world at large, today, almost a generation later.

(In order to be strictly fair, I should lay on record that I’m not an unbiased commentator. I’m a Sinophile in many respects. While my ideology isn’t equivalent to any “-ism”, it most closely parallels Marxism. I admire the Chinese Revolution, the Long March, and Mao Zedong. I view with deep suspicion any and all Western media pronouncements about the non-Western world; and I believe that after the invasion of Afghanistan on false pretences and of Iraq on pretences that weren’t just false but deliberately and cynically cooked up, my suspicions are more than justified.)

We all know, or we have been reminded in great detail over the years, of the occurrences of 1989 that culminated in the (alleged) “Tiananmen Square Massacre”. In brief, they were these: that 1989 was the year when so-called “peoples’ revolutions” were clearing away (never very enthusiastic) Communist regimes across Europe. It was the year when the world seemed suddenly about to become free for the triumph of Western style capitalism. The Eastern European regimes were crashing. The Soviet Union, where Mikhail Gorbachev had begun a programme of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), was, mostly as a consequence, tottering on the verge of implosion. Only the great monolith of China still held out, refusing to be blown away by the winds of change.

The Background.

Actually, at the time, China was already into its twelfth year of its own version of perestroika; the then leader, Deng Xiaoping, had begun a programme of economic reform since 1978. China wasn’t the equivalent of the state-driven economies of Eastern Europe. It was already moving towards a mix of socialism (for most American readers: to the non-American world, believe it or not, socialism is not a dirty word) and market-driven capitalism. This kind of transit has characteristic features, including a sharp rise in prices, a widening rich-poor divide, and rising levels of corruption and social unrest. It’s been seen so often worldwide that it should be included as one of the defining characteristics of a privatising society.

I mentioned that there was social unrest. There were those who hoped and expected that the Communist Party would evaporate like the artificial parties of Eastern Europe and usher in unbridled capitalism. There were those old Maoists who felt the Communist Party was betraying the Revolution. There was opposition, too, from quite ordinary people from a non-ideological viewpoint; people against the negative aspects of the privatisation, against the price rise and the corruption; people who were, in effect, opposed to the first, free-marketeer, lot. All these diverse protesting groups were themselves divided in just what they wanted and were united in just one thing – opposition to the Chinese government. They had absolutely nothing else in common, and it’s important to remember that.

The so-called Tiananmen Square protests began in this atmosphere. They began on a relatively small scale on 15 April 1989 after the death of deposed and “pro-reform” Communist party General Secretary Hu Yaobang; they comprised mourning for Hu on college campuses across China and calls for reform. At this stage the protestors comprised almost entirely students who wanted change. They weren’t sure what kind of change they wanted, reform of the system or its overthrow. All they wanted was change.

By 17 April, groups of students had begun holding protests outside the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square, issuing a list of demands, and the next day they had begun blocking access to and affecting the functioning of the seat of the Chinese government at the Zhongnanhai Building. Police with linked arms formed a human cordon that prevented these students from physically forcing their way into the Zhongnanhai complex. It was only on 20 April that the police finally broke up the student demonstrations outside Zhongnanhai, using force – said force being the limited use of batons. Not even tear gas was employed at this stage.

The next day, some 100,000 students occupied Tiananmen Square while others boycotted classes. On 27 April, after the government had made an official pronouncement accusing small groups of plotters of fomenting unrest (more on that later) 50,000 students gathered in Beijing’s streets. By now other demonstrations were taking place in many other Chinese cities, including Shanghai, Urumqi and Chongqing. It’s important to remember that these protests occurred, and it will be important to see how they turned out.

In the first days of May, there were renewed student protests, including marches on Beijing’s streets and by 13 May there was a hunger strike by students in Tiananmen Square, with the demand that the government negotiate. However, the government only agreed to talk to the approved student’s organisations, which these students had abandoned in favour of their own, unrecognised organisations. The hunger strike went on, drawing increasing national concern, and early on the morning of 19 May Zhao Ziyang, General Secretary of the Communist party, and Li Peng, Prime Minister of China, went personally to the hunger strikers on Tiananmen Square to persuade them to abandon their hunger strike. It had no effect, but it’s important to remember that they did go.

At this time – to all appearances – the Communist party hierarchy was itself divided about its attitude to the students. It is clear that at least a good section were sympathetic to the students’ concerns about corruption, and so far the government had refrained from violence despite the virtual paralysis of the capital for weeks. Parts of the government, including Zhao Ziyang, were willing to negotiate – but negotiate with whom? The protestors had many and often mutually exclusive agendas. With whom should the government have negotiated? On 20 May, faced with an apparently insoluble dilemma, the government declared martial law.

Martial Law and Thereafter

The army tried to enter Beijing, but the streets were blocked with throngs of protestors. The army made no attempt to force its way through them, but withdrew on 24 May. The students made no attempt to meet the government halfway – the hunger strike was approaching its fourth week and with public discontent rising, the government either had to cave in completely to a disunited and disorganised mass of conflicting interest groups – an invitation to utter chaos – or take action. It decided to take action. Zhao Ziyang, who had consistently supported the students, was ousted. The “hardliners” took over. The students had sown the wind, and they were about to reap the whirlwind.

Not that this seems to have occurred to the students in the square. By 30 May, they had set up a plaster statue of the “Goddess of Democracy” in the square. The next day, the government sent in soldiers again; reportedly the 27th and either the 28th or 38th Armies of the People’s Liberation Army (accounts differ). They were supposed to take control of the city and restore normalcy.

It is at this point that the accounts from the “sources” which are usually quoted by the Western media and the other sources begin to differ. According to the Western media’s “sources” (I have deep and abiding suspicion of any “source” whose account is accepted uncritically by Western media – remember the Iraq “sources”? – hence the quotes) the two armies sent in were armed and ready to shoot. According to the Chinese government, and, crucially, according to the US embassy in Beijing, the soldiers were sent in unarmed (see link below for documentation on this point).

As rumours spread of thousands of troops converging on the square, a large part of the people of Beijing came out on the streets, burned buses – government property – and set up barricades. The unarmed troops could not penetrate through these barricades. Soldiers were attacked with stones and Molotov cocktails; some were beaten or burned to death and their bodies strung up. Finally, armed troops were sent in, and they were met with the same reception. Officers were pulled from tanks and killed. After an armoured personnel carrier was incinerated and its crew killed, the soldiers fired at the people throwing Molotov cocktails. That there were barricades and people throwing firebombs isn’t something that any Western media “source” has even attempted to refute. This was not a massacre; it was somewhere between a riot and an insurrection.

I wonder what the reaction would have been if American occupation troops in Kabul or Baghdad were similarly barricaded and attacked with petrol bombs? Actually, I don’t need to wonder; the actions of the occupation forces in Iraq and Afghanistan speak for themselves in such situations.

To get back...

The Tiananmen Square “Massacre”

Finally, at 1am on 4 June, the army cleared the streets and reached Tiananmen Square. What did the soldiers do then? Go in shooting? No – according to even the “sources” which are quoted by the Western media, they waited for governmental orders. By then – again, this is not doubted – a large majority of the students had left the square. Only a few thousand remained. The army offered these students amnesty to leave. At 4 am, the students put the matter to vote – whether to go or to remain and face the consequences. Again, this is a matter that is not at dispute. The army did not go in, shooting blindly, and killing everyone in the square. First, according to everyone, they gave the students a chance to save themselves.

Now things get rather interesting. According to the standard Western media account of this episode, the tanks went in about 4 or 5am, shooting and crushing the students. This is the famous “massacre”, which is so inscribed in the modern consciousness. The bloodthirsty Chinese government had let loose a rain of terror on the poor peace-loving democracy-craving people of their own capital city. You know the stuff.

However, Spain's ambassador to Beijing at the time, Eugenio Bregolat, notes that Spain's TVE channel had a television crew in the square at the time, and if there had been a massacre, they would have been the first to see it and record it. Did they? No. If they had, wouldn’t there have been videos all over the internet, not to mention TV, of the massacre itself? But there are none. Bregolat also claims that most of the journalists who filed “eyewitness” accounts of the massacre were – at the time when they were allegedly witnessing the massacre – away from the Square, in the Beijing Hotel.

Similarly, Graham Earnshaw, a journalist in the square who was interviewing student leaders and was present during the night of June 3-4, claims (link below) that all the few hundred remaining students were persuaded to leave by the army, and when the tanks entered from one side of the Square, the last remaining students were withdrawing peacefully from the other side. Earnshaw agrees that the students’ “tent city” was crushed under the tanks’ treads as they came in, but he says there was nobody sleeping in the tents at the time to be crushed by the armour. Anyone who has ever been anywhere near a tank with its engine running will agree with his contention that nobody (except, I assume, the profoundly deaf) could have remained sleeping through the episode to be crushed, even without the earlier drama of the amnesty offer and the vote.

Then again, Xiaoping Li, a former China dissident, now resident in Canada, writing in the Asia Sentinel and quoting Taiwan-born Hou Dejian who had been on a hunger strike on the square to show solidarity with the students, said: "Some people said 200 died in the square and others claimed that as many as 2,000 died. There were also stories of tanks running over students who were trying to leave. I have to say I did not see any of that. I was in the square until 6:30 in the morning."

And these are the words of a dissident, and more, of a dissident who now lives abroad and presumably has nothing to fear.

Then there is the circumstantial evidence. Most of the “Tiananmen Square Massacre” crowd repeat, ad nauseam, lists of student leaders arrested in the aftermath of the “massacre”. Many of these student “eyewitnesses” also claim to have seen tanks shooting and crushing people in the Square. Well, in that case, there’s an obvious question: how come all these leaders and/or eyewitnesses who were present in the Square all survived the “massacre” unscathed? How come not one of them can state the name of anyone who was killed in the Square itself, given that they had all been protesting together there for weeks? Wasn’t a single person of those hundreds or thousands killed a friend or comrade or classmate of these students? Why isn’t there one single, miserable photo showing the massacre in the Square itself?

I’m not saying there weren’t killings in Beijing that night. I’m saying that said killings were restricted to the fighting in the streets leading to the square, essentially between barricaders and soldiers trying to get through the barricades. I cannot find one single bit of incontrovertible proof that there was a single killing in the Square itself, let alone a massacre.

If you – therefore – try and maintain an impartial attitude to the sources, there is at least reasonable grounds for doubt about whether there was a single episode of firing, a single death, in Tiananmen Square on the night of 3/4 June 1989; let alone the famous “massacre”.

Deconstructing a famous photograph.

It’s called one of the “100 most famous photographs of all time”; actually, there are several versions of the photo, and there’s a video of the episode as well, which has its own peculiar significance. Taken on the morning of 5th June 1989, it shows a lone man, in white shirt and dark trousers, with what seems to be shopping bags in his hands. He stands in front of a line of tanks. In the most well-known version, that taken by Jeff Widener of the Associated Press, there are four tanks. In other photos, taken from further away, there are more tanks behind those four. They are Chinese Type 59 tanks, with the crew “buttoned up” inside; i.e. the hatches shut.

As seen in the video, the man gestures angrily to the tank with his bags. The tank swerves to one side in order to drive around him. The man steps again in front of the tank, and the heavy vehicle again tries to steer around him. Finally, it stops, and the man clambers on it, has a brief exchange with the crew, and descends. As the tank tries to drive on, he again steps in front of it and again it stops. People from the crowd then pull the man to safety and the tanks drive on (this last bit is typically excised from videos of this episode posted on such sites as YouTube).

According to the standard mythology of the event, one so standard that it’s practically sacrilege not to believe it, the man displayed almost unbelievable courage in the face of overwhelming Chinese military aggression. This “lone hero” became an instant icon, known as the “Tank man” and a symbol of courage worldwide.

Now let’s take a close look at the photograph, one from a strictly neutral viewpoint, and there are several extremely interesting features, which go well beyond the particular episode itself and reveal a lot about the entire Tiananmen Square affair.

First, and most obviously, the crew of the tanks have sealed themselves inside. This is extremely significant because as far as possible tank crews avoid doing this. Even in combat, whenever they can get away with it, they try to keep the hatches open. There are several reasons for this; one is that vision from inside a “buttoned down” tank is very limited and it’s almost impossible to hear sounds from outside; for a fairly primitive tank like the Type 59 (of which surviving examples are now relegated to training and second-line duties), this is even truer. All the driver can see when his hatch is shut, through two “vision blocks,” is to the front and slightly to the right. The commander in the turret can do little better (for details on the capabilities of the Type 59 tank, see link below). And a sealed up tank, especially an early model one like the Type 59, is extremely hot and cramped and difficult for the crew to operate in for prolonged periods.

So why did the crew seal themselves inside? There can be only one reason: to protect themselves against Molotov cocktails and attacks from mobs.

Secondly: take a close look at the photo. The first, third and fourth tanks can clearly be seen to have caps covering the muzzles of their main guns. The second may have a black muzzle cap or the muzzle may be open, but the rest certainly have capped muzzles. Muzzle caps, which are meant to protect the interiors of the guns from dirt and dust, are never taken into a situation where the main guns may need to be fired. This is proof positive that the tanks were sent in without any intention of firing the main guns, come what may.

Similarly, the tanks being sealed up means the crews cannot use the machine guns on the turret roofs (the blocky objects on the right of each tank turret, sticking out to the side). The Type 59, admittedly, has two other machine guns; of them more anon.

Then, there are the shopping bags carried by the “tank man” himself. Obviously, if you go shopping – and nobody has ever suggested the shopping bags meant anything else – there must be shops open. Take it from one who has been in riot situations: shops never open when there is a possibility of serious violence. The shop owners have too much to lose from riots and looting. If there are shops open, the quantum of violence must be much lower than usually thought.

Now, if we look at the video, we see the tank shifting to the right and back again in an effort to avoid the man. If the Chinese troops had already shot and crushed down hundreds to thousands of unarmed civilians, and according to standard mythology they were, even on this 5th of June, shooting students trying to re-enter the Square, why would the tank have gone to such trouble to save the life of one miserable counter-revolutionary? There can be no reasonable explanation but the fact that the tankers were exercising the maximum restraint in the face of provocation. (Again, suppose an Iraqi or an Afghan were to do this to an American armoured column, or a Palestinian to an “Israeli” Merkava, as many in fact have done; what do you think would he have been called even as he was being blown away? A terrorist!)

Incidentally, this is the photo that first made me doubt the entire story of the massacre. The action of the crew of those tanks was so completely opposed to the conventional tale of the “massacre” that it merited a closer look. So, in all, I am thankful to the photographer and the “tank man” – for reasons directly contrary to the usual Western media accounts.

Also, Widener’s own account of the prelude to the photo is interesting. He was confined to his hotel – he says – because he had flu and was injured by a protestor who threw a brick at him, smashing one of his other cameras and giving him a concussion. Nice nonviolent protestors, eh?

Deconstructing an ancillary photo.

Before we reach a final conclusion on the Tank Man, though, let’s take a look at another photo, taken from ground level and published only in June 2009. Taken shortly before the “iconic” images, it shows the distant tanks coming towards the camera, and, in the middle left distance, what is alleged (there is no direct proof of this) to be the “tank man” himself, waiting beside a bulldozer, all ready to step in the way of the armoured column, shopping bags and all. In the right distance a bicyclist pedals unhurriedly on, and in the left foreground a man (also carrying a shopping bag) seems about to flash a thumbs-up sign at the camera. In the right foreground is the only sign of hurry or panic; a young man who appears to be sprinting or trying to duck.

Terrill Jones of the Associated Press, who took this photo, claims that – in order to avoid firing – he and others took shelter and could no longer see what happened afterwards. This is one of those stories that need to be examined carefully. First: If there indeed was firing, why is the cyclist so unconcernedly pedalling on? Even if it is true that the man in the left distance is the “tank man” himself, and even if he is willing to sacrifice his life in order to stop the tanks and so is unconcerned, why is the shopping bag man in the foreground obviously not in any panic or fear? Why is he apparently about to break into a huge grin? Why is the only man in a hurry the one in the right front, dashing towards the photographer?

Then, if there was indeed firing, where was it coming from? Certainly not from the tanks; as I said, the main guns were capped and the anti-aircraft machine guns unattended by the buttoned-up crew. The Type 59 has two other machine guns, both of 7.62 mm calibre. One is a coaxial gun, which fires along the line of the main gun, in whichever direction the main gun is pointing. In this case all the tanks had their main guns elevated at normal position, so the firing wasn’t coming from the coaxial guns – the bullets would have gone into the sky. The third gun is one fixed in the front of the tank and firing straight ahead through a very small aperture in the glacis plate (the tank’s front armour) and operated by the driver. It’s a nearly useless weapon, since it can only be aimed by turning the entire tank to point it directly at the target. If the hull gun was firing, only the lead tank could have been firing it, as the fire from others in the line would have struck the tanks in front of them. And in that case, what was the hull gun firing at? And again – why on earth did the tank save “tank man’s” life? It doesn’t make any sense.

Similarly, if “tank man” was spirited away by the crowd to safety, then there was enough of a crowd to take him away to safety, and that in turn means that there wasn’t any firing. Whoever the man was, there’s no evidence as to what happened to him; accounts of his execution are balanced by accounts that he is living in Taiwan (link below). If he’s dead, why aren’t any acquaintances coming forward to say who he was? If he is alive, why isn’t he coming out of the shadows, if necessary after smuggling himself out of China? Absolutely nobody seems to be sure who he is. Or is he, as some have suggested, mentally ill? A madman wouldn’t be the best expression of defiance of a tyrannical regime, would he?

All in all, the conclusion is clear: far from being a symbol of courage, “tank man” was in no real danger from military units exercising restraint in the face of provocation. In fact, what the photos and video clearly demonstrate is the reverse of what the official iconography, if I can put it that way, of this episode claims.

The Death Toll

How many people died in the entire Tiananmen Square affair? The Chinese Red Cross was alleged to have said 2600 died, but denied having ever given any such figure. “Unbiased” Western media alleges that the Red Cross backed down after pressure from the Chinese government, but fails to either provide any evidence of either this pressure or just who were these 2600 who died. At least some hundreds of their relatives could have been cited? The official Chinese government figure is 241 dead, including the soldiers who were burned and battered to death when they tried to make an unarmed approach to the Square. There are various other estimates. And, according to the Tiananmen Mothers, only 186 names of the alleged thousands dead have been confirmed as of June 2006, and that includes people whose deaths weren’t necessarily due to army action, including one who committed suicide.

Does it matter how many died? Yes, it does; it marks the difference between a unilateral massacre and fighting on both sides. For such an allegedly enormous death toll, the evidence seems to be scanty indeed.

The Significance

It was – I think – Zhou Enlai who, when asked about the significance of the French Revolution, said “It’s too early to tell.” At the time, the Chinese government was probably not looking to the long term; in a year when fellow Communist governments were being toppled by mass street protests and governmental paralysis, it was looking to its own survival when it decided to use force, in whatever form, against the students. However, in deciding to use force, it put a permanent full stop to a chain of events which – going by what happened in other nations at the time – would have led to unravelling of Central governmental authority, collapse of the state, disintegration of the economy and more than likely of the nation, and anarchy leading to mass impoverishment and mafia rule.

For comparison, we should look to the Soviet Union and the so-called putsch of 19 August 1991, which temporarily overthrew Mikhail Gorbachev and tried to maintain the unity of the nation, something the Soviet people had themselves largely approved of in a referendum. The coup collapsed in three days almost entirely because the new junta refused to use overwhelming force against the protestors, led by Boris Yeltsin, later to preside, marinated in alcohol, over the descent of Russia into a corrupt  oligarchy with the collapse of social services, skyrocketing corruption, and plummeting life expectancy. Almost exactly the same thing would likely have happened to China if the Tiananmen Square protestors hadn’t been neutralised.

In fact, it’s likely that the entire crackdown could have been avoided if the Beijing authorities had acted early and severely, incarcerating ringleaders and shutting down their media outlets, as Jiang Zemin, then the mayor of Shanghai, had done. This had nipped in the bud developing disturbances in China’s second city. Allowing the students weeks of a free hand was in itself an error, and China has taken care not to repeat that error in later years.

One look at China today, with its roaring economy and its people – who are far more prosperous than they were two decades ago – and a comparison with where Russia is even now, when it’s finally beginning to get to its feet again, and it should be clear that the Chinese government acted in the best long-term interests of its own people when it ended the protests.

But – what about freedom? Aren’t the Chinese people deprived of freedom? That is an oft-heard argument, a rich argument indeed when one thinks of the status of the “freed” citizens of such nations as Iraq or Afghanistan; or indeed of Russia, whose starving and impoverished people were called “free” but now that they are, at last, slightly better off are no longer called “free”. Strange are the definitions of freedom, and bizarre are the uses of the word.

For the record, I believe democracy, as practiced today, is an eyewash and does not equal freedom. I believe that the right to live with dignity is more important than the right to vote, and I believe that a nation which provides the necessities for the maximum number of its people is freer than one which allows them to vote but takes no steps to ensure they have a roof over their heads and clothes on their backs.

There is also the question of the significance of the crackdown to the world at large, two decades later. As we all know (or should know), China is one of the most significant nations in the world today, and certainly the fastest-rising one. It’s also the only country which serves as a counterweight to the global hegemon and self-declared world policeman, the United States of America. The US is a power in decline, but is still the only nation which believes in war as a policy of first resort and seeks to impose its will – by force – on the rest of the world. But even the US has to tread warily on Chinese economic might.

Can one imagine how much more arrogant and lethal the USA’s war against the world would have been without China providing some kind of balance?

The Media Lies

As should be obvious by now, I believe the mass of the Western media lied, cynically and repeatedly, and continues to lie about the Tiananmen Square incident. Much of the lying is due to a phenomenon called “pack journalism” (see link below) where media fall in line, quite unthinkingly, and without checking facts, on a particular “plausible” story. One only has to remember the tales of Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Distraction, sorry, Destruction, for a recent example.

Also, the Western media have never hidden their anti-China bias, even in these days when they have to treat China with respect. So the 2001 incident when an American spy plane collided with a Chinese fighter and was compelled to land in China was an “intolerable act of aggression”, without regard to the facts. Actually, the facts never really mattered, as we saw in 2008 when the Lhasa rioting was deliberately and cynically misreported with propaganda from Tibetan exile groups (speedily exposed through the Chinese blogosphere) of how the PLA soldiers were responsible for dressing up as monks and rioting, and so on.

But media sources have to take their inspiration from somewhere. That inspiration is almost always from the people who actually control these media, people who have the most to gain from the lies the media disseminate. In Iraq, we know who benefitted the most from the invasion, which firms saw their stock prices jump through the ceiling. Similarly, a collapsed and disintegrating China would have freed a lot of space for certain business interests and allowed certain nations a free hand in East Asia. So it was entirely predictable that they would react violently to firm action that made it less likely that any such collapse would occur, besides painting all Communists with the same genocidal brush.

The conventional truth about Tiananmen Square    - in summary – is not the truth. But the truth is out there for those who care to know, the evidence visible for those who wish to see.

Statutory Disclaimer: The opinions stated herein are mine. I am in no way responsible for any fights, quarrels, or breaks in relations caused by the contents of this article. Be warned.


Further reading:

 If the links below don't work, please copy and paste to your browser

(I wish to express my gratitude to blogger “Bobby Fletcher” - http://tiananmenmyth.blogspot.com/ -  for bringing some of the links below to my attention)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989 (The wikipedia entry on the Tiananmen Square protests)

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB16/documents/09-02.htm (US Embassy note stating that the Chinese troops had initially been unarmed.)

http://www.earnshaw.com/memoirs/content.php?id=5 (Graham Earnshaw’s account of Tiananmen Square, where he states unambiguously that “most of the deaths did not happen on or near the Square.”)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man#cite_note-NYTNewPhoto-1 (About the Tank Man, with a description of the original video)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_59 (All about the Type 59 tank)

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/behind-the-scenes-tank-man-of-tiananmen/ (Jeff Widener’s account of how he was hit in the face by a rock and also claims how the photographers of the “iconic” image saw armoured personnel carriers firing at the crowds. Where are the photos of that episode?)

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/behind-the-scenes-a-new-angle-on-history/?hp (Terrill Jones’ account claiming the tanks were firing at the time of the “tank man” incident)

http://www.yachtingnet.com/time/time100/leaders/profile/rebel2.html (A Time Magazine article on the “tank man,” typical of Western media reportage of the incident. Note the unattributed and unsubstantiated allegations that the Chinese shot “hundreds of workers and students and doctors and children, many later found shot in the back.”)

http://dajiyuan.com/b5/6/6/1/n1336133.htm (Chinese language article claiming “tank man” still lives. I don’t speak Chinese so have to take it at its word)

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/eo20080721gc.html (An article by the former Canadian ambassador to Japan, Gregory Clark, examining the myth of the “massacre”)

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=CLA20060410&articleId=2245 (By the same author; an examination of the phenomenon of pack journalism)

http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2510/stories/20080523251000400.htm (A discussion of other anti-Chinese western media propaganda) 

Fire One: The Sinking of the Cheonan

Sometimes, it’s kind of interesting to take a stance directly opposed to “conventional wisdom”, and see just where that gets us.

For instance...

As anyone who is interested in current affairs knows by now, the two Koreas – the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or DPRK, or North Korea, or the bad guys; and the Republic of Korea, or the ROK, or South Korea, or the good guys – are in a standoff featuring war noises over the sinking of a South Korean warship by a North Korean submarine. That sinking is certified to have been the action of a North Korean torpedo...certified by an “international panel.”

Incidentally, that would make it only the third recorded post Second World War sinking of a ship by a sub, if you’re interested. The first was the torpedoing of the Indian frigate INS Khukri by a Pakistani Daphne Class sub, PNS Hangor, during the 1971 war, an extremely interesting episode in its own right. The second was the Argentine light cruiser ARA General Belgrano, sunk by HMS Conqueror during the war for the Islas Malvinas in 1982, another interesting episode for rather different reasons. (For descriptions of these episodes, see links at the conclusion of this article).

Fair enough. Let’s get back to the point.

Now I’m not trying to claim that the North Koreans did not, in an evil act of wanton aggression, sink the South Korean vessel. I am not claiming that the North Korean regime isn’t evil incarnate, led by a madman with a weird flattop hairdo, whose every action is driven by his lunacy. All of that is perfectly possible, and I’m not ruling out the possibility that Kim Jong Il feasts every night on human flesh and blood.

Fine?

But, now, just let’s assume – for the sake of argument, no more – that itisn’t completely and absolutely proved beyond reasonable doubt that the North Koreans sank the South Korean ship, which was, not necessarily, in international or South Korean waters at the time of the sinking, and see where it gets us. Now take a deep breath and calm down! Don’t blow a fuse! This is meant to be a mind-game only.

But, once we begin on this mind-game, just what do we have? Let’s see.

Logically, we should, then, begin by taking a look at the evidence that is presented to us, the evidence that makes us believe that North Korea was behind the sinking.

First, what we have (Source No 3, see link below) is a piece of rusty metal dredged up from the seabed, which is claimed by those in the know to be part of a North Korean torpedo – on the basis of a single marking, which is alleged to match those on a known North Korean origin torpedo. Yes, very, very damning evidence indeed. We know that when a ship sinks, anything found on the sea-bed in the vicinity is what must have sunk it.

Repeat after me...if a ship sinks, anything found on the sea bed in the vicinity, even if found weeks later, must have sunk it. Even if there’s nothing to say how old that piece of metal is, or whether it is even what a reputable international committee says it is, we must take it on faith that it’s what sank the ship, because it was found on the seabed.

Incontrovertible evidence, really, on a par with the WMDs that still lie unfound beneath the Iraqi sands.

OK, now we have that international group of experts, the “committee” as I called it. This committee, it seems,

(gave the)... investigation itself ... an added air of impartiality by the presence of 24 foreign experts from America, Australia, Britain and Sweden. They are all said to support the conclusions reached. (Source No 3, below.)

Ah, America, the land of wonder, great and impartial, as we all know; the land which went reluctantly to war to save us from Saddam Hussein’s thousands of weapons of mass destruction; Britain, which so accurately predicted that London was “45 minutes from destruction” at the hands of the Iraqi dictator, and which, of course, never ever sexed up any dossiers; and Australia, which has aided and abetted America’s democracy-building exercises by sending troops to Vietnam, not to mention Iraq and Afghanistan. Not to forget Sweden, trusted friend and alliance partner of all the above. Who could ever doubt any of them?

And while we are on the subject, might we just know the names of these gentlemen (and ladies, if any were present)? They are experts, are they? Experts in what, precisely? Marine weapons? Druid burial practices? Choral music? What are their qualifications? What were their individual conclusions? I’d be a mite happier if I knew a little more than the idea that they are “said” to support the conclusions reached. But then that’s just me.

Now, moving on, let’s see what the initial South Korean reaction was to the sinking of this ship, the Cheonan. This ship, a naval frigate, sank on the 26th March, it appears, two months ago as this is written. We still have access to the news reports that appeared at the time. Did they shout to heaven for justice against the evil North Koreans? Did they demand retaliation for the dastardly sinking? Did they hell. What the initial reports said, was, in essence, that there was no reason to think that the North Koreans were responsible for the ship’s sinking, despite survivor reports of an explosion. And the South Korean government (link no 1, below)

said they while they still had no idea what caused the hole, they were confident that it was not an attack by North Korea.

More, a news report (check link No 2, below) said that relatives of survivors

accused authorities of a cover-up, saying survivors told them the Cheonan was leaky and in need of repair.

Then, where, precisely, was this ship? Apparently, it was “near” a disputed maritime boundary where several “bloody naval clashes” between the Koreas had occurred in the past, and actually within sight of the North Korean coast. And yet...and yet, this leaky tub sank after an explosion in that volatile, dangerous area, and nobody initially claimed it had sunk due to hostile action!
Perhaps it’s just my stupidity that makes me think that there might just be a soupcon of a possibility that perhaps the initial reaction that the ship wasn’t sunk by the North was because the ship clearly wasn’t sunk by the North. No?

Oh, but wait, there’s a little bit more to it. There’s this clincher (source No 3, link below):

The investigation report says that a number of small submarines, escorted by a support ship, left a North Korean naval base in the Yellow Sea a few days prior to the attack and returned a few days after it took place.

Y’know, that just proves it. After all, we know perfectly well that no sub ever puts to sea for trials, exercises, and training. The very fact that subs were out on the ocean during the sinking proves...I tell you,proves, damn it...that they sank the ship.

Of course, it does strike me that it might have been kind of useful to the captain and crew of the Cheonan, who were off to prowl off an enemy coast (quite literally an enemy coast, since the two Koreas are still technically at war) where armed clashes had taken place in the recent past, if they had been warned that these North Korean subs were at sea. I don’t know...in the South Korean captain’s place, it’s information I’d have appreciated having. It strikes me also that if I were a naval ship captain in hostile waters, I’d be looking out for a sub attack; and even more so if I were the captain of a ship belonging to a nation with a far more technically advanced military than my opponent. In fact, it shouldn’t have been all that difficult for me to detect, you know, those enemy subs before they launched their dastardly attack.

Oh well. It’s sort of late to be disclosing that now, two months later; kind of like shutting the stable door after the horse has found new pastures. Or not...apparently the South Koreans are now looking for four “vanished” Northern subs. Vanished as in disappeared without a trace, presumably to launch more dastardly attacks. Or, just maybe...not.

Now, as I said above, I’m perfectly open to the idea that the North Koreans did actually and with malice aforethought sink the ship. So, you know, the question comes up, just why?

Somehow, I find it a little bit difficult to believe that any international action is caused by a leader’s personal madness. All right, I’ll go along with the idea that Kim Jong Il is a drivelling lunatic. But even a drivelling lunatic, if in a position of power, can only issue orders, and those orders have to be followed and carried out by people who are, presumably, not lunatics. Therefore, let’s assume that there was actually some benefit to be accrued from sinking the South Korean ship. What was it?

If you remove madness from the table, there’s only speculation; and the brilliant BBC article I’ve already referred to (source No 3: see below) claims that it might be retaliation (for what? One retaliates against something done by someone else. Was this retaliation for similar aggression by the other side? No, the South Koreans are the goodboys, remember?). Or maybe it was an action by the North Korean military, acting alone, for whatever reason you care to dream up. Of course, this is also the nation where nothing, but nothing, happens without the personal orders of the lunatic Dear Leader with the flattop hairdo, if that is you believe the same Western sources. Reconcile that for me if you can.

I suppose there just might be a possibility, as the report claims, that this was a strike by North Korea’s lunatic flattop to “keep the military on side”. How this is supposed to work defeats my weak reasoning powers. Most military types I know aren’t exactly eager to jump into a clearly unwinnable war, and torpedoing a ship without good reason seems to be precisely risking jumping into a clearly unwinnable war. Again, I’d love some help on this.

Now, let me advance my own theory about what made the lunatic flattop order the sinking, and see where it gets us. The North Koreans attacked the South in order to force the South to launch an economic or even military aggression, thereby uniting the North behind its leaders. There. That’s my theory.

Now, in order for this to make sense, you would, you know, make sure that your attack on the other side was so clearly an attack that the other side would not just recognise it as such but would have no option to strike back. Now, what kind of attack would be best to achieve that? Something like...I don’t know, a sinking of a ship by a submarine, a sinking that might easily be mistaken for an accident, or the truth of which might be deliberately suppressed by an opponent not eager to respond to provocation?

Somehow, it strikes me that when you have one of the world’s most aggressive commando forces, which have repeatedly infiltrated the other side’s territory and carried out strikes, it might be somewhat more effective to use them instead; a clearer provocation, and more effective at ensuring a response.

Instead, what do we have? We have not just angry North Korean denials about carrying out the sinking, and (source no 12, below) we have them demanding access to the “evidence” to carry out their own independent investigation. You know, kind of like how the defence in an American trial gets to see the prosecution’s evidence in order to prepare a defence.

You know, reading over what I’ve just written, suddenly I’m not so hot about my theory any more.

OK, now, again, just for the sake of argument, let’s take a total fantasy track. Let’s imagine that the Cheonan was not sunk by a North Korean torpedo, but because of some other reason: an internal explosion or a close encounter with an old, drifting sea mine. Let’s also imagine that the alleged “sinking” was a story cooked up by someone in order to increase tensions in the Korean peninsula.

Why would they want to do that?

Some of the possible answers are rather interesting.

1. North Korea’s forces, while impressive on paper, are primitive and in the long run would be unable to stand up to the South, which also has well over 28,000 American forces all ready at hand. What use are those allied forces on your soil if you don’t make use of them, huh? What this means is that the South actually has, if you believe the same sources which feed us the rest of our information on the North, relatively little to fear from a shooting war. (The North Korean nuclear arsenal is unproven and unlikely to be used in a limited war, which is what the South would be banking on, not an all-out conflict.)

2. South Korea hasn’t come out too well from its involvement in the freedom-building exercises in Afghanistan and Iraq, and some unpatriotic people are even calling for withdrawal from the US’ freedom-building efforts. What better than a nifty little war noise to make people fall in line?

3. South Korea has a long history of allowing itself to be used for the furthering of US aims. For instance, there was the shooting down of KAL 007 over Soviet territory in 1983, an incident that was extremely likely to have involved a US spying mission over Sakhalin and the Kamchatka peninsula (see pdf file linked to below).

4. Japan has recently been in some turmoil over continued US military presence on Okinawa in particular and in Japan in general. The current Japanese government has signally failed to deliver on pre-election pledges to reduce the American military presence, and the US evidently has no plans ever to reduce that presence. After all, China is still being drum-beaten as the Next Big Enemy. And a war threat in the region is so very beneficial to an increased military presence, is it not?

5. The ongoing plans to attack Iran. Since the South Koreans ought to be able to handle the North on their own, it would be a useful distraction to keep the Russians and Chinese busy while the final preparations for the attack were underway.

Now I can scarcely stress enough that all this is fantasy. Repeat after me: Kim Jong Il is a flattopped lunatic maniac. It’s been proved beyond doubt that the North sank the ship. And anyone saying anything to the contrary is a North Korean agent in the pay of Pyongyang. Got it? Good.

But just imagine a world where my fantasy scenario is right, and the incident has been manufactured for purposes we can, um, only guess at.

Couldn’t happen...could it?

No.

Sources:

1. http://news.antiwar.com/2010/03/26/south....th-north-korea/ (Initial news item on the sinking, with official denials by Seoul of a torpedo attack)

2. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36052055/ns/world_news-asiapacific/(News item about the sinking of the Cheonan, soon after the sinking, with references to survivor accounts of leaks and mechanical faults.)

3. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/asia_pacific/10130909.stm (BBC news item complete with “proof” the North sank the Cheonan)

4. http://goldsea.com/Text/index.php?id=6151 (More innuendo-laced and evidence-sparse “proof”)

5. http://www.bharat-rakshak.com/MONITOR/ISSUE4-3/harry.html (The sinking of INS Khukri)

6. http://www.bobhenneman.info/belgrano.htm (The sinking of the ARA General Belgrano)

7. http://www.headlinerwatch.com/1169/south....ry-official.htm (An account, in somewhat sloppy language, of South Korea’s hunt for four Northern subs which are “missing”)

8. http://www.rescue007.org/docs/HowKAL007WasLost.pdf (An annotated account of the shooting down of KAL 007)

9. http://www.frontlineonnet.com/stories/20100604271104900.htm (On the current relations between the US and Japan)

10. http://news.antiwar.com/2010/05/25/us-mi....repare-for-war/ (On the US drive to prepare for imminent war against Iran.)

11. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/asia_pacific/10129703.stm?ls(More BBC "evidence")

12. http://www1.voanews.com/english/news/asi....n-94657164.html(The North Korean response)






Here's the "evidence": the alleged torpedo: