West Still Miscasts 1989 Protestors

by Liberty and Power

James Kynge has written an insightful article on the Tiananmen anniversary in today's Financial Times.

"The truth is that the students in the square had only the haziest understanding of western-style democracy. To the extent that the protests were directed at abuses of an existing system by an emerging elite, they were motivated more by outrage at the betrayal of socialist ideals than by aspirations for a new system. The mood in the square was at least as much conservative as it was activist."

I encourage you to read the entire article here. It's well worth the effort.

UPDATE: Brendan O'Neill explains here how both China and the West have distorted the truth about the Tiananmen Square protests and the massacre that followed.

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Kevin Carson - 6/5/2009

The people involved in the 1953 uprising in East Germany, Hungary 1956, etc., would have been subpoenaed by HUAC if they'd been in the U.S. They essentially demonized the Soviet puppet governments in terms of Marxist values. In these countries as well as Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Solidarity in Poland, their primary focus was libertarian socialist: achieving real economic and political power for the working class, establishing worker self-management in the factories, etc.

It was very much an exercise in "using the master's tools to tear the master's house down," much like my own attempt to demonize corporate capitalism in terms of its defenders' own phony "free market" rhetoric.

American-style corporate capitalism is the enemy of free markets, and Soviet-style oligarchical collectivism is the enemy of socialism.