The Guardian 2 April, 2008
Culture and Life
by Rob Gowland
"Open revolt"
and a strong sense of déja vu
"Open revolt" screamed the front page headline of The Sydney Morning Herald last Monday. The story, of course, was about China. The capitalist media were uniform in their assessment of the situation: The people of Tibet were in revolt and were heroically "defying China’s iron fist".
Disappointingly for some right-wing media and governments, the Beijing Olympic Games do not appear to be at risk of either cancellation or a boycott. Nevertheless, clearly the capitalist media have taken on the job of organising all the disruption they possibly can.
And these "spontaneous" riots are definitely organised. Even The Sydney Morning Herald acknowledged, perhaps without meaning to, that the Tibetans throwing rocks at the windows of government buildings, hurling petrol bombs or simply beating up Chinese civilians in the street, had been organised — "through the telephone grapevine, through Voice of America radio broadcasts in local dialects [they don’t miss a trick, do they] as well as … satellite television".
The whole episode carried a heavy sense of déja vu. We have seen this kind of operation before, more than once. In fact, the US in particular, has become highly adept at organising it.
We first encountered it, in its full-blown form, in Hungary in 1956. Remember the prominent way Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America were involved in that whole exercise? Remember too how the "freedom fighters" there captured all those local radio stations with such ease, testifying to the scope and popularity of the "uprising"?
Only later did we find out that the "radio stations" that had been "liberated" by the rebels were not real radio stations at all, but portable transmitters flown in from West Germany (like so many of the "freedom fighters" themselves) to give phoney reports of the capture of towns by rebel forces that in fact did not exist.
They were in fact part of what we now know are called "black ops", unacknowledged intelligence agency operations designed to sow confusion and destabilise governments the US wants to remove.
Twelve years later we saw the procedure in operation again in Czechoslovakia, then in 1989 it was replayed with Gorbachev’s help in the USSR itself. The people of the USSR actually voted in a referendum not to dissolve the USSR, but Gorby, that great democrat, did so anyway. He ushered in not just the breaking-up of the Soviet Union, but the looting by eager entrepreneurs of the vast assets of its State economy (Gorby gave himself the former Lenin Institute in Moscow, but to his chagrin was later not allowed to keep it).
In that same period of counter-revolutionary assaults, Berliners were goaded by Radio Free Europe and the VofA (again) to seize the "luxurious" hunting lodges owned by Party and government leaders in the GDR. In the event, the actual lodges proved to be a disappointment, being perfectly ordinary and not at all luxurious. But they had served their purpose for the organisers of the destabilisation of the GDR.
We know enough about these destabilising ops now to recognise many of the techniques — and the huge investment in money and manpower they represent.
It is not enough, obviously, to simply report on the radio that "Party leaders are lolling about in luxury while you have to struggle for basic necessities". There must also be a well-organised team on the ground, to stimulate and if necessary lead street protests. Well trained — very well trained — agents provocateurs are a must if these tactics are to work.
We saw it in action in Yugoslavia, when groups of disciplined young strong-arm boys led the crowds in the disruption that caused the overthrow of the socialist government of Slobodan Milosevic and the Socialist Party of Serbia.
The US Army maintains at least two complete military units whose sole job is to conduct hostile operations on the territory of countries the US is not at war with.
Destabilisation, "black (i.e. false) propaganda", currency raids, interference in trade via lies about "product safety", are all part of imperialism’s modern day arsenal. Religion, of course, is a favourite weapon, much used in recent times.
Less obvious is the carefully orchestrated use of the global mass media, less obvious because of the collusion of the media magnates themselves in the process. Their own class interest predisposes them to allow their particular media to actively co-operate in imperialism’s little game.
Of course, nothing so crude as telling their journalists to "say such and such". They hire journalists who aren’t going to think independently, or who think along a right wing track already; journalists who can be trusted to say the right thing politically. It saves time in the long run.
And so we have the universal portrayal of the Tibetan question as one of Chinese conquest, Chinese tyranny, and saintly Tibetan monks led by the Dalai Lama in defending their country.
But don’t forget, under the Dalai Lama Tibet was partly a feudal and partly slave society. Being a monk was the only way a Tibetan could get any kind of education.
When the UN Conference on Women took place in Beijing a few years ago, the media made much of the protests organised by Tibetan women against China outside the conference. Although the media downplayed the counter-demonstration by pro-Chinese Tibetan women at the Conference, they could not completely hide it. So they dropped the subject.
In all the news coverage of the latest protests, not one Tibetan supporter of China has been interviewed (so far, at any rate). Every anti-Chinese Tibetan "refugee" has been able to talk to the world’s media, however.
That, too, is part of the way these things are organised. And in this case, organised is the operative word.