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Helmut Schmidt defends Tiananmen massacre
Published: 13 Sep 12 12:44 CET | Print version
Online: http://www.thelocal.de/national/20120913-44953.html
Helmut Schmidt, ex-chancellor and sacred cow of German political punditry, has defended the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing. Casualty estimates were "wildly exaggerated" and the Chinese army was defending itself, he said.
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He said the Red Cross estimate that 2,600 people were killed did not tally with that of foreign ambassadors in the city at the time.
Schmidt, who was Germany’s Social Democratic chancellor from 1974 until 1982, added that other mitigating circumstances needed to be taken into account when assessing the riots and massacre.
Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was visiting China for the first time after a long interval, and that his Chinese counterpart Deng Xiaoping had "lost face" because Gorbachev had been forced to enter the city's "Great Hall of the People" by a back door because of the violence.
He also said that since the government had had no police force available, authorities were forced to send in the army. "And the soldiers had only learned to shoot," said Schmidt.
Schmidt praised Deng, who steered China to long-term prosperity, as the most successful communist leader in world history. He also rejected the claim that the Chinese had "sacrificed" civil rights in favour of material wealth, since there has never been a tradition of personal freedom in Chinese history.
Chinese politics could not be measured by European standards, he argued.
The Local/bk
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Your comments about this article:
So thing he said are correct (not all agreed )
When have the Chinese ever had a free election? ,
But I think Fidel Castro is a better leader when you consider how much pressure he was put under by the U.S.A. for all his time in office.
Why did you delete my post? Because I said a truth about Germany !
Ok.Germany is the greatest country ,the land for the greatest people ever, greatest scientists ever from Isaac Newton to Karl Marx , Archimedes to Avicenna , Socrates to Plato , Hugo to Venter
bla bla bla bla bla
@Onlythetruth
Some things he said are correct (not all agreed )
When have the Chinese ever had a free election? ,
But I think Fidel Castro is a better leader when you consider how much
Its people like Herr Schmidt who do down the Germans. He can not be found talking like this - as though he is just another man from the streets !
May be these are signs of senile decay - one may never know.
All the other ex-socialist countries had peaceful demonstrations, their commie regimes collapsed and the Americans and their neoliberal stooges a##raped them ever since. Only Russia has improved itself since Putin stepped up and threw the American stooges into prison where hopefully they'll rot for the rest of their days.
The Chinese broke up their demo at the first sign of unrest and nobody has f***ed with them since. Hell, they even own the entire US treasury now and their worst growth levels, the West would kill for.