DeepSeek – and Mandy Rice-Davies

Reactions in Western media have been predictable. As the innovations of a pint-size Chinese AI outfit – innovations imposed (necessity being the mother of invention) by US sanctions on high end chips to China – wipe $billions off Silicon Valley/Wall Street corporate valuations, the Guardian can be trusted to put an empire-servile damper on interest in all thinks DeepSeek.

The Guardian yesterday evening, January 28, 2025

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Well that’s one way of scaring off Western potential users! Leave aside the Orwellian extent to which the likes of Google and FB hoover up our personal data to sell to other corporations and US spy agencies – if the product is free, the product is you – while stenographers ¹ like Simon Tisdall intone grave warnings on China’s sinister intent. Let’s instead cast a for once critical eye on that iconic event – those nights in Tiananmen Square ² – invoked with exquisite timing by the Guardian’s kicker. It embodies – as the craters, contradictions and colossal coincidences in the Navalny and Skripals stories do for Russia ³ – all we think we know about the dark heart of Beijing.

Here’s something I posted in 2021 on Tiananmen Square, 1989. Those paying attention know how CIA and arms-length actors like The National Endowment for Democracy get thugs on the streets of target nations; thugs our media depict as freedom fighters. At Tiananmen Square the MO was in its infancy but would replay in more honed forms in Syria 2011, Kiev’s Maidan Square 2014, Kazakhstan 2022 and across the Middle East in the “Arab Spring”. ⁴

In my post I cited an extract from a piece – its link now broken; not necessarily with malevolent intent – by one Milton James: ⁵

In recent times, the words “Remember Tiananmen Square” have become a slogan serving to remind us that we are dealing with an “evil empire” here.

But what if the so called “Tiananmen Square Student Massacre” never happened, at least not in the way mainstream media continues to portray it? The story that Chinese troops machine-gunned hundreds of innocent student protesters on the night of 3rd or 4th June 1989 has been thoroughly debunked by many of those present in the Square on those nights. Among them was a Chilean diplomat (Second Secretary), a Spanish TVE television crew, a correspondent for Reuters, and protesters themselves, all of who said nothing happened that night other than a military unit telling the remaining students to leave the Square; there was no student Massacre in Tiananmen Square. Similarly, a well-known Taiwan-born writer Hou Dejian, who had been on a hunger strike in the Square in show of solidarity with the students, said “Some people said that 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 that I did not see any of that. I myself was in the Square until 6:30 in the morning.”

For a species of story lovers the plots and sub plots of media propaganda blitzes enjoy – even after being debunked as factually wrong and/or logically incoherent – high durability precisely because they feed and are fed by Grand Narratives. Media saturation confers dismayingly high levels of immunity to truth and reason.

Which of course is why the Guardian chose to reference so empire-friendly a tale of PRC devilry as Tiananmen Square, its relevance on the face of it tenuous at best, in that kicker.

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Oh, almost forgot Mandy! Not all or even most of the efforts – sure to be drip fed in the weeks to come – to trash DeepSeek and big up US corps will invoke China as bogeyman. Most fire will be aimed at product efficacy …

indeed, the Graun kicker does both – the one overtly, the other by dog-whistle

… which is where the voice of one Mandy Rice-Davies rings down the decades. Those unfamiliar with the Profumo Affair of 1962, which forced the resignation of British prime minister Harold Macmillen for believing the lies of his war minister, can find a wiki-summary here. It cites her immortalised gem:

While being cross-examined at Ward’s trial, when James Burge, the defence counsel, pointed out that Lord Astor denied an affair or even having met her, [Mandy Rice-Davies] dispatched this swiftly with pert humour, “Well he would, wouldn’t he?

(In my mind’s eye she’s filing her nails in the witness box, looking not at Mr Burge but the jurors as she delivers with worldweary deadpan. So often are her words now re-used, they have their own abbreviation, MRDA – “Mandy Rice-Davies applies”.)

Now read this tweet by a Neal Khosla whose son Vinod’s venture capital firm, Khosla Ventures, raised a cool $400m for an OpenAI whose shares this week did a Niagara Falls:

“deepseek is a ccp state psyop + economic warfare to make american ai unprofitable. They are faking the cost was low to justify setting price low and hoping everyone switches to it, damage AI competitiveness in the US, don’t take the bait”.

I say MRDA!

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1. I’m being unfair. Simon Tisdall is more useful idiot than stenographer.
2. It’s not often you find me criticising Leonard Cohen but this line from Democracy,  on his album The Future, shows political savvy – as he’d be the first to agree – wasn’t his strong suit.
3. Skripals? Poisoned on park bench in Salisbury, a stone’s throw from chemical warfare labs at Porton Down. First at the scene is British Army’s most senior nurse. Mediafest ensues on evil Putin; Skripals vanish for good. Navalny? Putin poisons his hotel water. He is taken to Omsk hospital. No one kills him there – because poll ratings for this far right xenophobe are a fraction of Putin’s? – though a hospital is an ideal rub-out venue. The authorities approve transfer to Berlin, medics find Novichok. Merkel accuses Russia, EU imposes sanctions. Makes perfect sense doesn’t it? Since both fairy tales invoke deadly nerve poison we get a BOGOF. Not only are Putin’s men evil; they are incompetent too. A masterclass in how critical thinking flies out the window, in professor no less than refuse collector, in the face of dominant narratives!
4. The empire need not always succeed in its ousters. Sometimes it wins, as in the Ukraine, sometimes the attempt is foiled. But always the target government regime has to invest heavily in countering foreign interference dressed as genuine protest – which, indeed, it sometimes is: as in Syria before popular demands for greater freedom were hijacked by Western/Israeli/Saudi backed jihadists, few of them Syrian.
5. Milton James is or was with the Australian not-for-profit, Critical Social Work Publishing House.