It's two decades to the day since the Chinese people demanded their freedom from the despotic, mass-murdering junta that rules their nation.
It's twenty years since they stood in Tiananmen Square and sang songs and demanded that the Communist dictators quit power.
It's twenty years since the power-hungry psychotics turned tanks on their own people and murdered them for asking to be free, killed them, jailed them, sent them to re-education gulags where they were tortured horrendously.
It's twenty years in which more terror has been inflicted on the people of occupied Tibet, the Uighur nation, and the other minorities within the Maoist monolith.
Twenty years in which the hypocrites of the West facilitated China's leadership by hiring their slave labour, buying their bloodstained products at dirt cheap prices, handed back free Hong Kong and Macao into their anti-democratic hands and helped them block the internet from reaching their people, and let them hold a propagandist Olympics that will go down in history as stomach-churning as Hitler's Berlin Games in 1936.
Twenty years in which their template for terrorising their own people has been exported elsewhere, to other stubborn juntas who will not countenance democracy or liberty or freedom of choice, in places like Burma.
It is not anywhere near as long since I was in China. But the people there still yearn for freedom.
We cannot allow the Chinese government to exercise their blanket control over information. We cannot let them rewrite history. We cannot permit the spirit of Tiananmen to be ignored.
Because one day, the proud Chinese people will be free from the sixty year nightmare of Maoism, and they will legitimately say:
"Yes, for much of that time, we bowed to the terror and let ourselves be ruled. But one day we rose and sought our freedom, and we were brutally beaten down. And you in the West did nothing. Rather than insist on our freedom as you did for the people of South Africa, you instead rewarded the Communist cadres and made them millionaires."
Remember Tiananmen. Remember what they did.
Remember how democracy was stillborn in China twenty years ago, and how we still trade with the murderers.
2 comments:
I watched a report on this with much dismay last night on BBC. I was a bit shocked to see today's students in Tiananmen supporting a completely different version of events from the way I remember it. I was a final year student in '89 so I had some connect, if only by age and academic status, with what went on.
The Chinese educators appear to have re-written the entire thing. Shame on them ..
They don't let anyone other than party faithful talk to Western press, Evoting.
And anyone deviating from the party line would find themselves being 're-educated' soon afterwards.
In one sense, we need to remember Tiananmen for the Chinese too young to know who have been told only lies.
But primarily we need to remember and to speak out against the corrupt Chinese Communist Party continually because we cannot permit their lies to ever be accepted.
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