“In this state-approved narrative [of China’s
modern-day renaissance], there is no place for the People's Liberation Army's
act of opening fire on its own people. And the battle over the memory of 1989
is now a global one, waged in classrooms, in print and online. Academic
journals and tech companies have censored June 4-related content. Whether this
happens under direct pressure from Beijing or as a pre-emptive act of
self-censorship for commercial reasons hardly matters anymore. In one recent
case, a Chinese online education company that employs 60,000 teachers in the
United States and Canada sacked two American teachers for discussing Tiananmen
and Taiwan with their students in China. And as Chinese companies acquire news
media overseas, they have direct levers over sensitive issues like the
Tiananmen anniversary and human rights coverage more broadly.”— Louisa Lim, senior
lecturer at the Center for Advancing Journalism at the University of Melbourne,
Australia, in “China Conquers History Itself,” The New York Times, June 4, 2019
Longtime admirers of this blog know that I am
obsessed not only by the past but by how we remember—or dis-remember—it. Today,
on the 30th anniversary of the Chinese regime’s massacre of student
protesters in Tiananmen Square, that concern seems especially to the point.
Louisa Lim’s discussion in the essay from which the
above quote comes, on her encounters with Chinese overseas students who were
unaware of their nation’s tragic turn away from greater freedom, reminds us
that it’s all too easy for a regime to
induce its citizens to forget or even never learn about its past. The
instrument of choice: a “patriotic education” that in reality is nothing but a
stalking horse for indoctrination, by ensuring that dissenting voices are never
heard, by concealing or destroying documentary evidence, by repeatedly denying
what millions have seen, until they wonder if they might be going insane.
The classic 1944 film thriller Gaslight depicted a Victorian husband who sought to convince his
wife that, despite the evidence of her own senses, she might be going mad. But
actual nations as well as fictional characters can fall victim to “gaslighting.”
Such is the fate now of post- Tiananmen China.
I urge everyone reading this post to click on the
links I’m attaching now to a timeline of the events surrounding the Tiananmen massacre and a Huffington Post eyewitness account of that terrible day.
Oh, by the way—don’t think that gaslighting is a
condition perpetrated solely by entrenched totalitarian leaders. It can also be
used, more dangerously, by would-be authoritarians—such as a buccaneering
capitalist-turned-President who, for reasons best known to himself, insists that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan 40 years ago occurred because “terrorists were going into Russia,” and, therefore, “They were right to be there.”
Hideous...all too hideous...
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