Audio: Snow Patrol – Take Back the City
June 4th 2009 marks the twenty year anniversary of the climax of the Tiananmen Square protests which chain of events differ from which side of the coin one may receive the story from.
Outside China, we know that the climax involved thousands of students on a hunger strike, a pro-democratic cause, Russian-made tanks, one man standing defiantly standing to block its path, soldiers and death.
If you’ve watched any Discovery channel documentary (or like producers) the events would end on a very one-sided, gun-infused bloodshed involving the waste of many young lives, and almost a death of a generation of individuals acting for freedom, acting for democracy and acting for fair opportunity.
If you’re from China and was born circa the late 1980’s onward, you would probably hear of Tiananmen Square as nothing more than a Beijing landmark. News of the event was in 1989, limited; and even more so post-June-fourth. From then on, an entirely new generation of citizens are raised with an event blotted out of their history books.
Come the Google-era, and with China possessing the greatest central internet prohibition/screening scheme in history, any entry of the word Tiananmen together with protest, massacre or killing, let alone this very picture of the infamous ‘tank man’ would lead you to some sort of 404 error…
…and alert the Police at the same time.
The same goes with almost everything pro-freedom and democracy within its walls. Anything ‘Western’ is socially deemed evil, lacking moral and would undermine the authority of the Government. With these conceptions ideas are censored, Bibles are burnt, freedom of association is curtailed and the Rule of Law is upended, reversed and poured upon the Chinese people.
The Communist Party’s rationale behind its censorship, akin to parental control on internet browsers really acts to draw democratic ideology, religion and freedom of information along the same lines with the exploitation of women for sexual gain.
And believe it or not, with all the central internet control, people in China are actually allowed to surf porn within their domestic spheres (it’s just that the authorities know exactly where each of them live).
Ironic?
So the new Chinese people grow up as a generation faithful to their ideologies, to their Government, to its current direction towards financial growth and gain, but remain a faceless people who do not recognise their inheritance, a world-view of themselves, and in consequence are not going to be one privileged with the notion of learning from past mistakes.
But it’s not like the chose to be ignorant, truth was silenced.
The shedding of facts from history books or the act of re-writing them is not new. The Japanese have no mention in their textbooks of the Rape of Nanking during World War Two. Iran would not have much memory of modern developments brought by the Shah’s rule, unless it is used as fundamentalist spin to shout how far one country has come since their ‘pits of corruption, nepotism and temptation.’ Malaysians know more about the May 13th incidents from their parents and grandparents, rather than from their education.
And the danger of stifling details is only that somewhere, somehow, someone is going to fill in those blanks with a perverted perception of events and/or opinion. And then we who don’t know better choose to believe them.
The limitation of ideology, the force-fed nature of doctrine played by Governments starting from Hugo Chavez to Kim Jong Il in advancement of their own interests are the worst forms of deception known to man. Fraud acts to deceive a person or a system for another’s gain, but ideology-fraud deceives a nation.
A flipside of a controlled authority is, well, no real authority at all. Proponents of ideological and stifled democracy point at the United States as the prime example of ‘freedom gone wrong.’
Guantanamo. Iraq. George W. Bush. GM’s bankruptcy. Citigroup. Oh the hell. Oh why let people of a great nation go through so much turmoil, whereas we stand proud of its limited freedoms, whilst thriving in economic prosperity?
That’s the greatest carrot the Communist Party dangles upon the Chinese mule. Yes, we can all strive for our dreams, work hard for your money; but just, believe with what we tell you.
Year upon year China sees double digit national economic growth (with the exception of 2008) whilst democratic countries ’suffer’ with the changing masks of Republican/Democratic leadership, sex scandal after Governmental mishaps.
China can proudly say they are consistent, compared to the screw-up-then-fix democracy the Americans and Europeans face as Obama tries to pick up after Bush, Gordon Brown slowly gets ousted out of office for mere mediocrity (apparently Tony Blair’s shoes were too big to fill) and Malaysia finally getting rid of some dead-weight leadership (albeit with someone arguably worse than dead-weight).
But honestly I could only say that with a red face (pun intended). Consistently growing yes, consistently Authoritarian yes, consistently stifling the basic human rights enjoyed by the rest of the world, also yes.
The notion of choice gives us fundamentally the right to make our mistakes, and better them and (sometimes) learn from them. It’s the beauty and the beast of politics. The Watergates are remembered, but so are the shouts of ‘I have a dream.’ The policies may change, but we remember them as a piece of whom we were back then. The public apologies to a race on behalf of the Government, the rectification measures taken, the public referendums to rewrite constitutions are all examples of how people power should be.
The Rule of Law implies that democracy is bottom-up: a Government comprised of the people is formed by the people, for the people. The Rule also states that the ruling Government is sovereign, but at the same time the people have the right to choose who to govern.
Today in California, Proposition 8, a ballot-initiative by members of the electorate went from a privately-sponsored campaign all the way to successfully overturning the Supreme Court’s rule in 2008 to allow gay marriage. Today in California, the people voiced, and the people by majority succeeded in limiting marriage as a union of a man and a woman, only.
I’m not here to talk about the merits and arguments behind gay marriage, but today’s example, in the retrospective view of what happened 20 years ago, is notably the most public act of choice done since Obama came to power, and it even had nothing to do with him, or any political party. It was a private initiative of a group of people who chose to act on the fundamental freedom granted by the democratic system upon them to call a ballot-initiative.
It is today, one of the most significant exercises of pure people power.
Looking back at Tiananmen today, the Civil Rights Movements of the 60’s, the reforms and people-revolutions taken place, it is only central to every single one of them that the people involved made a conscious choice. A choice not stifled by lack of information, not forced by coercion or the lack of freedom. The movements are on the other hand motivated by lack of information, driven by the stifling of fundamental freedoms and aimed to give everyone equal opportunity, equal choice.
The underlying concept central is that people represent democracy and democracy represents choice.
And choice represents the people.
Posted by calvintay 
Posted by calvintay 
Posted by calvintay 