Never Forget
June 4, 2020·8 comments·Politics
Hong Kong just canceled its annual June 4th vigil for the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, citing a coronavirus rule. The same week, U.S. military units faced orders to clear protesters from city streets. Two governments, two different continents, two versions of the same decision: some memories should not be public.
• Hong Kong's vigil has grown larger every year it was allowed to happen. Last year drew 180,000 people on June 4th. This year, authorities said eight people was the legal limit for gatherings. Something shifted in what a government was willing to tolerate.
• The official reason given doesn't match the timing or the enforcement pattern. Coronavirus restrictions existed for months. The vigil was singled out. When a government uses a neutral policy to prevent one specific commemoration, what's actually being prevented?
• Next year, remembering June 4th itself will carry criminal penalties under new national security laws. Not gathering. Not protesting. Remembering. The mechanism is moving from preventing assembly to punishing memory.
• Meanwhile, competing narratives about American protests are being constructed by the same institutions that frame what counts as legitimate dissent. Both cable news networks, both political parties, both have their version of who these protesters are and what they mean. The stories don't just disagree. They compete to shape which reality people accept.
• If a government can decide which historical events are permitted to be remembered publicly, and which voices are allowed to frame current events, what remains that civilians can actually know? The parallels are uncomfortable. The distance between there and here is smaller than it feels.
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Comments
YES! “This IS democracy.”
It’s all well and good when the “Brave people of Hong Kong” stand up to oppression, the Senate fast tracks legislation that will erase the $90 billion a year surplus we have, among other things. Here, there a numerous infiltrators of the peaceful marchers by Proud Bois, Antifa, and others, all meant to stir the pot and incite violence against the police and damage property as well. The current occupant calls the marchers “Thugs” as his dog whistle and buses in people who are armed, no name tags or trained in crowd control to blast his way over to a church. He took a page from Putin’s playbook by using irregulars and “volunteers” in the “People’s Republic of Donetsk and Luhansk” in the ongoing war in Donbass.
“And they won’t break a thing except the complacency and narratives of a corrupt two-party system and its crony capitalist supporters.”
Please, you can’t be this naive. The riots in the US are an embodiment of the two party system. They are being manufactured by the globalists that run both parties as a way to introduce totalitarian globalist government to the US. “Pissed-off Americans” aren’t putting bricks in strategic spots around cities and paying people to riot. It’s offensive and degrading to the people that died in the struggle against communism to group them with the pawns of authoritarianism that are rioting in the US right now.
The closest thing I saw to para-military goons in Richmond were black hooded Antifa people directing the mobs to parked SUVs without license plates filled with bricks and Molotov cocktails. I remember the efforts of many Soviet apologists during the cold war who like to draw moral equivalence between us and them. It makes me sad to see you potentially going there. I am angry about a lot Hong Kong is especially bad. Trump has not shown leadership to say the least but the CCP is having a ball make the situations out to be the same.
All goons are despicable, but government goons are the worst. Why? Because a government has the only legitimate right to use deadly force in a society. That’s what a government IS. When deadly criminals are cloaked in that legitimacy, there is no greater threat to liberty and justice than that. None.
Civil disobedience can take many forms and we have seen the videos of non pissed-off Americans placing bricks, breaking windows and spreading chaos with other malicious acts. That’s a side effect of the protests. But the protests are the same thing here and in China. They are a critical mass of the people that get to a point where they want to be heard by a system that actively “ain’t tryna hear” their grievances.
In my small, rural hometown, several hundred protesters gathered on Tuesday to make themselves heard. No riots, no looting, no windows broken. My kids were there, a handful of the only people of color in the group, probably less than 1%, and I was very proud of them. It is not naive to think that these uprisings are the only thing that can effect change.
“Everybody likes sausage, nobody wants to see how it’s made.” I’m a glass half-full guy, who has been pretty pessimistic about getting any real change. This weekend, progress, however small, was made. And it was from the ground up.
Ben, you hit the nail on the head here. Your reply to the comment below reinforces The Point. Government has a Monopoly on Violent Enforcement. We need to renegotiate that relationship AS A CULTURE.
Does ANYONE feel safer interacting with Police?
Knowing they can kill you with NO RECOURSE?
Local Police killed two middle class white people suffering mental illness in the last few years.
They received a paid vacation and a medal.
After a few months of having the knee of the World Health Organization on our necks watching Police use violence to enforce social distancing, don’t we all feel the threat of EVEN MORE VIOLENCE?
Yes, we also had busloads of well dressed (in black, of course) Antifa arrive to wreck and burn a small part of Eugene, OR after a day of Super Peaceful Protests.
Certainly expecting the Maidan Playbook when snipers start shooting protesters and police alike. But not the looters, no, they seem to be protected more than anything.
I weep for my Country.
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