On June 4, 1989, the world watched as Chinese tanks and soldiers, randomly firing on unarmed civilians, rolled into Tiananmen Square to crush a student-led, pro-democracy movement, the biggest in history. One of the major forces of the protest was Wuer Kaixi. As the massacre at Tiananmen Square turns twenty, it’s instructive to listen to Kaixi today, in exile in Taiwan.The truth is that "evolution" is very hard when you are up against a regime that is desperate to cling to power and its privileges. Even in a Western democracy the change of power is not always easy or "clean": witness the dirty tricks by Republicans in 2000 and 2004 to steal the US presidential election.
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Wuer Kaixi: ... For many years I have said, I don’t want a revolution, I have always wanted a peaceful evolution in China. I have wanted a reform. Even back in 1989, when we held a mass demonstration, when we held a mass sit-in, when we held hunger-strikes where we occupied Tiananmen Square for so long, all we wanted was the Communist Party to reform from within. And that is what I have always been saying. ...
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Guernica: Less than a month after you had escaped, you wrote in a letter that the students didn’t expect this kind of fascist violence, that you never thought the government would be so base and beastly. What were your expectations for the students? How did you think the government would react?
Wuer Kaixi: We were all, back then, wondering. We would sit down and talk. We would think. We knew for quite certain that we would be thrown into prison and the students who took part in the movement may be given the severe punishment of getting very bad jobs. And then of course, the bloody part, maybe the violent part, we had expected would be a group of army charging into the square with clubs in their hands, not ammunition, not tanks running over students. We were expecting a certain degree of violence, but we didn’t expect people’s deaths.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Iran via China
From an interview in Guernica. As I read this interview I can hear something similar 20 years from now when an Iranian protest leader is interviewed:
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5 comments:
I figure that you read James Fallows. This is kind of related to this post.
Thomas: I have a hard time understanding that kind of indifference and insularity. I guess I was bounced on my head when I was born, but I've always seen the world as woven together. Pictures from Apollo of the "blue marble" made it utterly obvious that we are all passengers on "spaceship Earth" and have to share this big ball.
In college in the 1960s I was ridiculed because I made the following logical extension: We have democratic institutions at the city level, we have democratic instutions at a regional level, we have democratic institutions at a national level, so we should have democratic instutions at a global level.
Whoa! Almost everybody went nuts on me when I took the last step. (By the way, I attended a US college.) The followed the logic from the first step up to the last one, but would buy the last step. Yes it was obvious that cities and towns in a region need some kind of regional government to handle inter-town problems. Yes it was obvious that there needed to be a national government to handle inter-regional problems. But when you wanted to go the next step up. No way Jose! You lose "sovereignty" if you do that!
Funny, nobody at the town level is worried about losing sovereignty because of a regional superstructure. Similarly nobody worries about loss of sovereignty when you put a national government over regions. But take the next step and people go beserk.
Back then the standard argument was that the UN was a communist organization so now way would you ever join a UN structure. Fine, I said, how about a totally new international federation to bring nations together. No way!
The above is my long-winded way of saying that I don't understand people failing to see that all countries have an impact on each other and we need an international federation so that when you have tyrants like those in Iran there is a super-national police that can be sent in to lock up those killers and re-hold the elections to ensure that the will of the people can be upheld.
I have been reading another article on this subject and perhaps I will ask your opinion on that one by email.
I follow your logic to the point of having international police intervene; I agree and then I see reasons to disagree... Police intervention at the domestic level is good if it is done right, so on a national and international level; it could work, maybe. People always balk at having someone come into their home to make peace or enforce laws even if lives are at stake.
Nobody likes the police to come barging in. I've had my fair share of problems with police bullying and with a legal system that can't be bothered to investigate two sides of an issue. I know only too well that the authorities simply go with the initial complaint fail to do even a superficial investigation to establish facts. When the legal system intrudes into your life it is expensive (the state has unlimited resources), painful (despite all the talk of justice there is precious little in any real legal system run by bureaucratic minds), and there is always the threat of the state taking away your freedom. It is horrible.
But the alternative is worse. Prior to civilization the only "law" was eye-for-eye and Hatfield-and-McCoy with endless cycles of revenge.
So, like a lot of things in life, you end up with an imperfect solution. A local police force coming into a house and dragging off one party as "the offender". An international police crossing borders to haul somebody (or leaders of some faction or cartel or terrorist group) off to an international criminal court.
Sure they will get it wrong from time to time. No legal system is perfect. But what is the alternative? The US didn't like how Noriega went "rogue" on them (they don't like ex-CIA agents going rogue). In apprehending him they killed perhaps a thousand innocent Panamanians in their "police action". Sure, an international police force could do the same "collateral damage" in effecting an arrest. But there is less bad taste left in the mouth of the world community if this is done by an internationally sanctioned police force and not by one nation declaring extra-territorial "rights" to go after "their man".
But there is less bad taste left in the mouth of the world community if this is done by an internationally sanctioned police force and not by one nation declaring extra-territorial "rights" to go after "their man".
I agree
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