THE PAST IS HISTORY
Jun. 4th, 2009 05:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
defrogIt was 20 years ago today ...
Which is why the Chinese govt has blocked all access to web sites like Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail, YouTube, MSN Spaces and pretty much any site that allows you to share an opinion. Also Bing is off the air. And if you know anyone on LJ in China and they’re not posting, now you know why.
Also, says Threat Level:
BBC viewers in China also saw their screens black out when the news service broadcast stories about the anniversary, and foreign news crews have been barred from filming in the square. Readers of the Financial Times and Economist magazine found stories about Tiananmen ripped from their pages.
Business as usual, then.
But let this stand as a master class in how to rewrite history. It’s been just 20 years since the Tiananmen protests and subsequent crackdown, and yet China is full of college-age kids attending universities who have no idea that June 4 has any significance in Chinese history.
Imagine that.
And you thought it was impossible to rewrite history in real time.
Granted, many of them could one day leave the country and find out what happened through other means. But put yrself in that position. Here's one for the Americans: let’s say you travel overseas for some reason and found out that, according to history books there, the death toll at Kent State in 1970 wasn’t four, but 804. Or let’s say you didn’t even know anyone ever died at Kent State because yr history classes never once mentioned the incident and all media are forbidden by the govt to even mention it.
Would you believe it? Or would you write it off as foreigners making up stuff about yr country?
George Santayana was more right than even he knew.
Dunno much about history,
This is dF
Which is why the Chinese govt has blocked all access to web sites like Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail, YouTube, MSN Spaces and pretty much any site that allows you to share an opinion. Also Bing is off the air. And if you know anyone on LJ in China and they’re not posting, now you know why.
Also, says Threat Level:
BBC viewers in China also saw their screens black out when the news service broadcast stories about the anniversary, and foreign news crews have been barred from filming in the square. Readers of the Financial Times and Economist magazine found stories about Tiananmen ripped from their pages.
Business as usual, then.
But let this stand as a master class in how to rewrite history. It’s been just 20 years since the Tiananmen protests and subsequent crackdown, and yet China is full of college-age kids attending universities who have no idea that June 4 has any significance in Chinese history.
Imagine that.
And you thought it was impossible to rewrite history in real time.
Granted, many of them could one day leave the country and find out what happened through other means. But put yrself in that position. Here's one for the Americans: let’s say you travel overseas for some reason and found out that, according to history books there, the death toll at Kent State in 1970 wasn’t four, but 804. Or let’s say you didn’t even know anyone ever died at Kent State because yr history classes never once mentioned the incident and all media are forbidden by the govt to even mention it.
Would you believe it? Or would you write it off as foreigners making up stuff about yr country?
George Santayana was more right than even he knew.
Dunno much about history,
This is dF
