The twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre - and Hill marks the occasion by having a futile and counterproductive pop at China, urging it to 'examine openly the darker events of its past'. What are the chance of that happening? Zero - this is pure ethical grandstanding (backed, inevitably, by little Millie Band), and China has immediately, and predictably, expressed 'strong dissatisfaction'. That's their polite way of saying something very much more robust. Hill should remember that China now owns rather a lot of the US and is virtually keeping the States' (and therefore the West's) embattled economy afloat...
I remember hearing the news of the massacre - so terrible, so shocking, so unsurprising - coming in on the World Service. I was in a hotel room in Dieppe. Was Tiananmen a JFK moment? Do other people remember where they were when they heard?
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I was 10 and at a prep school that didn't allow TV or newspapers, so most of the big news stories of the 80's only reached me as second hand schoolboy gossip. I'm pretty sure I was impressed that there was this guy doing his shopping somewhere who was like not afraid of a tank and stuff or something
ReplyDeleteYes, it was a JFK moment. I remember where I was for neither.
ReplyDeletePerhaps the Couple That Is Clinton might like to 'examine openly the darker events of its past'?
ReplyDeleteI remember because I went to college with the free-lance reporter who filed the initial telephone reports of what was going on (for ABC News, IIRC). Switching to another network, I realized that the free-lance reporter filing a similar first-hand account was also someone I knew personally. (We'd lived in Hong Kong at the same time a decade earlier.) He was subsequently beaten up by security forces and, according to mutual friends, had yet to recover from his injuries a decade afterwards.
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