1/12 Allow me to share a little story on this anniversary of the #TiananmenSquareMassacre. While in grad school @ElliottSchoolGW, I organized students to protest the crackdown at Tiananmen. I called every university and as many student organizations as I could find in the DC area 
2/12 I soon started getting calls in Asian accents saying “we are watching you.” This was before social media; I expected a few hundred to show, but thousands came. We shut down the streets leading to the Chinese Embassy and spent three days in the little park in front.
3/12 We built an unworthy replica of the statue of freedom like the students had built at Tiananmen, but out of random styrofoam pieces. We could see all the curtains had been pulled shut at the embassy, but every now and then, they would open as they took pictures of us.
4/12 I must be in a secret police file somewhere. The Chinese students were so appreciative of the friendship and moral support and soon had me on their shoulders as we all chanted “down with communism,” “down with Li Peng” in Chinese. I so wish I could meet them again.
5/12 One of them had a friend near the military museum in Beijing and we went to a pay phone to call him. I had a little handheld recorder and we could hear the machine guns mowing people down.
6/12 The witness said trucks and tanks were rolling over the dead to crush them as explained that the bodies were being carted off to be burned to hide the carnage. I sent the tape to CNN.
7/12 No one really knows how many thousands were killed, but the Chinese premier said it didn’t matter ‘cuz they had billions.
8/12 The year before Tiananmen, I had the good fortune of landing a teaching gig at the renowned Corvinus University in Budapest (then the Karl Marx University of Economics under communism). I followed in my mother’s footsteps & demonstrated in Budapest and saw the regime fall.
9/12 I demonstrated in Prague and witnessed the fall of that regime. I went to East Berlin and crossed the Iron Curtain into the West and saw monuments to the dead who dared seek freedom. Communist East Germany soon fell.
10/12 My mother was wounded fighting Soviet communists in Budapest. She crossed mine fields out & then back in to get her parents, & out again. The Soviets crushed the revolt. She fought to bring me this freedom & taught me freedom is not free & it ain’t given. It’s to be taken.
11/12 Trump praised China’s “power of strength” in massacring students at Tiananmen. He lamented that Gorbachev didn’t show a “strong enough hand” in preventing the breakup Trump of the Soviet Union. The same Soviet Union who brutally deprived my mother of basic human rights.
12/12 Trump & his Republican enablers, understand (& appreciate) one thing: power. They don’t understand dialogue, they take advantage of it. History repeats, but we are fighting back. I can’t believe we are facing this in the United States, but I’ll be dead before I am silenced.
