As we confront the rising evil and growing power of the Chinese Communist Party, June 4 is day to remember that some of the bravest people to stand up for freedom - at Tiananmen Square in 1989, and today - are also Chinese.
Tiananmen Square is where the illusions of the postwar international order died, along with countless brave Chinese democracy activists. On that day, the forces of evil learned they could murder their way to power, even in the dawning Information Age.
The CCP's internal communications from that day are illuminating. Some of them thought their regime was doomed, that nothing could be done against the blossoming of democracy in Tiananmen Square - not with the whole world watching, not with cameras and fax machines everywhere.
But the monsters won out, correctly arguing that all of the new information technology could be perverted for tyrannical ends, that ideas CAN be killed if you kill enough people. They gambled the free world's commitment to human rights could be worn down with patient effort.
Here we are in 2021, the age of the Internet, and the CCP is closer than ever to effectively erasing Tiananmen Square from history. Commemorations in Hong Kong have been stamped out by brute force. The free world says and does nothing, its corporations in thrall to CCP money.
Don't hold your breath waiting for Hollywood's left-wing gasbags and tedious moralizers to bravely make a movie about the heroes of Tiananmen Square and the horrors of June 4. Beating up Americans for insisting on fair elections is more their speed.
If you want to see real courage, look away from Xi Jinping's bought men and women in Hollywood and U.S. news media, and turn your eyes to Hong Kong, where brave democracy activists persist even though they KNOW they'll be arrested, their lives ruined.
They've devised ways to express their resistance in secret codes that get past the speech police. They're defying orders from Hong Kong's puppet government under China's fascist "national security law" and risking arrest by standing up to remember Tiananmen Square.
Memory is an implacable enemy of tyranny. People who remember the glories of freedom are a perpetual irritant to authoritarians. Oppressors claim they act for the good of the people, but the enduring memory of their crimes exposes them as greedy liars.
In Hong Kong today, there are young people risking their futures, and rich men losing their fortunes, because they will not give up on freedom or make accommodations with tyranny. The Taiwanese rise every morning knowing today could be the day they must fight for their freedom.
In 1989, a man armed with nothing but shopping bags faced down a column of Communist tanks. We don't know who he was, or what happened to him, because the tyrants of Beijing want to erase him from history. It is our sacred duty to remember him, and all the dead of Tiananmen.
Think about the heroes of democracy standing up against Chinese Communist tyranny, then and now, when you're tempted to give up a little more of your freedom for the promise of security or a handful of cash. Think about them when left-wing mobs try to intimidate you.
There are teenagers in Hong Kong today willing to risk jail and ruin to speak up for the freedom so many in the West have discounted, even though they see little hope of defeating the fascist empire training its weapons upon them. They HAVE to fight, even if they can't "win."
If you meet anyone who doubts the capacity of communists, socialists, fascists, and other collectivists for murder, remind them of Tiananmen Square. If you forget what freedom is worth, ask a Hong Kong democracy activist. They'll be happy to remind you.
The grim truth is that information didn't liberalize the authoritarian world. From the fax machine revolution of Tiananmen Square to the Internet today, authoritarianism has proven to be more viral, more infectious, more subversive than freedom. WE became more like THEM.
We CAN change that. It won't be easy. It won't be cheap. People will lose a lot of money standing up to the new, super-rich, tech-savvy incarnation of fascism. But we should resist despair, as China's democracy activists have. We should be inspired by their courage and resolve.
Last year the Communists forced a law on Hong Kong that treats all dissent, all talk of freedom, and now all memory of Tiananmen as a threat to their "national security." You know what? They were right. Even now, after all of fascism's triumphs, they SHOULD fear those ideas.
Right now there's a lone survivor of June 4, 1989 sitting in Hong Kong's Victoria Park, defying police orders that no one should remember the massacre. The miserable cowards in Beijing are correct to fear him. They were right to fear Tank Man. Remember, and persevere. /end
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