For the past couple
of posts, I've written exclusively about the various implications of possessing
very malleable memories as individuals. As a result, I've decided to take a
detour and explore a prevalent issue in collective or societal memory instead:
intentionally revising history.
For me, one case in
history that best exemplifies that practice is the iconic censorship policies
China had implemented to combat its tainted image after the Tiananmen Square
Massacre in 1989. According to this contemporary article in the New York Times,
as many as two thousand pro-democracy protestors were slaughtered by the
military acting under government command, which perceived the demonstrations as
a "counter-revolutionary riot." To be completely honest, only until
recently, I never really took the surprising efficacy of today's Chinese
censorship very seriously. This recent article from the Guardian stated that
Chinese officials' efforts to "maintain their legitimacy" are so
painstaking that even words and numbers only vaguely connected to the massacre,
such as "special day" and "64," are censored. And, a simple
search on Google Images would show pictures of Tank Man and bloodied corpses
while the same search on any device in China would instead present photographs
of smiling tourists in the square:
Despite evidence
that China is obsessive about the maintenance of its censorship policies, is
blocking Google searches effectively causing the Chinese public to be blind to
what truly happened in Tiananmen Square? In middle school, I watched a
documentary film on the subject (unfortunately, I cannot find it online) and
learned that while the censorship in China is attempting to wire younger
generations to be completely oblivious to the massacre, people from the older
generations who actually experienced, in any way, the event were forced to
"forget" it, lest they desired to meet some of the horrors described
in this article from the Global Post. However, I recently read another piece
from the Huffington Post that described how for this year's anniversary of the
Tiananmen Massacre in June, Chinese activists took to social media outlets,
such as Weibo, to urge the public to wear black in commemoration of the
hundreds of deaths of pro-democracy protestors. The article also expressed that
more and more members of the younger generations are being revealed to the
horror that the Chinese government had covered up. I wonder, what steps will
the government make--which will not make China look "bad" to the
international community--to respond to this "awakening"?
From what I've read
and learned so far about the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, I really do
hope that the Chinese public will be empowered to penetrate the veil that the
government has placed over the massacre. In my last post, I grimly expressed
that especially in legal courts, people have to be cautious of the high
malleability of human memories. Witnesses are, unintentionally, prone to
providing not completely true testimony, which can end up wrongly convicting
innocent people. In a similar way, I believe that the history of a society can
be significantly altered negatively; indeed, this was actually the first and
most important step that the Nazi regime took in Germany to justify what
eventually culminated in the Holocaust. What seems to be the simple
solution--just differentiate between factual history and altered history--is
undoubtedly easier said than done, especially when an actor, such as the
Chinese government, is extremely adept at both hiding and distorting history.
Other than the strategies that Chinese activists are using to disclose
information about the Tiananmen Square Massacre to the public, what are some
ways for people to protect themselves from the negative
implications of intentional history alteration?
Potential answers to
that question may be found in the deplorable amount of violence that has
occurred in Egypt since the military ousted the popularly elected president
Mohamed Morsi in July 2013. From then until now, numerous clashes between
pro-Morsi protestors and the Egyptian military have occurred, and this article
from the New York Times described a particularly bloody mass killing that took
place mid-August in Rabaa al-Adawiya, a square in Cairo. What happened is
eerily similar to the Tiananmen Square Massacre: security forces entered the
square and fired into the crowd. As many as nine hundred pro-Morsi protestors
were killed, and at least two thousand more were wounded. In the massacre's
aftermath, the Egyptian military responded by covering the bloodied streets
with fresh asphalt and replacing paving stones--clearly an effort to distort
history rather than to confront it. For now, the memory of that mass killing is
still fresh within the Egyptian public, and the military's "cowardly"
actions are fostering much animosity. But in the future, will this particularly
devastating event be merely identified as a simple Egyptian protest and
tragically be forgotten? How the Egyptians will work to successfully preserve the memory of Rabaa al-Adawiya may provide some clues about how people should combat, in this day and age, imposed efforts to intentionally revise history.
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| Aftermath of the Rabaa al-Adawiya Massacre |
