Friday, May 29, 2009

June 4

As June 4 gets closer the usual apologists for the CCP are out and about. Thanks to Hemlock for highlighting this quote from Basic Law Committee member Lau Nai-keung.

“All objective evidence suggests that students dispersed peacefully from the square that night,” he said, citing remarks by hunger strikers Zhou Duo, Hu Dejian and Liu Xiaobo after the incident.

“Nowadays, many Hong Kong people still believe tanks crushed students in the square to death … if the army really did this, it would be a true massacre and would not be forgivable. But it is not what happened that night,” he said, adding that he would not call June 4 a “massacre”, and called on people to view the incident objectively.


Note the careful choice of wording here because what he says is in some respects true but is nevertheless a complete distortion of reality. Western press coverage of the massacre helps the CCP to trot out this line because the press simplified the story, choosing to focus on the ‘brave students massacred in Tiananmen Square’.

When Lau Nai-keung says that objective evidence suggests that students dispersed peacefully from the square when the tanks finally fought their way to the square he is probably correct. The evidence suggests that students, understandably, chose to go home when faced with the reality of being killed. Where he completely distorts reality is by using the CCP strategy of defining the massacre as ‘killing students in the square’ and therefore arguing that the massacre did not happen because students weren’t killed in the square. His mealy-mouthed explanation conveniently neglects to mention that objective evidence also clearly shows that many, many people were killed in the streets around the square, mostly workers trying to protect the students by stopping the tanks from reaching the square.

You’ve got to wonder how the quisling little shit sleeps at night.