June 4th, 2019 - The 30th Anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre

Image courtesy of Etan Liam's Flickr page - 6  4th June 2017 , Victoria Park, Hong Kong: https://www.flickr.com/photos/etanliam/35912406026/in/photolist-WHst9f-u9Ky7P-26wnmgv-27PwtPA-tcz57y-259dWTu-2g3BWKi-2g3BRns-2g3BRe6-2g3BQSK-2g3BQnw-2g3BPB8-2g3BJ6R-2g3BHRH-2g3BNHV-2g3BNk5-2g3BN7p-2g3BCeQ-2g3BC2W-2g3BFZm-2g3BFPm-2g3BLPV-2g3BB1T-2g3BFaA-2g3BAsJ-2g3BKN6-2g3BEjT-2g3BzHN-2g3BJQe-2g3BJJN-2g3BDky-2g3BJpQ-2g3BD7H-2g3ByBu-2g3BJ87-A3ccQ-A3ciK-27TWzWn-2g3BJ3c-2g3BHVt-2g3BycM-2g3By5Y-2g3BHqF-2g3BC71-2g3BxzE-2g3BBLX-2g3BGRV-2g3BBwt-2g3BBc5-2g3Bwu3

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When I was a kid, I remember everyone, especially my parents, talking about how monumental and revolutionary everything was in the year 1968. It felt like a world revolution, and everything was changing. There were protests and popular movements in Europe on both sides of the Iron Curtain. France looked like it was about to have another revolution. The United States was also undergoing some incredible changes, and popular protests mixed with often violent responses, perhaps most famously with the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that summer. There were also major political assassinations, particularly Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, who many feel could and likely not only would have gone on to receive the Democratic nomination for the presidency, but won the White House itself. Plus, there was the counterculture, which included the explosion of drugs and experimental music. All of this made the sixties generally, and 1968 in particular, unforgettable for any and all who had lived through it. There was no way you could forget living through a year like that.

Indeed, it was an incredible year. It was also a year that I was not yet born for, so I obviously did not have firsthand experience of it. And that meant that there was a feeling, at least on my part, that I had missed something. That a lot of the most important and impactful stuff in recent memory had happened before I was even born. 

There were no years quite like 1968, and there never will be again. How could there be, since history does not literally repeat?  

However, there are years when a lot of memorable events occur. Years when it feels that a lot of things happen that will strongly alter, or at least shift, the way things go from here on out. Years that have events that shape things for many years, and even many decades, to come. 

In my own lifetime, perhaps the most monumental year like that could have been 1989. There were other huge years, to be sure. Like 2004, the year of one of the most controversial presidential elections in American history, when we were also fighting two wars simultaneously, and when we saw that massive tsunami in the Indian Ocean that killed an estimated 150,000 people or so in southern Asia. More recently, there was 2011, the year of the popular Arab Spring movements in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. It ignited a very bloody war that only recently ended in Syria, and which effectively destroyed the infrastructure of that country. There was also a tsunami that year, this time in Japan. It caused all sorts of damage inside of the country, and we westerners got to see it all very shortly after it happened, since the Japanese are wealthy and have their handheld devices as well, and so recorded some of the carnage. Fukushima became a disaster zone as a result of that. 

But the biggest year of my own lifetime, in terms of news stories and how much they shaped things to come, likely came in 1989. That was the year that Reagan, who felt like he had been in the White House forever, left and his Vice-President, George H. W. Bush, took over. It was also the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the enormous, and largely peaceful, demonstrations throughout eastern Europe, which effectively dismantled the Iron Curtain and at least went a long way towards ending the Cold War, if not outright ending it. In South Africa, P.W. Botha lost his power struggle to stay in power, and a reformist, F.W. DeKlerk, stepped in. If we extend the year 1989 to the first few months of 1990, we saw DeKlerk announce that the apartheid experiment had been a failure, and would be dismantled. He also released all of the South Africa’s political prisoners. Nelson Mandela was the most famous prisoner to go free, and the world seemed to rejoice when he was released, as negotiations between the white minority government, and Mandela’s ANC began to shape the future of the multiracial democracy to come in South Africa. Namibia would gain it’s independence, ending apartheid there, as well. Certainly, all of the reforms ushered in by Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union were clearly leading in that direction. All of those things clearly changed the political landscape in those countries, and more generally, in those regions.  

There was also a major political event that calendar year of 1989 that was an enormous story at the time, and which altered the political landscape for years, and quite possibly decades, to come. That would be the popular peaceful demonstrations in China’s capital city of Beijing. It seemed that democracy might come to China, and the protests grew in size and significance on a daily basis. Indeed, it seemed that China was joining the family of countries that were seeing reform, and were bringing more power to the people of the country. 

All of that changed, literally overnight, when the Chinese government cracked down violently on the protesters. Most of the images were caught on camera, and were truly shocking. Many people died, and the protests were forcibly ended. There is that iconic image of the student who stood in front of the tank, by himself, and who takes steps to remain in the way of the tank, and the tank seems ready to literally run him over.  

That, too, was a huge news story, although it was clearly not as positive as what was happening in terms of reforms and popular movements in eastern Europe and southern Africa. Indeed, China was a grim reminder of just how much resistance we can expect for any movements towards reform as well as a reminder (as if we needed one) that while sometimes, it seems that the arc of news stories, and of history more generally, seems to be going towards improvement, there are certainly exceptions to that. There are news stories that are just bad news, period. In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, there was a general optimism with how things were going around the world, but the massacre at Tiananmen Square was a very dark moment, even though it was also undeniably a huge story that reverberated around the world.

The 1980's felt like a time of massive political indifference, for the most part. There were few exceptions, such as the anti-apartheid protests against South Africa, which featured high-profile artists and musicians and events. Gorbachev was making reforms in the Soviet Union, but this was not so much a popular movement, as political change controlled by the very top in that country. And very late in the 1980's, the largely peaceful protests in eastern Europe. But the protests in China seemed to break the otherwise largely indifferent and inactive political stance of the "Me Decade." It was the first hopeful sign that I felt, although that also made how it ended that much more shocking.

Ultimately, the massacre at Tiananmen Square in 1989 was the first major massacre that I remember vividly. I had heard of the shocking Sharpville massacres that rocked South Africa, but that happened in 1960, long before I was born. Same with the Soviet tanks crushing the student protests in Budapest in 1956, and in Prague in 1968. I do not remember the attack by Saddam Hussein's forces on it's own people in the village of Halabja, and the genocides seen in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sudan, and Syria would all come later. So the shock value was, to me, incredible and, frankly, unforgettable.

Still, I remember. It is hard to forget the hope that most people felt when it seemed like the peaceful students were ushering in incredible change in China. And we cannot ever forget those who lost their lives at Tiananmen Square in 1989, especially in a world that feels like repeats of such horrific events are more possible than ever.

Today, I remember the peaceful protests throughout China that came to a bloody end with the Tiananmen Square Massacre on this day, 30 years ago.