"the troops have been firing indiscriminately... their own army was firing wildly at them... savagery of the situation... this army was launching into an unarmed civilian population as if charging into battle"
Remind me when the United Nations or the world's media called for the Chinese government to be charged with crimes against humanity.
Tank man - "A Chinese man stands alone to block a line of tanks heading east on Beijing's Cangan Blvd. in Tiananmen Square on June 5, 1989."
Do also listen here to Kate Adie, the BBC reporter in the first clip above, on how many people died 20 years ago and how the Chinese state still persecutes the protesters today.
So why do we give the Chinese state such a free ride on human rights when this is such recent history and indeed still going on? How many people have been killed or unjustly imprisoned by the Chinese state over the past 20, 30, 40, 50 years?
Meanwhile I note that:
"China has begun imposing an information blackout ahead of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, blocking access to popular networking websites such as Twitter and BBC television reports inside China.
The measures came as the authorities tried to close all avenues of dissent ahead of Thursday's anniversary, placing prominent critics under house arrest and banning newspaper from making any mention of the pro-democracy protests.
Viewers of the BBC's world channels in Beijing found their screens turning black whenever reports on the anniversary were being aired and four foreign television crews attempting to film in Tiananmen Square reported being stopped by police.
Print publications were also affected, with many subscribers to The Economist magazine receiving their weekly copies with the Tiananmen-related pages ripped out. Readers of the Financial Times and South China Morning post also reported missing pages.
Over the last 20 years China's ruling Communist Party has refused to apologise for the deaths of hundreds, and possibly thousands, of protesters who were shot or crushed by tanks on the night of June 3-4, 1989.
Ignoring calls at home and abroad to pardon jailed demonstrators and "reassess" the events at Tiananmen, party officials have unwaveringly maintained the line that the protests were "counter-revolutionary riots" that were suppressed for the good of the country."
2 comments:
For God's sake get rid of that awful voice over Gordooom Brown thing that comes on every time I visit your site, it is driving me crazy. Until you set this up I visited every day but now I am contemplating abandoning your site completely.
I hadn't noticed that there was such an annoying piece of video autoplaying on my site but then the only browser I use is Firefox with the Flashblock add-in. This add-in allows you to choose whether to play flash video or audio files so nothing autoplays.
Oddly I have IE setup in a similar way but when I load my site the two videos that are not YouTube sourced do auto-play, which is rather irritating.
Two simple solutions suggest themselves to me:
1. Swap to Firefox and Flashblock
2. Turn off sound
However in case you don't want to do either and in order to keep a regular visitor happy, I have archived all posts over three days old so my site should now be pleasurably silent.
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