Tuesday marked the 30-year anniversary of the bloody Tiananmen Square massacre, when the Chinese government slaughtered upwards of thousands of student protesters demanding democracy. In true Orwellian fashion, the Chinese government had effectively erased it from their history and arrested a CBS News crew for showing pictures of the massacre to young Chinese citizens. Meanwhile, outlets in the U.S. claim President Trump was the Orwellian one and the danger to press freedom.
Standing in Tiananmen Square, CBS correspondent Elizabeth Palmer remarked that, “It is hard to imagine this vast square filled with passionate students demanding more freedoms. 30 years on, the Chinese government has erased every reminder of those events 30 years ago.”
“Pictures like this are banned from television and school textbooks,” she noted as the famous picture of a man staring down tanks flashed on the screen. She described how she spoke with young Chinese citizens she met on the street and they couldn’t identify anything about it:
YOUNG WOMAN (Palmer spoke over): I’m not really clear about it.
PALMER: And it's worked. We showed some of the photographs to young passers-by.
Have you ever heard of these events?
YOUNG MAN 1: I think not.
PALMER: No idea? What country?
YOUNG MAN 2: I have no idea.
Seeming to bring George Orwell’s 1984 to life, Chinese police descended upon Palmer and her crew. “Minutes later, the police showed up and we ended up in custody for six hours,” she recalled.
Meanwhile, on Monday morning, CNN legal analyst Jeffery Toobin was busy claiming President Trump’s spin regarding the spat with British royal Meghan Markle signaled we were living a “1984-like scenario.” Last time this author checked, Trump wasn’t locking people up for talking about his “nasty” comment and sending them to be re-educated.
Time magazine named journalists their Person of the Year back in 2018 because according to them: “[The] world is led, in some ways, by a U.S. President whose embrace of despots and attacks on the press has set a troubling tone.”
CNN has been so ludicrous with their hyperbole. Almost two years ago, CNN’s media janitor Brian Stelter suggested Trump was threatening the lives of his co-workers with a mean meme. Stelter had also used his “Reliable Sources” show to suggest the President was leading the world’s dictators on a global press crackdown, and formed a “hate movement” against the press like Stalin and Hitler. Hmm, he didn’t mention China.
Now, unlike communist China, the U.S. doesn’t have a state-run media (as much as CNN likes to claim that’s what Fox News is). Trump using his First Amendment right to criticize the press doesn’t constitute a threat or violence. What happened to CBS, now that was a threat and violence. Learn the difference.
The transcript is below, click "expand" to read:
CBS Evening News
June 3, 2019
6:42:44 p.m. EasternDAVID BEGNAUD: It is already Tuesday, June 4th in China, the 30th anniversary of the brutal crackdown on a democratic movement in Tiananmen Square. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people were killed. Today the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, called for a full accounting of what happened, but China appears to be more interested in wiping it from history. Elizabeth Palmer went to Beijing.
[Cuts to video]
ELIZABETH PALMER: On June 4, 1989, weeks of demonstrations in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square ended in mass murder. [Gunfire] CBS cameras recorded Chinese soldiers shooting unarmed civilians, most of them students. Wu’er Kaixi, one of the student leaders, survived, but had the flee into exile.
WU’ER KAIXI: I am a survivor of a massacre.
PALMER: A massacre no one talks about in China. Posing as tourists, we went to Tiananmen Square, a landmark still so sensitive that even tourists have to show I.D. and there are surveillance cameras everywhere.
It is hard to imagine this vast square filled with passionate students demanding more freedoms. 30 years on, the Chinese government has erased every reminder of those events 30 years ago.
[Shows famous image of a man blocking tanks] Pictures like this are banned from television and school textbooks.
YOUNG WOMAN (Palmer spoke over): I’m not really clear about it.
PALMER: And it's worked. We showed some of the photographs to young passers-by.
Have you ever heard of these events?
YOUNG MAN 1: I think not.
PALMER: No idea? What country?
YOUNG MAN 2: I have no idea.
PALMER: Minutes later, the police showed up and we ended up in custody for six hours. In today's China, consumerism and capitalism have eclipsed demands for political freedom. But Wu’er Kaixi, once a young hunger striker who risked his life for the cause, says Tiananmen still makes the Chinese Communist Party very nervous.
WU’ER KAIXI: Freedom is something once you taste, you get hooked on it very easily.
PALMER: Elizabeth Palmer, CBS News, Beijing.
BEGNAUD: Incredible story.
