| Reality check necessary. Lets not make martyrs of those student leaders. A very good friend of mine was one of those hanging about the square the night everything turned ugly. Interestingly, he was a foreigner who managed to enter the "inner circle" of the student leaders by impersonating a foreign reporter. He was holding the passport of another country. His analysis of the leaders was pretty negative. They were described as idealistic opportunists with no sense of their responsibility to their supporters. Their demands were vague, with emphasis on freedom and democracy but without true understanding of the issues. I had the opportunity of following the events leading up to the final clash on both CNN and BBC. Even the reporters appeared rather amused initially by how niave the students were. Slogans like "Give me freedom or give me death !" were thrown about. But when asked to clarify what democracy meant to them, you heard silly things like "I want freedom to do anything I want !" When asked what is it that they wanted that they could not do, we saw puzzled expressions. The arrogance of the students when meeting the representatives of their government was shown on CNN. Even the reporters were taken a back. Was the protest as peaceful as it was made out to be ? Who was provoking who ? What did they think when they threw excrement at the painting of the idol of the party ? Of course I am not saying that what the army did was right, But when a string is pulled hard enough by one side while the other side is anchored to bedrock, eventually it will snap and sometimes the ones pulling it gets hurt. The jackass Wuer Kaixi came to my university in Canada not long after to raise funds for the "movement". In between,he was feted with sympathy by everyone till he became as fat as a pig. Of course there may be other sides to this story. You don't need to believe everything I wrote, just check out the facts first before deciding. As stakeholders, we owe it to ourselves to find out the truth. |
I Hope We can Start to Talk about History