Sunday, June 04, 2006

Remembering the Fallen

Today is the anniversary of the 1989 massacre of student pro-democracy protests in China. Merely 17 years ago, and yet Chinese students in Beijing University today reply that they are not sure what it was, and that they have never seen the iconic images from those events that the rest of the world recognizes immediately. Censorship of history is effective in keeping people ignorant and confined.

Students in Taiwan have indeed heard about this history, although they remain vaguely unaware of what it implies about their own lives in the 21st century. None of my students has ever seen a video or photo of those momentous events. The link below downloads a BBC video shot live during the massacre. It plays with the free RealPlayer software.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/video/otdvideo/89/06/04/nb/7653_04-06-89_4x3_nb.ram

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