Western Governments Embrace the Tiananmen Square Mentality

American Thinker ^ | 16 Jun, 2023 | J.B. Shurk

[MtnClimber]

With the thirty-fourth anniversary of China's Tiananmen Square Massacre having just passed, it is worth pointing out how that atrocity set the stage for increasing government tyranny across the globe today. The Chinese slaughter of innocents should always be seen as the other side of the coin to the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Iron Curtain.

In Europe, where dedicated freedom fighters spent decades creating a "parallel polis" providing both an escape from and organized resistance to totalitarian regimes, the fall of communism naturally followed the rise of public movements for liberty. In China, where cries for freedom were crushed with tanks and despair for the lost, the one-party communist State's power grew. When the United States and other Western countries chose to ignore China's crimes against humanity in a Faustian exchange for Western companies' lucrative opportunity to replace their own domestic workforces with Chinese slave labor under the communists' control, the West proved that it was more than willing to sell out both moral conviction and political principle for a quick buck.

The Chinese communists learned that Western governments are ultimately corrupt "paper tigers" that pretend to stand for human freedom but instead prostitute their ideals for material greed. Aspiring tyrants around the world learned that it is better to crush popular opposition movements with gruesome violence than to permit calls for individual liberty and free speech to grow into outright rebellions powerful enough to redirect the course of history.

Western politicians celebrate the fall of the Soviet Union and occasionally grumble about Chinese human rights abuses, but make no mistake: the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the Tiananmen Square Massacre remain cautionary tales to those enamored of power. In their minds, they hear only Machiavelli's warning...

[MtnClimber]

It seemed that communism had been defeated, but the left was just changing their strategy.

[dfwgator]

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

And that’s exactly what they did.

[Tench_Coxe]

"In China, where cries for freedom were crushed with tanks and despair for the lost, the one-party communist State's power grew. When the United States and other Western countries chose to ignore China's crimes against humanity in a Faustian exchange for Western companies' lucrative opportunity to replace their own domestic workforces with Chinese slave labor under the communists' control, the West proved that it was more than willing to sell out both moral conviction and political principle for a quick buck."

Let's not forget who was President at the time. The public response could best be described as 'tepid'.

[OttawaFreeper]

“Western companies’ lucrative opportunity to replace their own domestic workforces with Chinese slave labor under the communists’ control”

And that was a good deal in part due to laws pertaining to minimum wage and other things the unions browbeat American politicians into supporting. The factory jobs kept black unemployment low. The absence of compulsory schooling up to age 16 or thereabouts had youths working those jobs as well and as a result, schools basically had kids who wanted to learn, as opposed to the bloody mayhem going on nowadays.

[PGR88]

Western leftists admire China - its one-party control, its ability and willingness to monitor every citizen’s activity, its ability to social-engineer every human action