"A strong signal to China": Model of the "Pillar of Shame," a memorial to the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, was unveiled outside the European Parliament in Brussels
"A strong signal to China": Model of the "Pillar of Shame," a memorial to the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, was unveiled outside the European Parliament in Brussels
A model of the “Pillar of Shame,” which was controversially removed from a Hong Kong university in 2021, has gone on display in front of the European Parliament in Brussels.
Depicting a heap of contorted bodies and screaming faces, the statue was unveiled Tuesday as part of an exhibition of “forbidden art” that organizers said had been censored or “deemed subversive” by Hong Kong and mainland China.
The exhibition was hosted by Jens Galschiøt, the Danish artist behind the famous sculpture, and Kira Marie Peter-Hansen, a member of the European Parliament (MEP). A further six MEPs, including representatives from each of the parliament’s five largest political coalitions, were listed as co-hosts.
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Meanwhile, Belgium has several monuments glorifying the colonization of congo but I couldn't find one dedicated to the victims of Léopold II's brutal colonial practices...
Whataboutism
Believe it or not, one can think the Tiananmen massacre was bad, and also think colonization was bad.
I'm just not a fan of countries' moral posturing about other countries' exactions while sweeping their own under the rug. And I'm french, so my own country is definitely part of this shitty hypocritical club.
There's a lot wrong with Western colonization, but this whataboutism is once again out of place.
One difference between contemporary Europe and contemporary China is that the former consists mostly of democracies, and even though they may be imperfect democracies, there is freedom of speech.
For example, you are free to criticise your country's history, the actual politics, or freely express your opinion on any subject you want.
However, if you are organising candlelight vigils in the city of Hong Kong on the anniversary of the Chinese military's crushing of the 1989 protests in Beijing at Tiananmen Square, you go to jail.
Three former organisers of Hong Kong's annual vigil in remembrance of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests have lost their bid to overturn their conviction. A judge quashed the appeal saying there was enough evidence to uphold the decision. The trio received a four-and-a-half-month sentence last year.
[Edit typo.]
Yet, you prance about telling everybody that displaying one memorial against an atrocity is worth less if some other (arbitrarily chosen) atrocity isn't admitted and remembered the same way. That's BS. Just as condemning Belgium here when the exhibition is hosted by the EU.
It is worth less in the sense that its impact is less than it could be. Like for example, would you be moved by such a statue being set up in Pyongyang or in 1946 Germany? Of course not. The statue only works because and as long as Europe, the EU, Belgium or the artists who created the statue can claim a moral superiority over China. That superiority largely hinges on whether and how past atrocities are admitted, rectified and prevented from happening again.
Also, what has people like the commenter above outraged is that such a statue is not displayed in a contextless moral void but serves as a propaganda tool to diminish Western or European human rights violations in past and present - even if not intended by the creator. "But look at China" itself is a huge whataboutist argument. If the moral evaluation of states and such is too emotional a topic to see this point, then maybe you can see it at work in the climate catastrophe. "But look at China" has been and is a very popular argument despite being both completely illogical and actually wrong, and it's a danger to the continuation of our civilization.
The students at Tianmenn protested for China becoming democratic and gainst China becoming capitalist. So it is quite strongly linked to Western commercial and colonial interests.
China developed just as the West wanted, by adopting capitalist economics without democratic systems or worse democratic ownership of the means of production.
Just that China then outplayed the West at their own game.
1000 upvotes for you. Someone with rational thinking that can see the hypocrisy.