Freeman's soft spot for dictatorships
By JAMES KIRCHICK | 3/3/09 4:32 AM EST
On May 26, 2006, Chas Freeman sent an e-mail to a confidential listserv called ChinaSec. The subject under discussion was the Tiananmen Square massacre, the 1989 Chinese government crackdown on peaceful democracy demonstrators. Sounding like a hard-line Chinese Communist Party flack, he referred to the young activists as constituting a ?mob scene,? termed their appeals for liberalization ?propaganda,? mocked the ?goddess of democracy? they had erected in honor of the Statue of Liberty and deemed the government?s response ? which resulted in over 2,500 deaths ? ?overly cautious.?
Savor that last line for a minute, and call to mind the indelible image from Tiananmen Square of the anonymous man standing in front of a line of tanks. In light of Freeman?s criticism of the Chinese regime?s ?ill-conceived restraint,? one cannot escape the conclusion that he would have preferred that the episode had ended with the man being flattened, the vivification of George Orwell?s aphorism that totalitarianism is a ?boot stomping on a human face.?
