Sad and angry

For whatever reason, the Tiananmen protests stuck with me more than the fall of the Berlin Wall. I find people rallying against an oppressive regime a more compelling story than a large military force surrendering to another large military force. Maybe it’s just the drama of the story, or maybe it’s that I don’t believe what Mao wrote about power flowing from the barrel of a gun. I believe in democracy, not just as a principle but as a practical reality. However slowly or imperfectly it happens, eventually the common majority always crushes an elite minority. If you watch, they always seem to prop up an elite minority in the place of the one removed, so I’m convinced that the existence of the elite minority is in fact part of the will of the common majority. It’s not power TO the people, it’s power OF the people. We’ve got it if we only choose to exercise it.

Anyhow, I kept a picture of the paint-splattered poster of Chairman Mao in my wallet as a reminder for several months. When I opened my wallet, I’d often see the Chairman there with red paint on his face. It was an encouraging reminder to me of the bravery shown by the protesters at Tiananmen Square.

So it makes me very sad to see the news today:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4742478.stm

The thrower of the paint balloon that defaced the portrait I kept a picture of in my wallet was released from prison Wednesday. He served seventeen years in prison for an act that at worst could be called vandalism.

Those seventeen years were not spent working out at the prison gym and watching cable TV, either. He spent two entire years in solitary confinement, and was lashed to a pole in the summertime sun for days at a time. He was beaten and tortured in ways that we’ll probably never know, and he was released to his family completely mentally broken. Reportedly he does not recognize his own family and cannot speak intelligibly,

I don’t know that much about prisons. I’ve never spent more than a couple of hours inside one, and even then I was always free to walk out. But I remember Solzhenitsyn writing about the gulag where he said that prisoners could not take more than about two weeks of solitary confinement without losing their soul. And here is this guy who was kept in the hole for two years.

I suppose that all men have their breaking point. And I suppose I shouldn’t find it at all surprising that a regime who holds down their population at gunpoint should want to break the ones who really hold the power. Especially a government that came into place by bloody revolution should remember the lesson that their positions of power and influence are at best held precariously.

Yet I have to wonder why we, in the parts of the world where no matter how badly we fail at it we at least believe in liberty and democracy, continue to do business with torturers. I am ashamed that yesterday I purchased a Chinese motorcycle tire.