With Mao gazing approvingly, no one should be surprised there was a massacre in Tiananmen Square.
Is there a more evil regime on the planet than the Chinese Communist Party?
This week marks the 32nd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre where 10,000 pro-democracy student protestors were slaughtered.
They were shot and run over by “Peoples’ Liberation Army” tanks.
Bicycles and rickshaws were used to ferry the wounded to hospital.
I was at university in 1989 and remember the ceremony held in the quadrangle as a mark of respect. Flags were lowered to half-mast.
Then Prime Minister Bob Hawke rightly declared that Chinese students in Australia did not have to go home if they did not wish to.
In the years following, life went on and Australia pretended we could have a normal relationship with the CCP.
Indeed, they seemed to have learned from their disgrace and were opening up.
Trade boomed and Hu Jintao addressed a joint sitting of parliament in Canberra.
But then Xi Jinping ascended and started talking openly about Stalinism.
The Falun Dafa kept banging on about organ harvesting and churches started to get bulldozed.
But that didn’t stop our universities opening the door to CCP infiltration via so-called Confucius Institutes.
Victoria’s Dan Andrews signed up to the Belt and Road Initiative.
Satellite images of concentration camps for Uighurs were not even enough for us to think twice about engagement with the CCP.
Xi reneged on the one country two systems deal with Hong Kong and brutally took over.
Adding to the CCP’s crimes, they unleashed Covid on the world knowing Chinese travellers carried a highly infectious virus.
They knew because they developed it in a lab as part of a military experiment.
This week 7000 armed riot police were on the streets of Hong Kong as part of an attempted ban on the commemoration of the massacre.
While numbers were down, thousands of Hong Kongese defied the CCP and turned out of the streets.
That is courage. Good on them.
The Chinese people are good people. It is the CCP that is not.
As we mark 32 years since the massacre, we would do well to contemplate the man who’s larger than life picture adorns Tiananmen Square.
Mao Tse Tung killed somewhere in the order of 60 million people in his Communist take-over and subsequent “great leap forward”.
Sixty million. Dead. We should think on that.
Why is his picture still there?
Displaying images of Hitler is unthinkable, same with Stalin. Although the Russians still venerate Lenin, who is in the same pantheon of bloody dictators of the 20th century.
No one should be surprised a massacre occurred under Mao’s gaze 32 years ago.
As Australian Fred Schwarz said in his best-selling 1961 book with the same title, You Can Trust the Communists (to be communists).
The evil Xi is living up to this dictum.
Lest we forget.