Ai Weiwei - A Chinese Inquisition necessary for China to move forward

Mypaper published the thoughts of Ai Weiwei on 5 Jun rebuking China for not wanting to face its troubled past. With 5000 years of history, there are a lot of ugly past that China would have to confront. Fortunately Ai Weiwei spared the readers the agony by limiting China’s past to the era of Communist China. He went as far back as the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square Incident. In his view, unless China accounts for the wrongful past, it cannot move forward and would be bugged by a credibility crisis.
 
‘China has chosen to forget, or to allow forgetting – an attitude the West will find hard to understand. This provides China a way to liberate itself from self criticism, as well as a heavier moral burden.’ From the idealistic point of view, from an intellectual point of view, I fully agree with Ai Weiwei that it is good for a nation and a people to face up to its ugly past, do some critique, appease the conscience and move on to a higher plane.
 
What bothers me is his deference to the West as if the West is superior in not forgetting their ugly past, that the West was an epitome in facing and criticizing their sad past. 
How much did the West live up to this fairy tale expectation of Ai Weiwei? The genocide of Red Indians, the slavery of the Black Africans, the oppression of Asians, particularly the Chinese migrants, how much were these episodes really discussed and reflected by the West to clear their conscience? But these are too historical, too ancient to talk about. Okay, what about the wars of lies in Iraq and the oppression of the Islamic countries, regime change all in the interests of the West under the guise of democracy, freedom and human rights? Were these discussed, or were they not as they were not seen to be wrong or ugly? What about colonialism and the butchering of natives in the name of civilizing them? Were they really discussed in the West?
 
But the West moved forward with no trouble at all, with no sense of guilt, with no heart wrenching spasm, soul searching to want to liberate themselves from their ugly past.
 
Japan too had moved forward with no remorse to the cruelty and barbarism in the Second World War. Or does Ai Weiwei believe that Japan has repented, critiqued its Imperial past? Of all that I know, Japan has white washed its gory history that the young did not know what their cruel forefathers did in Asia. Or Japan is suffering from a crisis of credibility for not confronting their past and not moving forward? The Japanese are trying to rewrite history, no comfort women, no Rape of Nanking, no massacres of natives in China and Southeast Asia, no Unit 731….
 
Ai Weiwei is a modern Chinese intellectual, very well respected. I think he over respected and overrated the West and their white washing of their ugly past. The West did not suffer from amnesia. Any amnesia is selective amnesia, intentional amnesia just like Japan. Or it is because the Asians and Chinese have amnesia about western history of conquest, genocide and oppression?
 
Countries moved forward whether they take the effort to confront their past or not. Did the West confront the Inquisition in Europe, the massacre of pagan natives and non God believers all over their colonies? Many in the West, if not most, have conveniently chosen to forget their ugly and uncomfortable past. Many Asians chose to believe that the West did not have any ugly and uncomfortable past to confront, some out of ignorance, some out of idealistic adoration, and some out of stupidity.

Kopi Level - Green