No tear for the Red Indians

Every year on June 4, there will be commentaries and sit ins to commemorate the Tiananmen Incident not only in HK and Taiwan but also in the West.  I was reading this article deemed important enough by our main media to be reported in one full page.  Nick Frisch, a Yale Law School doctoral student wrote this in his article ‘Tiananmen at 27: Is it worth looking back? The first para:

‘Each spring, a ripple of recollection passes through Beijing and anyone over the age of 35 remembers how hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens went into the streets to join striking students.

The crowds, demanding reforms, used their bodies as barricades against advancing columns of troops.  No on believed the People’s Army would fire at its namesake.

When the gunfire started, the crowds melted away in shock and disbelief. Most individuals became anonymous to history and one another, and, like other urbanites across China, walled off memories of the massacre and accepted the Communist Party’s gospel of prosperity: Make money, avoid politics, get on with your lives.’

I find the above very well written and I choose not to reinvent the wheel and to use the same text, with a few changes, to describe the fate of the Red Indians in North America a few centuries ago. Now try reading this.

‘Each spring, a ripple of recollection passes through the Plains of the Prairies and how anyone of any age, could not remember how millions of native Americans, called Red Indians, went into the prairies to join other native Indians.

The crowds, demanding for the right to live in their land, used their bodies as barricades against advancing columns of troops and the Calvary.  No on believed the American troops would fire at its namesake, at native Americans.

When the gunfire started, the crowds melted away in shock and disbelief. Most individuals, mothers and children, became anonymous to history and one another, and, like other urbanites across America, walled off memories of the massacre and accepted the Confederates and American Union’s gospel of prosperity: Make money, avoid politics, get on with your lives.’ Unfortunately for the tens of millions of native Americans aka Red Indians, the genocide was so complete that barely a few survived today in the land of the free.

While the bleeding hearts and white man’s conscience want to remember 4^th of June, would the native Indians want to remember 4^th of July as their Independence Day or the Day they were terminated to near extinction? To quote Frisch, ‘It is a question that global media multinational businesses and foreign governments must confront as well.’ Or they have forgotten, afraid to confront to offend the white Americans?

The silence of the Red Indians is remarkable. There is no tear left for the Red Indians.

Frisch emphasized that there is one place, Hong Kong, 1,900km south of Beijing, that allows mass remembrance of Tiananmen. Would there be a place in the North American continent, a city far away from the Plain of the Prairies, to have a remembrance of the genocide of the Red Indian as a human race?

Frisch quoted a Hong Kong journalist Yau Lap-poon saying, ‘Without June 4, would China have travelled its 27 year path of development? ... Perhaps the blood of Tiananmen was a kind of fertilizer, helping China bloom prosperously on the soil of market economics.’

Using the same phrase, ‘Without the massacre of the Red Indians, would the USA have travelled its 240 year path of development? … Perhaps the blood of the Plain of Prairies was a kind of fertilizer, helping the USA bloom prosperously on the soil of market economics.’

Frisch also quoted a poem by Cao Shuying, a Beijing poet, ‘I am from a planet you cannot forget…We survivors look like husks…A burden over years…The laughter of lost days, emptied out.’

Take a ride into the prairies in a cold summer night and listen…You may still here the Red Indian laughter of lost days….many centuries ago. You may still see them chasing their squaws around campfires surrounded by their wigwams. You may still see the trails of smokes floating into the air from the pipes of the big chiefs.

No more tears for the Red Indians.