After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made

by Ben Rhodes

I asked him why the Party had to whitewash Tiananmen from history. “Because they can,” he answered, echoing my own sense of why Putin had poisoned Navalny. “It’s just because they can. The Tiananmen student protest exemplified nonviolent struggle. But because nonviolence was met with tanks and machine guns, right and wrong was really clear. The Communist Party had no excuse for this massacre, even within their own rhetoric. The history of the Communist Party is littered with inconvenient truths. Cultural Revolution they can’t explain. The Great Famine they can’t explain. They had to erase them all from history.”