New Yorker - Telling the Stories of the Protests Here and in Hong Kong

[TomCADem]

Interesting story about how Trump's authoritarian impulses, attacks on the media, willingness to suppress votes, and willingness to lie have eroded the ability of the U.S. to take China to task for its repression of its citizens.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/telling-the-stories-of-the-protests-here-and-in-hong-kong

It should come as no surprise, then, that, according to the former national-security adviser John Bolton, Trump courted Xi to help him win reëlection, while publicly berating his rival Joe Biden for supposedly being soft on Beijing. (Or that Trump reportedly endorsed the idea of holding members of an ethnic minority in detention centers.) Yet the emergence of an American would-be authoritarian has largely played to Xi’s benefit. Images of American police officers using tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber bullets to crack down on protesters, including across the street from the White House, were splashed across Chinese media. “U.S. Deploys Weapons of War in Bid to Control Protests,” a headline in the Global Times, a Communist Party-controlled news outlet, read. Its editor also took to social media to post that, for the United States, the “repression of domestic unrest has further eroded the moral basis to claim itself a ‘beacon of democracy.’ ” Then there was a message from my aunt, a retired journalist for Xinhua, China’s official state-run news agency, telling me that “America has begun arresting and shooting at journalists.” She had predicted all of this long before, she said, and added, “Please watch what you write about America and Trump.”

I tell my aunt that I can write what I want about American politicians, and that freedom of the press marks one of the fundamental differences between the United States and China. But I have to admit to myself that my pride in that fact has been shaken not only by Trump’s attacks on the press but by his contempt for the truth. What concerns me most, as a journalist and as an American, is how relentlessly the President seeks to rewrite the American story in real time. Now he’s trying to vilify the protesters who hope to heal America’s most searing wound—racism—as part of his reëlection strategy. He anoints himself the “President of law and order” at a time when he is transparently inciting disorder. This kind of revisionism is another hallmark of the Chinese Communist Party, which, in erasing the truth of China’s story, has inflicted a kind of cultural amnesia upon generations of its people.

After my story on Hong Kong came out, the official Chinese media called me a “pro-U.S. journalist who has made a career of smearing China.” Not that many people in China are likely to have seen my piece—The New Yorker’s Web site is blocked by the same digital wall that censors all press that does not conform to the Party line. I had an inkling that this might happen and realized, in retrospect, that my concern with projecting objectivity was born out of the anxiety that I could never prove my objectivity to my detractors. In an unfree society, even the pursuit of objectivity is a threat, because it suggests that there is a reality beyond the official state narrative.

During the past three years, Americans have experienced what it’s like to be characters in Trump’s story of America. But he can’t stop the true stories spilling out of this moment of reckoning. These stories have led us to reconsider the monuments to our past—from Columbus to the Confederacy—and to reassess the narrative framework from which these figures and symbols draw their value. Living in an open society means acknowledging that, although America is one nation, a good number of Americans have been complicit in relegating their fellow-citizens to another, meaner nation, one riven by arbitrary official violence—even though this is not the story that America wants to read about itself. Institutions and political systems live inside the stories we tell ourselves. Revising our history to acknowledge our failures is not an act of desecration but of hope. It is a reminder that we can change the course of this country and that, perhaps, we will.