The "correct" view of history

[Randy W]

in the WSJ

 

In China, German President Gives a Pointed History Lesson on Communism

 

In China, Germany often gets credit for adopting a “correct” view of history.

Students in Shanghai on Tuesday heard German President Joachim Gauck offer a history lesson about his country that differed from Beijing’s preferred episodes, as he criticized communist rule, state propaganda and exceptionalist worldviews. The year 1989 for Germany, he said, made clear it’s pointless to suppress personal freedom.

. . .

“For more than four decades,” Mr. Gauck said, he lived in “a state that, as part of the union of Communist countries dependent on the Soviet Union, silenced its own people, locked them up and humiliated those who refused to comply with the will of the leaders.”

Under the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” he said, “most people were neither happy nor liberated. And the entire system lacked proper legitimacy. Free, equal and secret public elections were not held. The result was a lack of credibility, which went hand in hand with a culture of distrust between the rulers and those they ruled.”

He said it took the Nazi defeat for Germany to reject its sense of “exceptionalism” and become open to “inalienable human rights and the rule of law, separation of powers, representative democracy and popular sovereignty.”

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Mr. Gauck said, “that moment made it clear that the human yearning for freedom cannot be kept down.” The president didn’t need to mention China’s violent suppression months earlier of the freedom movement in Tiananmen Square.

. . .

Instead of reflecting on Mr. Gauck’s history lesson on Tuesday, local media limited coverage to his admiration for China’s futuristic skyline.