American Tiananmen

“Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.” - Robert Jackson

America needs a “tank man.”

Armed and masked agents of ICE are raiding homes and businesses, arresting people with no more cause than a suspect’s skin pigmentation. A U.S. Senator was cuffed, and thrown to the floor for the crime of wanting to ask a question of the head of ICE, a cos-playing, collagen-lipped, pseudo-Barbie who went on a raid to the home of a woman, pregnant with her fourth child. The government wants her husband and will terrorize her and the three children until he is taken into custody. Marines and National Guard soldiers have been deployed against citizens in Los Angeles and military veterans were being arrested in Washington, D.C., as Trump’s parade prepared to roll down a street named after the Constitution he and his courts maliciously violate. We have a president who told his citizens, “We are going to have troops everywhere in the country.”

And no one seems able to stop any of this idiocy.

Trump’s 70-ton Abrams tanks were chewing up the asphalt of America’s capitol city on the same week that Chinese tanks thirty-six years ago were rolling into Tiananmen Square, finishing up a massacre of protestors demanding human rights from their authoritarian government. Such ironies and comparisons would not tickle a single synapse of a MAGA man but the contrasts between the two events are quickly fading. Both were designed to be exhibitions of government power and control with a message for citizens to understand and acknowledge who is in charge. No one knows how many died during the protests in Beijing that week of June in 1989, hundreds were certain to have been killed, thousands might have lost their lives.

The Chinese authorities were unable, however, to completely choreograph the drama in their theater of power. As protesting students were being annihilated, their bodies dragged from the streets, one man, wearing a white shirt and holding book bags, stood in front of a line of tanks, and refused to let them proceed. As the lead tank tried to steer around him, the unidentified man danced back and forth in front of it, risking his life to confront a political horror show. Onlookers, finally, dragged him away, and to this day no one knows who he was or his ultimate fate after the act of courage. Captured by video and still cameras, the moment became one of the most iconic photographs ever rendered in human history.

The peaceful protestor only temporarily stopped military might, but his actions have continued to inspire democratic idealists. China has banned any mention of the Tiananmen protests. No written record of it exists within the country’s culture. History is being ignored and rewritten by Chinese authoritarians with the same dedication the Trump administration has demonstrated for removing achievements by people of color from American institutions and school books. A man who sought and received multiple draft deferments to avoid service in the Vietnam War by claiming bone spurs, now finds himself aroused by flaunting American military power. He is almost certainly overcompensating for his own physical detumescence while also toppling what’s left of the facade of U.S. democracy.

The timing was grotesque, not poetic. Instead of celebrating the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army’s creation, Trump’s enablers organized a display of submission that darkened the reputation of an institution that has served to keep Americans and other peoples free and safe from dictators. Soldiers, airmen and women, Marines, and sailors, went from heroes to pawns beneath the salute of the least principled person ever to ascend the American political stage. He has not yet crushed dissent, but Trump is busy using the courts and executive orders to trample rights. The $45 million pageant of Abrams tanks, Black Hawk helicopters, and WW II-era bombers was sold as patriotism on display but the true calculus is the grim message of military might as political language. The real attempt by Trump is to erase the memory of American norms. Symbolism becomes both a weapon and distraction.

American norms, of course, have already endured exsanguination. College students protesting the starvation and bombing of Gazans are arrested or expelled or deported for being considered anti-Semites and an American president threatens the use of “heavy force” against anyone protesting the parade, which was more about celebrating his 79th birthday than American glory. Trump’s only innovation lies not (yet) in brute force, but in continued and planned institutional erosion: stacking courts with judges who’ve stripped reproductive rights, worker protections, and voting access even as he politically fellates autocratic aesthetics. Someone, somewhere, will pull a trigger, accidentally or otherwise, and it will be like tearing at the last thread of our republic’s garment. We live now in a country where law enforcement officers feel comfortable threatening to murder protestors, promising, “We will kill you graveyard dead.”

Any law that still exists in the U.S. is malleable, weakened by the interpretations of the 234 federal judges Trump appointed to capture the federal courts. Policies that were unthinkable a decade ago, become case law under the present Supreme Court and the supplicant Federal Appeals Courts. Civil rights won on the streets of the American South and in the face of firehoses and under the swing of billy clubs are being diminished almost daily with rulings reached by tortured logic and complete defiance of the Constitution. The streets of America were filled with peaceful protestors this weekend as part of a “No Kings” national movement determined to save the republic from one man’s ego and the soulless who pull at his pant legs, begging for favor. They represent what happens to a nation when its leaders prioritize myth over reality.

China’s post-Tiananmen strategy uses CCP’s politburo to enforce ideological purity. Trump’s message, only slightly different, is that what remains of our democracy has become a kind of hybrid regime. We are equal parts of an homage to the flag and the Fourth of July and another part to legalistic suffocation. To dissent, increasingly, becomes a crime. The U.S. Army was founded to defend democracy, not to star in a strongman’s birthday video. Nonetheless, we suffer a president warning dissenters of consequences while his judges turn the bench into a tool of minority rule. The tragedy isn’t that America has become China; it’s that it’s doing so while insisting it’s still a democracy. Tiananmen’s Tank Man stood alone against steel; America’s dissenters now face a more insidious force: a judiciary reshaped to ensure the parade never ends.

The U.S. needs millions of protestors with the courage and commitment of Tank Man.