Confucius* says: The Czar is right. But so was Orwell, and the Ministry of Truth in Peking has been hard at work airbrushing the protestor from in front of those tanks. Glorious Parade of Armored Division of 27th Army PLA! And it’s been working. As James Fallows wrote the other day:

I have spent a lot of time over the past three years with Chinese university students. They know a lot about the world, and about American history, and about certain periods in their own country’s past. Virtually everyone can recite chapter and verse of the Japanese cruelties in China from the 1930s onward, or the 100 Years of Humiliation, or the long background of Chinese engagement with Tibet. Through their own family’s experiences, many have heard of the trauma of the Cultural Revolution years and the starvation and hardship of the Great Leap Forward. But you can’t assume they will ever have heard of what happened in Tiananmen Square twenty years ago. For a minority of people in China, the upcoming date of June 4 has tremendous significance. For most young people, it’s just another day.

We have always been at war with Eastasia.***

Picture: That’s Po Ku** (l., né Ch’in Pang-hsien) airbrushed out of the picture, presumably on orders of Mao (r.).

*For those who came in late: Confucius is the name of the Gormogons’ Œcumenical Volgi.

**Wade-Giles is the official Chinese romanization of the Gormogons.

***This is Orwell, not geopolitics.

Confucius, Œc. Vol.

Don’t ask impertinent questions like that jackass Adept Lu.