In 2021, China and Russia went full mask-off.
Item: the memorial to the victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre at the University of Hong Kong was removed, under cover of night.
A famous statue at the University of Hong Kong marking the Tiananmen Square massacre was removed late on Wednesday.
The statue showed piled-up corpses to commemorate the hundreds - possibly thousands - of pro-democracy protesters killed by Chinese authorities in 1989.
It was one of the few remaining public memorials in Hong Kong commemorating the incident.
Its removal comes as Beijing has increasingly been cracking down on political dissent in Hong Kong.
The city used to be one of few places in China that allowed public commemoration of the Tiananmen Square protests - a highly sensitive topic in the country.
Item: a Russian court has closed down Memorial, a human rights group dedicated to honouring the victims of Stalin:
Russia’s supreme court has ordered the closure of Memorial International, the country’s oldest human rights group, in a watershed moment in Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on independent thought.
The court ruled Memorial must be closed under Russia’s controversial “foreign agent” legislation, which has targeted dozens of NGOs and media outlets seen as critical of the government.
Memorial was founded in the late 1980s to document political repressions carried out under the Soviet Union, building a database of victims of the Great Terror and gulag camps. The Memorial Human Rights Centre, a sister organisation that campaigns for the rights of political prisoners and other causes, is also facing liquidation for “justifying terrorism and extremism”.
Memorial International’s closure marks an inflection point in Russia’s modern history, as efforts to publicise crimes under Soviet leaders such as Joseph Stalin have become taboo 30 years after the secret government archives were opened after the end of the Soviet Union. While not quite seeking a return to the Soviet past, Putin has become deeply sensitive to any criticism of it by groups including Memorial.
[…]
The Russian prosecutor portrayed the organisation as a geopolitical weapon used by foreign governments to deprive modern Russians of taking pride in the achievements of the Soviet Union. Those arguments dovetail closely with the Kremlin’s use of Soviet history as a rallying point for society and reinterpretation of key historical moments in its confrontations with European countries.
“It is obvious that, by cashing in on the subject of political reprisals of the 20th century, Memorial is mendaciously portraying the USSR as a terrorist state and whitewashing and vindicating Nazi criminals having the blood of Soviet citizens on their hands,” said Alexei Zhafyarov, a representative of the Russian prosecutor general’s office, during the hearing.
“Why should we, the descendants of the victors, have to see the vindication of traitors to their homeland and Nazi henchmen? … Perhaps because someone pays for that. And this is the true reason why Memorial is so fiercely trying to disown its foreign agent status,” he continued.
Putin wants to return Russia to its glory days of the mid-twentieth century, when it was a dominant superpower that sent the first man into space and had client states all over the world, though without the “living up at the bakery for six hours only to find out there’s no bread left” part. In the new year, we’ll see if Ukraine takes the hit once again.
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