89/ Tiananmen, Denialism and History (With Mia Wong)

This is a conversation with Mia Wong, a writer and researcher with Cool Zone Media whose essay "When communists crushed the international workers’ movement" for Lausan was the subject of this conversation.

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Blog: https://thefirethisti.me

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Topics Discussed:

• The Tiananmen massacre in its historical context
• The meaning of Tiananmen
• How we remember Tiananmen and what we erase
• The before and the after
• The cost of denialism
• Tiananmen/Syria comparisons
• Occupying the squares vs occupying the factories
• On class identities
• How could it have been different?
• Aesthetics and politics
• Burying the past
• On tankies

Recommended Books:

• Rhythms of the Pachakuti: Indigenous Uprising and State Power in Bolivia by Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar
• The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy by David Graeber
• Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil by Timothy Mitchell
• Hatta Shūzō and Pure Anarchism in Interwar Japan by John Crump

+ I recommended Anarchist Modernity: Cooperatism and Japanese-Russian Intellectual Relations in Modern Japan by Sho Konishi