Ai Weiwei: "Let Us Forget"
With Twitter blocked and his Fanfou apparently censored already*, it’s been a rough couple of days for Ai Weiwei, but the new blog remains free. Today, he posted this piece. It’s very short, and very, very poignant. Please, please read this.
Translation
Let us forget about June 4th, forget this ordinary day. Life has taught us, under totalitarianism, every day is the same. Every day in a totalitarian society is one day, there is no ‘other day’, no ‘yesterday’ or ‘tomorrow’. We no longer need partial truth, we don’t need partial justice or partial fairness.
Without freedom of speech, without freedom of news, without freedom of elections, we are not people, we do not need to remember. Lacking the right to remember, we choose to forget.
Let us forget every instance of persecution, every instance of humiliation; every massacre and every cover-up, every lie, every time we are pushed down, every death. Forget every moment of suffering, then forget every moment of forgetting. This is all just so that they, like ‘men of honor’, might ridicule us.
Forget those soldiers who fired on civilians, those students whose bodies were crushed by the treads of tanks, the whistle and scream of bullets and blood on big streets and in the alleyways; a city and a Square without tears. Forget the interminable lies, the rulers hoping everyone has forgotten, forget their cowardess, their evil and ineptitude. We must forget, for they must be forgotten. Only when they’ve been forgotten can [we] exist. For the sake of existing, let us forget.
*A Note
His fanfou isn’t actually blocked — I really should read the error messages, it turns out — rather, the entire site is down for “maintenance” until June 6th. I must say, I suspect that the government may have had something to do with the timing of that maintenance! I might even go so far as to suspect that actually, there is no maintenance required at all!
UPDATE: Rue89 has translated this English translation into French.
UPDATE 2: Now also available in Spanish.
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“Lacking the right to remember, we choose to forget.”
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