A friend in a formerly communist country explained to me how things
were in the communist days.
Many members of her family had been in prison because they were priests.
There was only one TV channel. On this channel, there was only one hour
of TV per day: The speech of the dictator.
On the birthday of the dictator, the people had to celebrate and
pretend they were happy and loved the dictator, while in reality they
were unhappy, afraid, and hated him. They proved this later when they
killed the dictator and had real celebrations and were really happy
this time.
But the image was held up that things were not so bad for these people,
and that is the image we received in the western world.
Now, 15 years later, you can still see the results of the communism.
There is a big contrast everywhere in the country: Old (communist)
versus new (western). Most people still have cars and apartments from
the communist days. The economy, infrastructure, and so on, everything
is still in a very bad shape.
These people will never forget that their family was being imprisoned
and killed for political reasons, and that Russia helped their dictator
oppress them.
Today we know what happened. We know that the image we received was not
true. But the same situation still exists in countries like China.
Knowing the history, it is unacceptable that countries like France
want to end the weapon embargo against China, a country where human
rights do simply not exist and where innocent people still get executed
every day.
People in China will never forget if we help their dictators and
occupiers oppress them.