Jeffrey Wasserstrom: prediction

Transcript context

…Yeah. We’re watching the video now. He’s got, what, grocery bags in his hands? It’s such a symbolic, “I’ve had enough,” that kind of statement. Yeah, and it’s probably not a student. It’s often described as a student, but he probably was a worker. And it is a powerful, powerful image of bravery. And I brought up the 1968 parallel for Eastern and Central Europe. There was actually a very powerful photograph of a man baring his chest in front of a tank in Bratislava during what we think of as Prague Spring. That was a famous image of bravery against tanks. And in 1968 in Czechoslovakia, then still Czechoslovakia, the tanks that rolled in were Soviet tanks sent down there. But that was an image… What was so powerful in that was saying, “We’re not going to put up with this invasion.” Again, I think you have the People’s Liberation Army looking like an invading force, and that’s what the Chinese Communist Party in a sense can’t deal with now. Even though sometimes they could tell a story about 1989, and they do tell a version of this, and some people believe this, I think, is that in 1989, China went one route of not having the Communist Party dramatically change or relinquish control, and the Soviet Union and the former Soviet states went another. And you could say, “Well, look.” And after 1989, the Chinese economy boomed. Life got better for people in China. Life got really terrible for a lot of people in the former Soviet blocs. “Actually, maybe this was the right way to go.” And you can make that kind of argument, but if you show the tanks and the man in front of the tanks, you just have a different kind of image of heroism. It’s one of my favorite photographs or snapshots ever taken, videos ever taken, so I apologize if we linger on it. Sometimes you don’t understand the symbolic power of an image until afterwards, and perhaps that’s what the Chinese government didn’t quite understand. They lost information more than [inaudible 00:35:39]. So I have to ask, what do you think was going through that man’s head? Was it a heroic statement? Was it a purely primal guttural, “I’ve had enough”?…

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