permaculture

[Dieter Brand <diebrand@yahoo.com>]

> > It is natural that farmers are radical, thinking about
>> the roots of things as much as they do.

Nope, it is natural that farmers are conservative because they need to 
conserve the prosperity of the land that has come down to them through 
generations of ancestors.

It is only in desperate times that farmers will rise up in arms and throw 
away their lives together with their land because of the hardship brought 
about by a combination of natural calamities and the pressure from the city 
whose greed will drain the land of its last resources.

> Are the events described above true and accurate about the
> murders and repression committed by the Chinese Government
> during the Tiananmen Square demonstrations when thousands of
> farmers as well as thousands of students participated
> together?

The true numbers will never be known.  The subject is still a taboo in China. 
 But it is without a doubt one of the most horrible crimes in modern times.  
And what's worse: the butchers of Tiananmen and their heirs are still in 
power and dictate the destiny of more than a billion people.  They are now 
flexing their newly gained economical muscle to bully smaller Nations into 
submission and buy up land in Africa on a large scale.  This will be 
something to watch in the years to come. 

Personally I doubt that the farmer element at Tiananmen was very significant, 
but I don’t have any firm data.  There were probably small numbers of farmers 
who happened to be at the capital at the time and somehow got mixed up in the 
events.  At the time, nobody thought it would end like that.  The students 
sized the opportunity of Gorbachev’s visit to Beijing to encourage a 
political liberation in China similarly to the one that was taking place in 
the Soviet Union.  They thought that they would be safe in the limelight of 
the international news.  But that was forgetting the bloody-mindedness of the 
rulers in Beijing.  To mow down unarmed civilians of your own citizenry with 
tanks is about the most dastardly thing anybody can do.  Chinese rulers will 
have to live with the stigma for generations to come.

Dieter