Overshadowed last week by the seventieth anniversary of D Day was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Here is a Glasgow perspective on it, written at the time.
CHINAMAN
I saw him near George, not Tiananmen, Square,
A Chinese student, taller than the norm,
Open-shirted like a fifties Socialist,
Swinging a plastic poke from M and S, and chewing on his lip.
As Strathclyde buses orangely
passed,
He surely thought of burnt-out versions
Slewed across Peking streets and bandana'd camarades,
Demanding that impossible absolute, democracy,
Not knowing the sour compromise of Western reality.
But was naivety, I wondered
for him,
Crime enough to merit massacre?
Or was it simply to revenge the old men's loss of face
That the young ones lost theirs too,
Their egghead, eggshell, skulls smashed
By their own contemporaries, uniformed, uninformed,
The slain detritus bulldozed into rubbish heaps?
Passing the Stockwell Bazaar, my Chinaman
Brooded on these things, I'm sure,
But did he rue his distance from events, mourn missed
martyrdom?
Or did he, base but human, feel relief he wasn't tested,
And share with me, and all the Glassford Street flaneurs,
The moral luxury of safe indignation?
LD
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