The BBC refers to some acts of forgetting as “forgettance.” More precisely, the BBC is talking about China’s utter refusal to acknowledge the 1989 murder of an estimated 10,000 protestors in Tiananmen Square as that crucial act of “forgettance.”
I happened to visit China in 1984, when in an effort to move away from a rigid state economy and encourage tourism, they moved to open Southern China to the West. Meanwhile, young people in China, especially those who had travelled abroad, having tasted a bit of Western-style democracy, tried to extend that concession even further. In response, the political/military establishment grew worried. Remember, China was still recovering from the trauma of the Cultural Revolution, a period that had absolutely nothing to do with culture or was in any positive way revolutionary. It was instead driven by dogma and stupidity. And almost everyone in China was afraid, trying hard to survive their version of the Stalin purges, led by the arrogant young faux radicals who, manipulated by the regime, exacted vengeance on all those they did not like or suspected were less dedicated than they were. These Red Guards had the ability to send the offenders, often teachers and ministers and intellectuals, far from home to hard labor camps where they more often than not failed to prove their loyalty.
The BBC summarizes the events leading to the massacre at Tiananmen:
In the 1980s, China was going through huge changes. The ruling Communist Party began to allow some private companies and foreign investment. Leader Deng Xiaoping hoped to boost the economy and raise living standards. However, the move brought with it corruption, while at the same time raising hopes for greater political openness. The Communist Party was divided between those urging more rapid change and hardliners wanting to maintain strict state control.
In the mid-1980s, student-led protests started … In spring 1989, the protests grew, with demands for greater political freedom. Protesters were spurred on by the death of a leading politician, Hu Yaobang, who had overseen some of the economic and political changes. He had been pushed out of a top position in the party by political opponents two years earlier. Tens of thousands gathered on the day of Hu’s funeral, in April, calling for greater freedom of speech and less censorship. In the following weeks, protesters gathered in Tiananmen Square, with numbers estimated to be up to one million at their largest …
At first, the government took no direct action against the protesters. Party officials disagreed on how to respond, some backing concessions, others wanting to take a harder line. The hardliners won the debate, and in the last two weeks of May, martial law was declared in Beijing. On 3 to 4 June, troops began to move towards Tiananmen Square, opening fire, crushing and arresting protesters to regain control of the area.
[Emphasis added.]
China’s establishment had clearly chosen to crush dissent, and their tanks rolled over the demonstrators. In a story it calls “Tiananmen 30 years on – China’s great act of ‘forgettance,’” the BBC reports that all these years later, China will do everything in its power to keep that story secret:
There are no official acts of remembrance for the events of 1989 in Beijing. But that statement, although factually correct, is far too neutral. In truth, what happened in Tiananmen Square is marked faithfully each year by a massive, national act of what might more properly be called ‘forgettance’. In the weeks leading up to 4 June, the world’s biggest censorship machine goes into overdrive as a huge dragnet of automated algorithms and tens of thousands of human expurgators cleanse the internet of any reference, however oblique. Those deemed to have been too provocative in their attempts to evade the controls can be jailed – with sentences of up to three and a half years … Merely reposting such images on Twitter – a banned platform not even accessible to most Chinese internet users – can get you detained.
A few months ago, I saw for myself the extraordinary lengths to which the authorities are prepared to go to ensure that Chinese citizens engage in absolutely no public discussion or visible acts of commemoration.
So overwhelming is China’s need for forgettance that a mother is forced to risk jail for her public remembrance of her dead son.
Forgetting, forgettance seems ever more relevant to me as we in the United States wake with an almost daily need to remember reality, to remind ourselves that we cannot really find that fictional gas station with Donald Trump gas at two dollars a gallon. And each day, we are reminded how much groceries actually cost, remembering with each additional presidential outrage that those very Supreme Court justices who so often assured us that they would be guided by the actual words of our Constitution have really, truly awarded the incompetence of Donald Trump with gold-plated immunity, assuring him that he will not pay the consequences for all the illegal, lunatic things he is doing to us and our republic.
And so, I have been trying to recall those times when the truth has bubbled up to dispel the myths of the state. Yes, remembering those violent days when Beijing tore the mask off its pretend liberalization to reveal how much it still embraced authoritarianism and how little it cared for its people.
Like many of my generation, I watched Vietnam expose our darker side, shredding what remained of Eisenhower’s manufactured 1950s optimism—the “Father Knows Best” TV version of the Land of the Free, when everyone wanted a dog like Lassie or a horse like Trigger. Of course, toward the end, Eisenhower himself was no longer a believer: Having truly seen his vice president, Richard Nixon, for the McCarthyite he really was and having suffered the incompetence of the Dulles brothers, with a last gasp, he tried too late to warn us about the military-industrial complex.
For those of you too young to have lived through the worst days of the Cold War and the tragedy of Vietnam, here is what President Lyndon Johnson told, actually sold, the nation on September 29, 1967:
Vietnam is also the scene of a powerful aggression that is spurred by an appetite for conquest. It is the arena where Communist expansionism is most aggressively at work in the world today—where it is crossing international frontiers in violation of international agreements; where it is killing and kidnaping; where it is ruthlessly attempting to bend free people to its will.
Into this mixture of subversion and war, of terror and hope, America has entered—with its material power and with its moral commitment. Why? Why should three Presidents and the elected representatives of our people have chosen to defend this Asian nation more than 10,000 miles from American shores? We cherish freedom—yes. We cherish self-determination for all people—yes. We abhor the political murder of any state by another, and the bodily murder of any people by gangsters of whatever ideology … At times of crisis—before asking Americans to fight and die to resist aggression in a foreign land—every American President has finally had to answer this question: Is the aggression a threat—not only to the immediate victim — but to the United States of America and to the peace and security of the entire world of which we in America are a very vital part? That is the question which Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson had to answer in facing the issue in Vietnam …
Those who tell us now that we should abandon our commitment—that securing South Vietnam from armed domination is not worth the price we are paying—must also answer this question. And the test they must meet is this: What would be the consequences of letting armed aggression against South Vietnam succeed? What would follow in the time ahead? What kind of world are they prepared to live in 5 months or 5 years from tonight?
[Emphasis added.]
This, of course, was the version of history where we were good and the communists were bad. And, yes, they were bad, but, unfortunately, we were not good. We had previously engineered the assassinations of popular leaders like Mossadeq in Iran and Lumumba in the Congo and had propped up despicable dictators like Batista in Cuba and Somoza in El Salvador.
What Lyndon Johnson did not tell the country was that the South Vietnamese government was thoroughly corrupt and undemocratic and had lost the support of its people, that American troops were not welcome, and that, in fact, the Vietnamese people cherished their independence and had always fought against whoever came to occupy their nation. They had fought the Chinese and, most recently, the French. He did not tell the country that our troops would die not for freedom, but in vain.
And what Lyndon Johnson also neglected to share was the fact that he and our government had lied about the supposed attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats against the USS Maddox, a Navy destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin on August 2, 1964. Looking back, the U.S. Naval Institute wrote:
The Truth About Tonkin: Questions about the Gulf of Tonkin incidents have persisted for more than 40 years. But once-classified documents and tapes released in the past several years, combined with previously uncovered facts, make clear that high government officials distorted facts and deceived the American public about events that led to full U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.
As The Naval Institute reveals they had used this incident to justify the many years of our disastrous war with North Vietnam:
On 7 August, Congress, with near unanimity, approved the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which President Johnson signed into law three days later. Requested by Johnson, the resolution authorized the chief executive to ‘take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.’ No approval or oversight of military force was required by Congress, essentially eliminating the system of checks and balances so fundamental to the U.S. Constitution. On hearing of the authorization’s passage by both houses of Congress, the delighted President remarked that the resolution ‘was like Grandma’s nightshirt. It covers everything.’
One tragic, brutal event demonstrated more than any other how that unnecessary war had so profoundly impacted and poisoned our soldiers. Half a year after President Johnson’s speech, on March 16, 1968, American soldiers slaughtered more than 500 unarmed Vietnamese villagers.
The My Lai massacre … was a United States war crime committed on 16 March 1968, involving the mass murder of unarmed civilians in Sơn Mỹ village … At least 347 and up to 504 civilians, almost all women, children, and elderly men, were murdered by U.S. Army soldiers from C Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade and B Company, 4th Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade of the 23rd (Americal) Division … Some of the women were gang-raped and their bodies mutilated, and some soldiers mutilated and raped children as young as 12 … The incident was the largest massacre of civilians by U.S. forces in the 20th century.
For the American people, the Vietnam War was never again seen as our leaders wanted us to see it, and their never-ending rhetoric that this was some noble attempt to bring democracy to Southeast Asia would fall on deaf ears at home and abroad.
The Encyclopedia Britannica reveals what a great price the Vietnamese, the United States, and our allies and the neighboring countries of Southeast Asia paid for such stupidity.
Lyndon Johnson challenged Americans to imagine what our world would look like if we chose not to intervene in Vietnam. Well, we have our answer today as Americans journey to vacation in Saigon and Hanoi and so often encounter kindness. Meanwhile, peaceful trade between our two nations grows by the day.
Arrogance comes in so many forms—it seems a particular failing of so many humans, of all colors, of every religion, of so many opinions. There are always those who are convinced he or she or we or they know better: how do to live, what to think, how to be.
There is one example I have never been able to forget. Moments when egotism and the incontrovertible sense of superiority conspired to justify the destruction that had inspired so many for close to 1,500 years. And yet Mullah Muhammed Omar and his Taliban fighters delighted as they destroyed the statues of Bamiyan, in what they regarded as a victory of Islam over Buddhism.
As Pierre Centlivres writes for the Middle East Institute:
The 2001 destruction of the two giant Buddhas in Bamiyan is, by far, the most spectacular attack against the historical and cultural heritage of Afghanistan committed during the country’s recent period of turmoil.
On February 26, 2001, and after having consulted a college of ‘ulama’, Mullah Muhammad Omar, the leader of the Taliban, issued a decree ordering the elimination of all non-Islamic statues and sanctuaries in Afghanistan. A kind of jihad was launched against the two Buddhas — the one to the east 38 meters high, and the other to the west, 55 meters high — hewn into the cliff of Bamiyan. ‘Our soldiers are working hard; they are using all available arms against them,’ said the Taliban’s spokesman. Rockets and tank shells were brought in to help, and the destruction was completed with dynamite. On March 14, the Taliban issued a public announcement that the giant figures had been destroyed … ‘If the statues were objects of cult for an Afghan minority, we would have to respect their belief and its objects, but we don’t have a single Buddhist in Afghanistan,’ said the Mullah, ‘so why preserve false [sic] idols? And if they have no religious character, why get so upset? It is just a question of breaking stones.’
Dogmatism had triumphed over tolerance. Extremism had defeated art. And so, the world was asked to forget that the Buddhas of Bamiyan had inspired the world for 1,500 years.
As I read once again about Donald Trump’s pathological need to pardon those he enlisted in his efforts to lie about the 2020 election, it was clear to me that he will never fully accomplish his forgettance. There is too much to forget, too many to pardon, too many confederates to successfully pretend that they had not broken the law for him. From those who messed with voting machines, who lied to the press, who lied in the courts, who pretended to be legitimate electors, who beat our police to a pulp, who hunted their own vice president in the halls of Congress.
The AP puts it this way:
President Donald Trump has pardoned his former personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, his onetime chief of staff Mark Meadows and others accused of backing the Republican’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election … The move, however, underscores Trump’s continued efforts to promote the idea that the 2020 election was stolen from him even though courts around the country and Trump’s own attorney general at the time found no evidence of fraud that could have affected the outcome. Reviews, recounts and audits of the election in the battleground states where Trump contested his loss also affirmed Biden’s victory.
Trump’s recent action follows the sweeping pardons of the hundreds of Trump supporters charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, including those convicted of attacking law enforcement. Ed Martin, the Department of Justice’s point-man on pardons and a former lawyer for Jan. 6 defendants, linked his announcement of the pardons to a post on X that read ‘No MAGA left behind.’
Thinking about all those who lied to themselves and lied to others about an election Donald Trump clearly lost makes perfect sense when you take a step back. More and more, forgettance seems to accurately describe MAGA’s continuing imperative to deny reality, to constantly rewrite the present and the past. And the most important thing MAGA needs us to forget is their attempt to steal an election by deception, first, and then by force and violence. Everything that the right falsely claimed had happened during the George Floyd protests and most recently with the popular resistance to the often illegal ICE raids they embraced on January 6, 2021, but still pretend never happened.
As a reminder, here are two excerpts from Jack Smith’s “Final Report on the Special Counsel’s Investigations and Prosecutions: Volume One, The Election Case”:
It seems to me that from the very beginning, MAGA has been a scam, built on a foundation of fraud. MAGA has never been about making America great again. That whites-only America that MAGA dreams of recreating, well it was never, ever great. And so, a newer iteration, without extensive of repudiation of its fundamental racism and elitism can only fail just as miserably. The vision of America MAGA wishes for, well, it was always a third-rate autocracy, relying on fear and violence and a hatred of the other, dislike and distrust of women and servants and slaves, dueled on bias and marked by ignorance rather than reason. Of course, exceptions were made for the women and folks of color who willingly accepted dependence on, and sufferance from, the white MAGA men/boys. Clarence Thomas, who gladly takes the bribes of his white billionaire “friends” and Bondi, Noem, Gabbard, and Usha come to mind, those who have traded integrity for power. Oh, and, of course, there is the subset of the faux Christians/Catholics who imagine themselves special emissaries, mini-Gods when it comes to denying abortions to others and equal rights to the LGBTQ+ community but manage to disregard the inconvenient teachings of Jesus, like empathy for the poor, the immigrants, and the discounted.
MAGA falls back on a fundamental suspicion of intelligence, of facts and truth. And it is why MAGA is desperately scouring our universities and libraries and museum. It was once Lindsey Halligan’s job to ethnically and ideologically cleanse the Smithsonian. But she was promoted by Pam Bondi and Donald Trump to replace those prosecutors who resigned rather than prosecute the phony cases against Jim Comey and Letitia James. Karma, they say, is a bitch, and Halligan is about to face the unpleasant consequences for participating—incompetently, it appears—in such foolhardy endeavors. We learned the other day that Halligan addressed the grand jury for more than two hours without a court reporter providing a transcript.
Is there even enough forgettance available to perpetuate the central MAGA myth, the hoax of the stolen election of 2020? To insist that the insurrection of January 6 never happened? That there was never a mob? That MAGA Republicans in both houses were not cowering? That Donald Trump had not sicced that bloodthirsty mob on them all, including his own vice president?
And so Trump continues to pardon the January 6 criminals—from those who bloodied and beat the police to those who threatened and abused election workers, those who pretended to be legitimate electors, and his lawyers who abused their oaths as officers of the court and shamelessly lied.
No matter the unsuccessful scrubbings and embarrassing deceits, the never-ending awful contortions the MAGA faithful force upon themselves, January 6 will always be the tell-tale shame, the moment the mask fell off, and back-the-blue was revealed to be batter-the-blue:
On Jan. 6, 2021, supporters of then-President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol, injuring approximately 140 law enforcement officers, forcing a panicked evacuation of the nation’s political leaders, and threatening the peaceful transfer of power.
Five people died during or soon after the riot, and more than $2.9 million worth of damage was done to the Capitol. Rioters brought firearms, knives, hatchets, pepper spray, baseball bats and other improvised weapons to the Capitol grounds and prosecutors say many of those weapons were used to assault police. In the aftermath of the attack, the Federal Bureau of Investigation referred to the siege as an act of domestic terrorism. In response, the Department of Justice launched the largest criminal investigation in U.S. history.
On Jan. 20, 2025, the first day of President Trump’s second term, he granted relief to every defendant charged in connection with the violent attack. Trump’s written proclamation stated that he was ending a ‘grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over the last four years and begins a process of national reconciliation.’
Nearly every defendant, including those who assaulted police and conspired to plan the attack, received a pardon. In 14 cases, Trump granted the defendants a commutation, ending their prison sentence, but leaving the felony on their records.
NPR tracked every federal criminal case stemming from that day’s events. This database makes publicly available — and searchable — information on hundreds of cases and defendants, including alleged affiliation with extremist ideologies and past or present police or military experience. Although nearly every defendant has now been pardoned and cases are in the process of being dismissed, this database summarizes the charges that were brought and the cases that were prosecuted and tried.
An overview of the cases so far
• Number of people charged, federal: 1,575
• Number of people who pleaded guilty: 1,030
• Number of individuals who completed jury, bench, or stipulated bench trials: 261
• Number with mixed verdicts: 76
• Number convicted on all charges: 181
• Number acquitted of all charges: 4
• Number of people sentenced: 1,126
• Percentage of people sentenced who received prison time: 64
• Median sentence for those who received prison time, in days: 240
I Am not sure how much you have forgotten, but I want to move away from the numbers to one man’s story of January 6. A few days later, PBS spoke to Officer James Blassingame, who was then a 17-year veteran of the Capitol Police. I am guessing he has not forgotten that day:
That’s something that I try to process and go through from time to time, what happened. How did it happen? It was an insurrection. It was a significant amount of people that felt aggrieved and felt that invading the Capitol to impose their will was an appropriate action. It looked like a sort of — a horde of zombies, just people as far as you could see just salivating and …
And they’re tugging on the officers. And they’re in danger. And there’s nothing we can do. And then I hear somebody say — somebody yelled, ‘They’re coming in a window.’ So, go towards the North Side, the Senate side of the Capitol. And there was some door. Nobody could get inside a door. That Capitol was kind of an old place and some things are antiquated. So we rolled out towards the center of the Rotunda, looking north, and you just hear just noise and people running at me as far as I can see, from the crypt all the way to the North Side, Senate side of the Capitol, is running at us. And I looked to my left and right, and there’s like maybe eight, nine of us. And I’m thinking (EXPLETIVE DELETED)
Sorry. And they kind of leak out. And there’s like — we’re holding a line, but there’s no line we’re holding, because there’s an insurmountable amount of people, and there’s like eight, nine officers. And … I’m 39 years old. I have never been called a (EXPLETIVE DELETED) to my face in 39 years. Might have been called a (EXPLETIVE DELETED), but I have never been called one to my face. That streak ended on January 6. I was called a (EXPLETIVE DELETED). I was called a traitor, I was called various epithets.
PBS continued:
I don’t want to make it seem like braggadocios, like there was no fear. Like, absolutely, there had to have been some fear, but my — I don’t think there was time for fear. It was: I have to make it home. Like, I have to survive this. I have been with the department 17 years. I have never been in a situation where I felt I had to use my weapon. That was a situation where I was pegging. I was like, OK, this is it. And the only reason why I didn’t do it was because the mentality was, this is a four-alarm blaze. And if I pull my gun out and start shooting, I’m throwing kerosene on it. Maybe there’s a chance I survive if I don’t pull my weapon, but, if I do, I’m probably not going to make it out of here alive. You don’t have enough bullets.
I would say it’s much more, like, emotional and mental than anything else, because we can’t really move past it. We’re — something as simple as a commission being passed or trying to take that on, at the end of the day, as bad as it was, like, we did our job. Like, no member of Congress was harmed, you know?
And to have to see these people every day, and they don’t have our back, something as simple as just trying to find out what happened, so that it doesn’t happen again, because my fear is this was the tip of the iceberg. You have a lot of people that are radicalized, that this is exactly what they wanted to do. And it’s — by there being no accountability, it’s emboldening them.
Yes, forgettance obliterates accountability.
I want for a moment to circle back to how corrosive it is when we neglect to remember, when we embolden irresponsibility. When we decided to send our troops to Afghanistan, we enlisted the help of so many Afghans. They chose to oppose the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and the corrupt officials of their own government. We promised to protect them. For some it was a promise we kept, and they made it to America. For so many it was a promise we broke.
These days it seems nothing is more important to Donald Trump and his MAGA collaborators than getting rid of as many immigrants as possible. Here is a story that ought to make us all ashamed:
The U.S. government asked a judge this month to deport a father of two to Afghanistan, where he expects the Taliban to kill him. To make its case, the Department of Homeland Security did not accuse him of any crime or disloyalty or act of terrorism. Instead, attorneys argued that Afghanistan — a country U.S. forces rescued him from in 2021 — is safe for his return.
The man, whom The Washington Post is identifying as H because of concern for his safety, has sought asylum because he so publicly supported the United States’ cause in Afghanistan. Before fleeing, he worked for a U.S.-based nonprofit and attended an American university in Kabul.
To undermine his claim, government attorneys argued that the Taliban have allowed those institutions to continue to operate — clear signs, they suggested, that his past would not endanger him if he was deported.
Both institutions, however, have fundamentally transformed since H left them, The Post has found. The nonprofit’s U.S. headquarters closed years before the country collapsed, and its former office in Afghanistan is now under strict Taliban supervision. The university, meanwhile, no longer provides in-person classes, and its campus was seized by the regime, which installed its own school.
The stakes of the case, which will soon resume in a Virginia courtroom, extend to tens of thousands of asylum seekers from Afghanistan whom President Donald Trump’s administration may seek to purge. If Attorney General Pam Bondi or an immigration appellate board dominated by Trump appointees ultimately sides with Homeland Security, legal experts say the case could set a precedent with sweeping consequences for Afghans the U.S. rescued and promised to support …
Since America’s 20-year war ended, some 200,000 Afghans have found refuge in the U.S. Many braved extraordinary danger for the U.S. The Trump administration has dismantled programs created to assist them, canceling humanitarian parole and other protections that allowed Afghan allies to remain while their cases were processed. Without those safeguards, many could be sent back to a regime so brutal and repressive the U.S. refuses to recognize it. Even Afghans forced to return from countries other than the U.S. have suffered. A July United Nations report details ‘cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, enforced disappearance or other irreparable harm.’
It is remarkable that in service to Donald Trump’s obsessive need to evict as many as possible, our governmental officials would surrender their integrity to make the preposterous claim that the Taliban are not the cruel and dogmatic extremists they have proven themselves to be. We do a great disservice not to remember what we asked of so many Afghans: To send them back to face prison or death is unconscionable.
As far as I am concerned, Trump’s pardons and the insurrection of January 6 will rank with the slaughter at Tiananmen Square, the Taliban’s obliteration of the Buddhist Statues of Bamiyan, and the My Lai Massacre as moments when all the propaganda in the world and all attempts at forgettance failed to hide their true crimes.
