As the world is watching the series of protests against election results in Iran, news media are taking a look back, to protests across the globe and time.
FOX News looks at the history of ordinary citizens rising up against the government over doubtful elections…
“We’ll start with a remarkably similar situation in the Philippines. It was in 1986, remember? The president was accused of rigging his re-election so voters stormed the presidential palace, overthrew the president in an event we now call the people power revolution. […] And in 2003, we watched the Rose revolution unfold in the country of Georgia. Demonstrators handed roses to soldiers before storming the parliament and successfully demanding the president resign over flawed election results.”
NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu compares two civilian movements that happened in the same year, but on different continents, and with different results.
He talks about the anti-communism demonstrations in Romania and the Tiananmen Square uprising in China back in 1989.
“In Bucharest, the fall of the Ceausescu regime was greeted by the demonstrators with delirious joy, but they were back on the streets in June 1990, when it turned out that the elections had been stolen by the dictator's old cronies.
The Tiananmen Square demonstrations had a completely different effect: They were brutally suppressed, and China remains today a one-party state that has no serious popular challenges because the citizens seem to have traded freedoms for prosperity.”
(Footage from Archive.org: Romanian Revolution by Alexandru Constantin, In Remembrance of Tiananmen Square China, 4 June 1989)
John Vause, CNN’s Senior International Correspondent in Beijing, shows how the Chinese government is handling the memory of Tiananmen.
“In the Global Times, for example, one analyst says it is western media which has exaggerated the full extent of the riots. In English-language China Daily, the editorial says the matter should be resolved by the Iranians themselves. China is much more concerned about comparisons between Tehran and Tiananmen. Whenever that happens--on CNN, for example, our broadcast goes to black here on the mainland.”
Finally, a contributor to The Huffington Post recalls the collapse of the Berlin Wall during the Cold War and points out the crucial difference between uprisings in the past and the present: technology.
“The world watched, making it less possible for those that abused power to continue to do so… Empowered by new forms of communications technology unavailable to protesters of the past, there is [now] movement at the grass roots level...”
So what have you learned from the history of protests shown by the media?
