Some bonus weekend links…

…some are paywalled…

‘The day begins with goose-stepping.’ WaPo on juveniles – some as young as 14 – in Hong Kong’s ‘deradicalization’ system in detention centres…

The deradicalization program includes pro-China propaganda lectures and psychological counseling that leads to detainees confessing to holding extreme views, and it is accompanied by a system of close monitoring and punishment, including solitary confinement, inside the juvenile facilities, former prisoners and guards said.

…“It was explicitly said to us that by the end of their sentence, the goal is to ensure the desire of these inmates to continue doing political stuff is less and less, and that they instead look for ways to leave Hong Kong,” said the former prison guard.

…From the start of their detention, inmates are subject to Beijing’s narrative that the protests were a product of foreign manipulation, rather than an organic pro-democracy uprising. One former prisoner in a facility for adults said a guard, holding a checklist in his hands with several questions, asked him whether he had received funding to protest.

…One 20-year-old juvenile detainee said some officers hit the soles of their feet with a wooden stick if they could not accurately recite a list of 19 prison regulations.

Waiting for a government press release responding to this.

Nicholas Kristof (misquoted by massacre-deniers) on what he saw in Beijing on June 4, 1989…

I was appalled on the 34th anniversary of that citywide massacre a few days ago when apologists [link to summary of techniques denialists use] for the Chinese government insisted that it had never happened. Even worse, I discovered that one of the eyewitnesses they cited to buttress their denial was me.

…“Who controls the past controls the future,” George Orwell wrote in “1984.”

Yet Orwell may have been too pessimistic, for in Poland, Romania, Mongolia, Indonesia, South Korea and Taiwan, I have seen suppressed history eventually re-emerge — popping up, as a Chinese saying goes, like “bamboo shoots after a spring rain.” In Taiwan, a 1947 massacre of protesters was once unmentionable; now there is a park honoring the victims.

French article with (warning: vivid) photos on June 4. 

To brighten up your day – a thread of photos of mangled-up luxury cars in Hong Kong.