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China

Say 'No' To Brainwashing! Hong Kong Fights Beijing's 'Patriotic Education'

SING TAO (Hong Kong), LIANHE ZAOBAO (Singapore)

Worldcrunch

HONG KONG - The Chinese political system is one of "progress, selflessness and solidarity." And the "Western" alternative of multiple political parties? Well, that's sure to bring "malignant party struggle, and it's the people who pay..."

Such keen analysis is standard fare from the corridors of China's state apparatus in Beijing. But this "Chinese Model National Conditions Teaching Manual," filled with these subtly penetrating nuggets, has just been sent for the first time by the National Education Center of Hong Kong to all the primary and secondary schools on the former British colony.

While schools on the mainland are used to such language, the manual has ignited a firestorm of protest in Hong Kong, according to Sing Tao daily, a Chinese-language paper on the island. Indeed, 15 years since the handover of Hong Kong to the mainland, protests have been growing about such attempts at "patriotic education."

Of the handbook's 34 pages, 32 of them are written in the kind of language that specialists wryly appreciate as pure Chinese Communist Party propaganda material. It's full of praise and blame in the good old Maoist style.

"The Chinese Communist Party is a progressive, selfless, and united ruling group" whereas "The western countries' alternation of political parties results in a malignant political struggle", the Singapore's Lianhe Zaobao reported.

The handbook also uses the term "Chinese model" particularly favored in recent years by certain academics in China who advocate the mantra that "one-party authoritarianism can help to ensure the Chinese authority's continuity and social stability," reports Sing Tao.

The National Education Center is funded with tens of millions of HK dollars by the Hong Kong Education Bureau. Its main goal is set out as helping us to "understand national conditions and national identity," and has all the hallmarks of acting as a front for the Chinese government's propaganda machine.

Two months ago, in spite of the strong opposition from numerous education groups as well as public opinion, Hong Kong's Education Bureau decided to start introducing "patriotic education," officially called "Moral and National education," from this September in all primary schools and starting from next year in secondary schools.

In the past two years, several parades and sit-ins have been organized over this issue, including one last August and a recent one last May, dubbed the "anti-brainwashing" march. Following these protests and overwhelming criticism from Hong Kong's education professionals, the introduction of this compulsory element of the curriculum has been postponed.

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Society

Where 'The Zone Of Interest' Won't Go On Auschwitz — A German Critique Of New Nazi Film

Rudolf Höss was the commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp who lived with his family close to the camp. Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest, a favorite to win at the Cannes Festival, tells Höss' story, but fails to address the true inhumanity of Nazism, says Die Welt's film critic.

Where 'The Zone Of Interest' Won't Go On Auschwitz — A German Critique Of New Nazi Film

A still from The Zone of Interest by

Hanns-Georg Rodek

-Essay-

BERLIN — This garden is the pride and joy of Hedwig, the housewife. She has planned and laid out everything — the vegetable beds and fruit trees and the greenhouse and the bathtub.

Her kingdom is bordered on one long side by a high, barbed-wire wall. Gravel paths lead to the family home, a two-story building with clean lines, no architectural frills. Her husband praises her when he comes home after work, and their three children — ages two to five — play carefree in the little "paradise," as the mother calls her refuge.

The wall is the outer wall of the concentration camp Auschwitz; in the "paradise" lives the camp commander Rudolf Höss with his family.

The film is called The Zone of Interest — after the German term "Interessengebiet," which the Nazis used to euphemistically name the restricted zone around Auschwitz — and it is a favorite among critics at this week's Cannes Film Festival.

The audacity of director Jonathan Glazer's style takes your breath away, and it doesn't quickly come back.

It is a British-Polish production in which only German is spoken. The real house of the Höss family was not directly on the wall, but some distance away, but from the upper floor, Höss's daughter Brigitte later recalled, she could see the prisoners' quarters and the chimneys of the old crematorium.

Glazer moved the house right up against the wall for the sake of his experimental arrangement, a piece of artistic license that can certainly be justified.

And so one watches the Höss family go about their daily lives: guiding visitors through the little garden, splashing in the tub, eating dinner in the house, being served by the domestic help, who are all silent prisoners. What happens behind the wall, they could hear and smell. They must have heard and smelled it. You can see the red glow over the crematorium at night. You hear the screams of the tortured and the shots of the guards. The Höss family blocks all this out.

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