Including the less attractive aspects in the tour guide

I’m often amazed at how quickly nations pick themselves back up after the worst humiliations of war, genocide, famine and near to total destruction; it speaks volumes about the innate resilience of the human race.
You have to consider when terrible things take place the challenges to a population to move on and get on must be immense, after all a single murder in a small village can have a negative effect upon it for years, imagine if it were mulitple murders, or a military invasion, genocide? you have to wonder, assuming that there was anybody left, how exactly people move on.
Words are really no more than symbols they mean only what they are associated with and in what context they are used. Consider the word ‘gay’ which of course has changed its meaning entirely, though it still appears in a thesauras in its original context it nontheless is used in an entirely different way to fifty years ago. The word ‘nigger’ once upon a time a perfectly acceptable word has become so synomynous with racial hate has picked up such a taboo that rarely will you hear it spoken in polite company.
In this fashion place names, countries, people, all pick up some of the characteristics that we associate with the past when I say Germany, people immediately would think of the centrally located european with the slightly dodgy past, I’d be suprised if no one in the first few moments of thinking about Germany did not fleetingly think of Nazism and Hitler; this isn’t me trying to say that Germany is all about Nazism, this is me saying that unfortunatly its history has been so influential upon the modern world, its difficult not to think of its  past associations with Nazism.
So it is with the names of places where bad things happened, in the UK, Hungerford, Dunblane, Lockerbie, Potters Bar, Kings Cross, Brighton, Guildford, you can’t think of them without being reminded of the atrocities that took place. These places have become tainted in some way and, whilst no one will raise the subject, it is a shadowy and unspoken awareness.
But where does this awareness come from? for certain it is not in the air of the location, unless you are a spiritual medium (and that, being unproven, is a debatable matter) you generally don’t feel any differently in one place to another; the local people might remember, may even talk about it, and of course the history books tell all with their characteristic lack of emotion.
I only write this because I read an interesting article on the BBC news website about the taboo subject in China of the Tiananmen square massacre and its consequential removal from tour guides published by HarperCollins.
Of course China is a subject which the left wing intelligensia would prefer to ignore, the spate of US bashing, justified as it may be, seems to be intent on vilifying the US and giving China an easy ride, perhaps this is because the ‘progressive’ (I’ve included inverted comments because its a loaded term not out of contempt) community have decided that the US still has enough democratic zeal to fight back against its globe hungry leaders, perhaps because its just fashionable who knows?
China however can quite happily begin the quiet process of erasing its own history and imposing such draconian censorship measures as actually censoring what is available on the internet is catered for without argument.
Lets just say for example that HarperCollins publish their new USA travel guide of Texas and that this travel guide made absoloutely no mention of Waco or Dallas, well they are just places, nothing happened there, thats why people who have never been there and would never have wanted to go there, hear about them and then go there; association with a past event, in these cases reasonably recent 1963 and 1993.
Do you think this would be ignored, if tour guides taking you round Dallas didn’t actually refer to the famous assasination of John F Kennedy, maybe even point out the (in)famous grassy knoll.
I don’t think people would accept that, but because its China imposing even more censorship over its shameful past they don’t care and this will be forgotten about as soon as President Bush next opens his mouth in a non-pretzel related manner.
Put simply we all have a duty to apply these standards across the board, rather than impose them all upon one nation and ignore the crimes of another.