My Color Revolution

Tiananmen conspiracy theorists claim to have found "proof" of a color revolution in photos of mine that were posted without permission on an asset manager's blog and then went all over the Internet.

It takes one level of chutzpah to appropriate another writer’s work or exhibit their photographs with your own half-baked captions, but it’s quite another to take photographs that include the very person you are denying credit and agency, and using their photos to show your supposed inside knowledge of events.

Patrick Chovanec, a senior consultant Silvercrest Asset Management Group ran some photos of mine on his blog mostly which has turned out to be the ground zero for the dissemination of photos across the Internet which are used as “evidence” for wild-eyed claims about my role in a historic “color revolution.”

The partial, incomplete and inaccurate appropriation of my story—words, images and interview quotes—has fed the beast of conspiracy theory about Tiananmen in 1989.

Part of the problem, leaving aside for a moment the question of attribution, is that the caption created by Chovanec to go with my photos are not always accurate, and the slapped-together narrative about Tiananmen ge…