Katz curled a hand around his cup of coffee, looking at each of them a moment. He took a long drink, before setting it down, reaching out to pick up the pistol that sat amidst the papers on the table.
He drew back the slide, released the safety and shot Alek in the knee, watching coldly as the man fell, shrieking an obscenity and clutching the wound.
"Warning number one, comrade," Katz said quietly. He looked up at Price. "The answer is quite simple. But one hard core communists refuse to acknowledge. But the Coalition, we learn from the mistakes of Gorbachev, Mao, Stalin and Peng. Our survival and success relies on the ability of the Coalition to adapt and to be better than the Soviet Union or other proto-communist states. The lesson is a simple one, the leadership stopped listening to its own people. Students are one thing... they are just children, they don't know better."
"The Parents who got shot, well they were grieving parents, of course they will protect their children. Butwhen a simple man, a worker, stood before those tanks, not because of another's words, not because of his children, but because it was the right thing to do, that rocked the very core of the CCP."
"They had lost the will of the people, and their mandate to rule."
"The aftermath is not commonly discussed, there were arrests on both sides, the leadership driven from power in disgrace and reforms were passed... at a pace that satisfied the old conservatives. Every single demand made by the June protestors was met, every last one. One man changed a billion lives."
He eyed them both a long second before he set the pistol back down on the table.
"What is the core tenant of Katism and how does it differ from my predecessor's philosophy?"