Just to show you how fair and balanced this blog is, I post the video above (18’15”) from the Washington Post. Anatomy of a Protest; Inside Hong Kong’s Fight for Freedom.
The Washington Post is of the Left and in the video above they don’t make any pretence to be balanced. Or maybe... maybe, they think that they are balanced. In any case, it’s certainly pro-protesters (= “yellow ribbon”). The only ones interviewed are sweet young things who speak good English and assure us that they are “peaceful”, that they are sacrificing so much for Freedom and Democracy and that the government are the uncaring baddies....
What you don’t learn from the video:
1. Violence was started by the protesters, as a result of a New York Times article which was widely circulated on social media sites LIHKG and Telegram. The aim was precisely to provoke the police into hitting back. From then on, it’s just been a cycle of more violence on both sides, though TBF to the police, more on the “yellow ribbons” side.
2. Violence and vandalism is almost all on the “yellow ribbon” side. But it’s not even mentioned in the video. There’s no mention of the man killed by a protester throwing a brick and hitting him on the head. No mention of the attempted murder of a man by setting him alight with lighter fluid (he lies critically ill in jail with burns to over 40% of his body). No mention of the policeman hit with an arrow. No mention of throwing bricks off bridges onto cars below. No mention that they are using universities as armament factories: mass producing petrol bombs, gathering javelins and bows and arrows, storing bucketloads of bricks. No mention that they have doxxed police and their families. No mention that they have trashed MTR stations, making it hard for ordinary folk to get to work. No mention that they have trashed shops and restaurants across the city. Nothing, nada.
3. Freedoms we already have (or had...): the protesters say they are fighting for “Freedom”. But we have every freedom of a modern, open, liberal society: freedom of speech; freedom of assembly; freedom of religion; freedom of conscience; freedom of movement; freedom of capital, freedom of trade -- you name it we have it.... We have all of these freedoms and they are not a delusion. They are real and meaningful. There is no freedom that the “yellow ribbons” might desire that they don’t already enjoy. Hong Kong is not/was not Syria or Sudan. The only restrictions on freedoms have been by the protesters themselves; they have abridged our freedom of movement and freedom of speech: with bricks, lighter-fluid and doxxing.
4. We already have the Rule of Law: and the protesters are damaging it -- specifically by their demands that all those arrested be released without charge. That would be very bad indeed for our Rule of Law.
None of the above will you learn from the Washington Post video.
These Young Ones are free to speak their minds. And I’m free to think they are deluded and doing harm to our existing freedoms. And to our ability to carry them past 2047. I’m free to say I don’t want our fine city destroyed by teenage millenarian fantasies.
But what you do learn, at the end of the vid, is the real reason they’re rampaging on our streets: open, naked, nativist hatred of mainlanders. For some time now, I’ve thought that this was the real reason for their rioting. And it’s true, from what they say. They want Hong Kong to remain Cantonese. They hate all these mainlanders coming in and speaking their own “dialect” -- as they call Mandarin, the lingua franca of China. In any other context -- the UK, for example, or the US -- such bigotry to outsiders, such hatred for a different culture would be roundly condemned.
But not now, not by WaPo. Because it’s “one divides into two” (一分为二, Yi Fen Wei Er), and if you have to choose a side, it’s going to be the “yellow ribbons” not Beijing.
