Tag Archives: freedom

Naivete and Hong Kong

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Bill McGurn usually does better than this.  He suggested

If the governments in Beijing and Hong Kong would show an ounce of that humility, the protests might be over tomorrow.

Presumably that would include an apology by Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam, per his piece’s headline.

It’s hard to believe, though, that McGurn would be this naive. Lam’s apology, and PRC and Hong Kong government “humility” would be nothing more than empty, unbelievable words. Lam needs to fully withdraw and cancel, as though it had never existed, the extradition bill that her PRC masters instructed her to put forward, not merely HIA it.

Then she and her deputies and cabinet need to resign and repair to the mainland.

Then Xi needs to withdraw his PLA units from the city’s front porch.

All of that would still leave the PRC government wholly untrustworthy and its Hong Kong branch mostly so, but at least the threat would be pushed back a little bit.

Never forget: the Hong Kong people are in the streets because they can trust neither the PRC’s government nor its Hong Kong branch.

People Power

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Hong Kong style.

Hong Kong’s pro-democracy demonstrators braved torrential rain to hold their largest rally in weeks [last Sunday], a show of strength led by more moderate protest leaders who advocated peaceful resistance to Beijing’s tightening grip on the city and sought to ramp up pressure on officials to respond to their demands.
Hundreds of thousands of mainly black-clad protesters of all ages rallied in Victoria Park, the starting point of some of the biggest demonstrations through 11 weekends of unrest, with crowds overflowing into the streets. The organizers said more than 1.7 million people attended the rally.

On that rally, here’s Leung Kwok-hung, a veteran of Hong Kong’s years-long campaign for just the simple respect for the terms of semi-autonomy to which the People’s Republic of China agreed when Great Britain handed the city over to the PRC:

If we have to break the law to exercise our constitutional rights, it means the government is exploiting our constitutional rights.

Can I get an Amen, brothers and sisters?

 

A major question, though—apart from whether Xi, or his subordinate, Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam, will even pretend to listen to the demonstrators—is this: does PRC President Xi Jinping have the same respect for human life as did Republic of the Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos when the canonical People Power Revolution went in?

That’s an open question.  Marcos, even in the depths of his reign, never ran “reeducation” camps.  Xi is doing precisely that, that interring millions in Xinjiang Province, and so did his hero and early predecessor Mao Tse-tung.

Marcos—indeed, no Philippine President, including the current Duterte—ever ran anything like Tiananmen Square with hundreds to thousands butchered by the nation’s army.  Xi’s predecessor, Yang Shangkun and that one’s second, PLA CinC Deng Xiaoping, have, and Xi has shown no regret over that atrocity.  Presently, Xi has elements of the PLA—of which he also has been CinC since 2012—massing and drilling just outside Hong Kong.  (Yes, I’m aware those units officially are paramilitary. It’s a distinction without a difference.)

The Hong Kong people are showing great courage, and they deserve our overt support.

Democracy is Terrorism

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That’s the openly stated position of the People’s Republic of China.  PRC President Xi Jinping now has said, through his government’s Hong Kong and Macao Affairs of the State Council spokeswoman Xu Luying, that he

condemned what [the State Council] described as “terrorist-like” attacks on its citizens by pro-democracy protesters.
“We express the strongest condemnation of these terrorist-like actions[.]”

Because pro-democracy demonstrators—who are the citizens of Hong Kong—in objecting to Xi’s weeks-long attempt to take complete control of the erstwhile semi-autonomous city, are terrorists.

And this from Xu:

Hong Kong’s radical violent elements have completely broken through the bottom line of the law, the bottom line of morality, and the bottom line of human nature.

Never mind that the Hong Kong police have done precisely that: using strong-arm tactics—truncheons and beatings, on top of tear gas—to quell nearly universally peaceful protests.

Never mind Xi’s attempts to intimidate the people of Hong Kong by massing PLA units just outside the city and threatening to inflict a Tiananmen Square assault on the city.

Here, too, is the Chief Executive of Hong Kong, Carrie Lam, with her crocodile tears:

Take a minute to think, look at our city, our home; do you all really want to see it pushed into an abyss?

No, they don’t. That’s why they’re in the streets, trying to protect Hong Kong from the power grab and threatened occupation of Lam’s bosses in Beijing.

On the other hand, the thought of democracy does truly terrify Xi.

They Do

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Hong Kong closed its airport for several hours Monday because protesters were thronging the terminals in protest of the People’s Republic of China’s Hong Kong—Carrie Lam—government’s attack on the “semi-autonomy” of the city, and of the police’s growing violence against what have been fundamentally peaceful protests over the last several weeks.  The movement into the airport is a recent development of these peaceful protests.

Then Lam’s Chief Secretary Matthew Cheung said this regarding the protests at the airport:

[P]eople should cherish the future of Hong Kong, which is the collective hard work of everyone over many years.

That’s exactly right, although not in the way Cheung meant.  The Hong Kong people do cherish the future of their city and environs. That’s why they’re in the streets, and now the airport, protesting an overweening government that’s so plainly in the hands of the PRC’s autocrat President Xi Jinping.

Their city most assuredly is the outcome of the result of the work of all those people, effort expended over so very many years.

Their city most assuredly is very much at risk at the hands of that misbehaving government.

The Dangerous Mr Castro

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Congressman Joaquin Castro (D, TX) still pretends he did nothing wrong in telling the world in general and us Americans in particular how to locate 44 of us when he doxed those 44 and called them racists because their politics were not his.  Castro still insists they deserved to be called out; all he was trying to do was identify despicable persons whose “contributions are fueling a campaign of hate.”

Here is a telephone message one of Castro’s minions, who answered his call to arms, left on the phone of one of those whose location information he so carefully, maliciously exposed. Play the recording, ugly as it is, but be careful where you play it; the recording does not contain gentle language.

https://twitter.com/TrumpWarRoom/status/1159845704614985728?s=20

But the danger is broader. Despicable and dangerous to us Americans as Castro’s doxing has been, this is typical of the Progressive-Democratic Party of which he is a part.

Unintended consequence? No, this is one of their deliberately sought-after consequences.  After all, if rhetoric is responsible for El Paso, as the Progressive-Democratic Party and its Presidential candidates insist so vociferously, so maliciously, so is Castro’s rhetoric—in spades.  And his rhetoric is directed.

Castro didn’t merely incite a general, violent attitude.  Castro, with his doxing, said, “here are 44 Americans of whom I disapprove.  Here is a person of whom I disapprove.  Here’s where you can find them, here’s where they work and for whom they work.  Names and addresses.  Go get them.”

And the Progressive-Democratic Party and its candidates whole-heartedly, loudly approve.  This is the real campaign of hate; this is the Left’s malevolence given concrete action.