Wednesday, September 18, 2019

Green New Deal Nation









Inequality And Climate Change Are Existential: A Blueprint For Survival
Towards A World Government
AOC 2028    


at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , ,

Tuesday, September 17, 2019

Video: Christine Fair: Pakistan, the Taliban and Regional Security



at No comments:
Labels: , ,

Indian Comedy: Varun Grover

at No comments:
Labels: , ,

Trying To Understand Hong Kong And China

While I have been trying to understand Hong Kong and China, this blog post of mine has been of great help: Racism. The history and persistence of racism in the United States should help us understand mindsets elsewhere that we might find exotic and offensive.

I can not talk of Hong Kong, without also talking of Kashmir.

I would like to talk of China, but also of Andrew Yang and Bernie Sanders, and all the race and class bias the two face. Looks like Bernie also faces what can only be called the Great Wall Of Capital.



To be clear, I don't believe the status quo is okay, in Hong Kong or Beijing. But where is the status quo okay?

Hong Kong, like every city out there, is sexist. The female protesters experience it on both sides. And so I have at times wondered if this whole movement is not some sexist rebellion against a female Chief Executive. Of course, that is rhetorical. The ball is clearly in Beijing's court. Carrie Lam has not much wiggle room.

Hong Kong, I believe, is taking the lead, not just for Hong Kong, but also for mainland China, not just for mailand China, but also for the 100 biggest cities in the world.


at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Racism

When W. E. B. Du Bois Made a Laughingstock of a White Supremacist Du Bois, the twentieth century’s leading black intellectual, once lived at 3059 Villa Avenue, in the Bronx. ....... not far from the Bedford Park subway station....... The first time I went to Du Bois’s old address, I wondered if I might find a plaque, but the house is gone, and 3059 Villa is now part of a fenced-in parking lot. ........ About a forty-minute walk away is the Bronx Zoo. In 1912, it was called the New York Zoological Park, and it was run by a patrician named Madison Grant from an old New York family. Though he and Du Bois lived and worked within a few miles of each other for decades, I don’t know if the two ever met. As much as anyone on the planet, Grant was Du Bois’s natural enemy. Grant favored a certain type of white man over all other kinds of humans, on a graded scale of disapproval, and he reserved his vilest ill wishes and contempt for blacks..........

in 1906 the zoo put an African man named Ota Benga on display in the primate cages.

........ Eventually, Ota Benga was moved to the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum, in Brooklyn, and he ended up in Virginia, where he shot himself....... He also was a director of the American Eugenics Society, thought “worthless” individuals should be sterilized, and considered his lobbying for the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, which shut down most immigration to the U.S., to be one of the great achievements of his life......... And what was the special attribute the Nordics possessed that made them so unique and sacred? Grant didn’t talk about it much, but it slipped out once in a while. The secret dwelt in a mysterious substance known as “germ-plasm.” Everybody had it, but the Nordics’ germ-plasm was the best. Grant and his co-believers could apparently use phrases such as “our superior germ-plasm” with a straight face..........

At the same time that Scribner published Hemingway and Fitzgerald, it was the leading purveyor of white-supremacist books in America.

........ The Du Bois-Stoddard debate turned out to be a singular event, as important in its way as Lincoln-Douglas or Kennedy-Nixon. ........ Stoddard had written that “mulattoes” like Du Bois, who could not accept their inferior status, were the chief cause of racial unrest in the United States, and he looked forward to their dying out.......... Stoddard grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts, attended Harvard like Stoddards before him, and got a Ph.D. in history. In the course of thirty-six years, he wrote at least eighteen books and countless magazine and newspaper articles......... he discovered what would become his most successful writing strategies: scaring the reader with the spectre of race war, and scaring the Nordic reader with the prospect of losing a race war........ For Stoddard, the pivotal event of recent history was the Russo-Japanese War. By his reckoning, the defeat of a “white” country (Russia) by a “colored” country (Japan) in 1905 had opened the door to disaster. ........ he predicted an imminent worldwide uprising against the “Nordic race.” “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy” appeared in early 1920.......... the Times wrote an approving editorial: Lothrop Stoddard evokes a new peril, that of an eventual submersion beneath vast waves of yellow men, brown men, black men and red men, whom the Nordics have hitherto dominated . . . with Bolshevism menacing us on the one hand and race extinction through warfare on the other, many people are not unlikely to give [Stoddard’s book] respectful consideration........... in 1921, President Warren G. Harding declared that blacks must have full economic and political rights, but that segregation was also essential to prevent “racial amalgamation,” and social equality was thus a dream that blacks must give up. Harding added: Whoever will take the time to read and ponder Mr. Lothrop Stoddard’s book on “The Rising Tide of Color” . . . must realize that our race problem here in the United States is only a phase of a race issue that the whole world confronts........ A black columnist wrote that the news of the white race’s impending demise would probably come as a surprise to Negroes in the South......... Stoddard, in the fog of his apocalyptic musings, made some predictions. He said that Japan was going to expand its influence in the Pacific and get into conflict with the United States, that the brown people of India would throw the British out, and that the Islamic world would grow militant and begin hostilities against the West. ......... At the time of the debate, Du Bois had just turned sixty-one. He had already written “The Souls of Black Folk,” helped to found the N.A.A.C.P., organized and led Pan-African conferences, and gained tens of thousands of readers for The Crisis, the N.A.A.C.P.’s magazine, which he edited and frequently contributed to. Like Stoddard, he had a Ph.D. in history from Harvard. .......... .....On the first page of “The Souls of Black Folk,” published in 1903, Du Bois wrote, “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.” On page 1 of “The French Revolution in San Domingo,” Stoddard wrote, in 1914, “The ‘conflict of color’ . . . bids fair to be the fundamental problem of the twentieth century.” ................... in 1926, he gave a lecture before two thousand at Tuskegee University, in Alabama, informing them that the Nordic race was superior to nonwhites and that, for the good of all races, the world must continue to be governed by white supremacy. ........... .....the students “sat awestricken during the address, which terminated without any applause.”......... “The attacks that white people themselves have made upon their own moral structure are worse for civilization than anything that any body of Negroes could ever do.”.......... Stoddard outlines a solution, which he calls “bi-racialism”—a “separate but equal” setup, which he says will be based not on any inherent inferiority but merely on racial “difference.” ........ When the laughter had subsided, Mr. Stoddard, in a manner of mixed humility and courage, claimed that he could not see the joke. This brought more gales of laughter..................

Du Bois knew that the racists would be unintentionally funny onstage

........... Du Bois let the overconfident and bombastic Stoddard walk into a comic moment, which Stoddard then made even funnier by not getting the joke............ His upbeat dispatches remarked on Goebbels’s “quick smile” and the greater warmth and friendliness of Mussolini as compared to Hitler. The stories read like comedy sketches today.........

I sometimes imagine Grant or Stoddard coming back to life in New York City, looking at the many people on the street who don’t resemble them, and asking, “What war did we lose?”

............ In the late fifties, Du Bois, soon to become an avowed Communist, spent time in the Soviet Union, went to China, and met with Mao. In the sixties, he moved to Ghana, renounced his citizenship, and became a Ghanaian citizen. He died there on August 27, 1963, the day before the March on Washington............ Du Bois recognized that the keystone in the arch of oppression was the myth of inferiority and he dedicated his brilliant talents to demolish it.



The Fight to Redefine Racism a persistent but delusional idea that something is wrong with black people. The only thing wrong, he maintained, was racism, and the country’s failure to confront and defeat it.......... Amid a series of police shootings of African-Americans during President Obama’s second term, “Black lives matter” became a rallying cry and then a movement, and helped push racism to the front of the progressive conversation. ......... particularly transformative among white liberals, who are now, by some measures, more concerned about racism than African-Americans are. One survey found that white people who voted for Hillary Clinton felt warmer toward black people than toward their fellow-whites......... racism can be objectively identified, and therefore fought, and one day vanquished. He argues that we should stop thinking of “racist” as a pejorative, and start thinking of it as a simple description, so that we can join him in the difficult work of becoming antiracists. .......... “One either endorses the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist or racial equality as an antiracist,” Kendi writes, adding that it isn’t possible to be simply “not racist.” He thinks that all of us must choose a side; in fact, he thinks that we are already choosing, all the time.......... “I cannot disconnect my parents’ religious strivings to be Christian from my secular strivings to be an antiracist” ....... he now regards the speech as shamefully racist, because it blamed black people for their own failures. ......... divided the racists into two kinds, segregationists and assimilationists......... In 1834, the American Anti-Slavery Society issued a pamphlet of admonishment: We have noticed with sorrow, that some of the colored people are purchasers of lottery tickets, and confess ourselves shocked to learn that some persons, who are situated to do much good, and whose example might be most salutary, engage in games of chance for money and for strong drink.............. a “low-testing” black student and a “high-testing” white student may simply be demonstrating “different kinds of achievement rather than different levels of achievement.” This celebration of difference comes to an end when it is time to judge the educational systems themselves. .........

the idea is to judge unfair policies, while refusing to judge, as a group, the people who are subjected to them

....... many forms of racism: there is class racism, which conflates blackness with poverty, as well as gender racism, queer racism, and something called “space racism,” which is less exciting than it sounds—it has to do with the way people associate black neighborhoods, or spaces, with violence. .......

“When we try to talk openly and honestly about race,” she writes, “we are so often met with silence, defensiveness, argumentation, certitude, and other forms of pushback.” To explain this phenomenon, she coined the phrase “white fragility.”

........ Unlike Kendi, who boldly defines racism, DiAngelo is endlessly deferential—for her, racism is basically whatever any person of color thinks it is. ........ Kendi is less concerned about manners, and he strives to stay grounded in the brute facts of racial oppression.......... “Where we are from Jamaica Queens the average youth doesn’t have hope or inspiration to live.” ........requires a great part of the country to undergo a revolution in thought that took Kendi decades of study to achieve ....... the cure, he thinks, will start with policies, not ideas. He suggests that, just as ideologies of racial difference emerged after the slave trade in order to justify it, antiracist ideologies will emerge once we are bold enough to enact an antiracist agenda: criminal-justice reform, more money for black schools and black teachers, a program to fight residential segregation. ........ Kendi wants us to see not only that there is nothing wrong with black people but that there is likewise nothing wrong with white people. “There is nothing right or wrong with any racial groups,” he writes.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Unlikely Path to the Supreme Court At Harvard Law School, which first admitted women in 1950, she was one of only nine women in a class of some five hundred. In one of the first scenes in “On the Basis of Sex,” Erwin Griswold, the dean of the law school, asks each of those nine women, during a dinner party at his house, why she is occupying a place that could have gone to a man. In the film, Ginsburg, played by Felicity Jones, gives the dean an answer to which he can have no objection: “My husband, Marty, is in the second-year class. I’m at Harvard to learn about his work. So that I might be a more patient and understanding wife.” This, which is more or less what Ginsburg actually said, was a necessary lie. It was possible for a woman to attend law school—barely—but it was not possible for her to admit her ambition....... She graduated first in her class. ....... Looking for work, Ginsburg confronted the limits of the profession’s willingness to take female lawyers seriously. ....... Felix Frankfurter, the first Supreme Court Justice to hire an African-American clerk, in 1948, refused to hire a woman, even after he was reassured that Ginsburg never wore pants........ Ginsburg pursued a series of cases designed to convince the Supreme Court, first, that there is such a thing as sex discrimination and, second, that it violates the Constitution.......... Erwin Griswold, notwithstanding his resentment of women law students, eventually dubbed Ginsburg “the Thurgood Marshall of gender equality law.” ...... Marshall never had to battle African-Americans opposed to the very notion of equality under the law; Ginsburg, by contrast, faced a phalanx of conservative women, led by Phyllis Schlafly, who objected to equal rights altogether.......... the following year, the Court ruled on Roe v. Wade instead, and struck down anti-abortion legislation not on the ground of equal protection but on the ground of a much weaker constitutional doctrine, the right to privacy.........If Struck was Ginsburg’s next, carefully placed stepping stone across a wide river, Roe was a rickety wooden plank thrown down across the water and—Ginsburg thought—likely to rot. In a lecture she delivered in 1984, she noted the political significance of the fact that the Court had treated sex discrimination as a matter of equal protection but reproductive autonomy as a matter of privacy. ......... “I ask no favor for my sex,” Ginsburg told the nine men on the bench, quoting the nineteenth-century women’s-rights advocate Sarah Grimké. “All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.” ....... In 1971, Chief Justice Warren Burger, on hearing that Richard Nixon was considering nominating a woman to the Court, drafted a letter of resignation......... Of the fifty-seven people she hired as law clerks, interns, or secretaries during her time on the D.C. bench, not one was African-American. Ginsburg was asked about this when she appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and she promised, “If you confirm me for this job, my attractiveness to black candidates is going to improve.” ....... But in her quarter century on the Supreme Court she has hired only one African-American clerk (a record that, distressingly, does not distinguish her from most of the bench). ....... Ginsburg, for all that she had done to advance women’s rights during the nineteen-seventies, was apparently not on the lists sent to the White House by women’s groups...... one gathers that the Madison Lecture was more often invoked than read ....... At one point, Clinton asked Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan to suggest a woman. “Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” Moynihan answered. “The women are against her” was the President’s reply. Moynihan called Martin Ginsburg and said, “You best take care of it.” ....... Ginsburg, a prominent and well-connected tax lawyer, was already running a behind-the-scenes campaign, without his wife’s knowledge. In February, 1993, he’d organized a breakfast meeting with the president of a leading women’s group in D.C. to seek her support for his plan to get his wife nominated as Solicitor General. He did not succeed. He had the same experience at a meeting in New York. In April and May, he courted the press and solicited at least thirty-four letters of support, largely from the legal academy, where Ginsburg, an excellent scholar, was widely admired. Fourteen members of the faculty of N.Y.U. Law School—people who had been in the room when Ginsburg delivered the Madison Lecture—wrote a joint letter to say that they were “distressed that her remarks at N.Y.U. have been misconstrued as anti-choice and anti-women.” ....... All spring, the Ginsburg family kept up the campaign, which involved bringing the lack of support among women’s groups out into the open, so that it could be countered. ....... The Brookings Institution fellow Stephen Hess, a cousin of Ginsburg’s, warned reporters, including the New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, that feminists were opposed to Ginsburg, and mailed them copies of the Madison Lecture. ....... Summoned to the White House on Sunday, June 13th, Ginsburg met with the President for ninety minutes. He made his decision later that day, and, after watching a Chicago Bulls game that went into three overtimes, called her nearly at midnight. The Wall Street Journal posited a rule: “When Bill Clinton is doing the picking, it’s better to be last than first.” ......... Her daughter had written in her high-school yearbook in 1973, under “Ambition”: “To see her mother appointed to the Supreme Court. If necessary, Jane will appoint her.” Ginsburg told the crowd, “Jane is so pleased, Mr. President, that you did it instead.”...... The Senate voted to confirm her ninety-six to three, with one abstention. But the idea that her appointment was uncontroversial is almost entirely a myth.
at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

News: Hong Kong, Kashmir, Vigilantism, Curfew, Terrorism, Diaspora

Carrie Lam can defuse the Hong Kong protests by taking on the property tycoons



Hong Kong is in India, Kashmir is in China. Right? Hong Kong and Indian Kashmir. One is administered by the world’s biggest democracy and one is the democracy-craving outlier of an authoritarian state...... Which is which? These days, it’s hard to tell … flying in from India this time, amid dramatic developments in the country’s restive Kashmir region, I could use a refresher on the virtues of democracy. ....... Like Hong Kong, the province of Jammu and Kashmir – till recently – was an autonomous region with special privileges defining its relationship to the republic holding its sovereignty. The princely state acceded to a newly independent India in 1947 in return for guarantees of its autonomy, including having its own constitution. ....... A rough, local equivalent of Modi’s move would be President Xi Jinping suddenly scrapping the Basic Law and declaring Hong Kong as a full-fledged province of China right away, rather than give it the stipulated three more decades as an autonomous territory. ...... focus on the opticality of it, which is what makes Kashmir such a striking contrast to Hong Kong........ a total lockdown, which is what is in place in Kashmir today ........ A fact-finding team of activists that has just returned from Kashmir describes it as “a prison under military control”, where underage boys are being arrested to pre-empt protests. And no one has heard from Kashmiri leaders since August 5....... estimated numbers ranging from 500 to 1,300. Its three top leaders, all former chief ministers, are in solitary confinement, with no contact with their families, lawyers or party members.........

Even stranger for a democracy is the way Kashmir is being covered by India’s mainstream media, especially when compared with supposedly quasi-democratic Hong Kong’s telling of its own story.

The months-long movement has been reported extensively and unhindered by the local and international media alike, making it one of the biggest international news stories this year. The protests are often beamed real-time and live-blogged by the city’s top media brands, increasing the scrutiny of government conduct......... The last two questions faced by Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor at her most recent press conference were, “do you have a conscience?” and “when will you die?”. ........ Most Indian mainstream media outlets, on the other hand, evidently under pressure from a headline-obsessed Modi administration, are more or less following the government narrative of peace and calm in Kashmir despite the abrogation of its special status. This is of a piece with the current trend in India, where a once-proud and independent media landscape is now littered with a host of news outlets eager to please the powers that be, rather than speak truth to them. The Press Club of India in Delhi even denied permission to display photos and videos brought back by the fact-finding team returning from Kashmir..........

India this year fell two more places on the World Press Freedom Index compiled by Reporters Without Borders. From 80th in 2002, it now ranks 140th out of 180 territories, right behind South Sudan (139), Myanmar (138) and Palestine (137), and far behind Hong Kong (73).

.......... Nowhere is this precipitous drop in journalistic standards and reporting climate more evident than in prime-time news and talk shows, where government spins are faithfully belted out by loud anchors eager to prove their patriotism and score brownie points with the government.

Some of them would easily give the Chinese state media an inferiority complex.

The dominant media narrative established in these shows and newspaper headlines is how Modi’s “masterstroke” will improve the lot of Kashmiris. Only, neither the Kashmiri people nor their leaders are anywhere in sight to vouch for this magical transformation of their lives. .......... Organisations like the BBC and Reuters have reported the rage bubbling up in Kashmir, impromptu protests and police firings to quell the mobs. Delhi has dismissed the reports as “fabricated”, much in the manner of an authoritarian state warding off prying foreign media.......While the image of one pellet injury has animated Hong Kong, reports and photos of at least half a dozen new pellet injuries that have surfaced in India’s plucky news websites and international media have had little impact in India. ........ A people who say they do not have democracy and are demanding elections can stand up and be counted, while those who took part in the world’s biggest election just three months ago are living under an undeclared martial law imposed by their own government and silenced. It’s almost as if Hong Kong and Kashmir have miraculously switched geographies – as if Hong Kong is part of India’s disputatious and diverse democracy, and Kashmir, an aberrant Muslim province in monolithic China.



On the ground in Kashmir, feelings of loss, betrayal and helplessness as Srinagar remains in lockdown
Have Singaporeans misunderstood the nature of Hong Kong protests?

One China, two different worlds: how the great political divide is on full show overseas amid Hong Kong chaos Hong Kong students abroad have described an atmosphere of fear, intimidation and vitriol in dealing with ultra-nationalistic mainland Chinese since the city’s anti-government protests broke out........ With the gulf in understanding showing little sign of narrowing, universities are now grappling with concerns about freedom of speech ........ she found her picture circulating on WeChat. She believes it was snapped by one of the dozens of mainland Chinese students who turned up to counter the protest on August 16......... Even more disturbing, someone photographed her while she was shopping at a Costco store the next day, and put that picture on WeChat too.......... It rattled her, and left her looking over her shoulder everywhere she went. “Who knows what they are going to do?” Wong said. “I keep feeling they will follow me home.”.......

The Australian citizen, originally from Hong Kong, made a police report.

........ Campus clashes and other incidents have occurred recently in cities including Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane in Australia, and Vancouver and Montreal in Canada........In Vancouver, police escorted worshippers out of a prayer meeting for Hong Kong last Sunday after flag-waving mainlanders surrounded the church in what one organiser described as an attempt at “bullying” and “intimidation”........

The incidents have almost always been initiated by a small number of ultra-nationalistic pro-Beijing Chinese, often students, who oppose demonstrations supporting Hong Kong’s anti-government protests, Taiwan independence or calling for investigations into Uygur detentions in China’s westernmost province of Xinjiang.

........ an expansion of tension that has periodically flared between Hong Kong and mainland students on Hong Kong university campuses, over issues such as separatism......... Overall, there were 1.2 million people of Chinese descent in Australia in 2016, according to the census that year. Of the total, 41 per cent were born in mainland China and 6.5 per cent in Hong Kong. Canadians of Chinese descent make up 1.76 million people, according to 2016 census data, of whom about 753,000 are mainland-born, and 216,000 were born in Hong Kong.............. Hongkonger Eugenie Wong, 19, an organiser of the Melbourne protest, said she was worried about being recognised on the street by the pro-Beijing group.......... “That makes me feel like Australia is not even safe – or that nowhere is safe – for a Hong Kong student,” said Wong, a La Trobe University student. ....... At the University of South Australia, a student who requested anonymity said a mainland student followed him to his apartment after he attended the anti-government protest at the university....... Simon Fraser University, where a Lennon Wall of messages supporting the Hong Kong protesters has been repeatedly vandalised........ While mainland students overseas have mobilised to counter voices critical of Beijing for decades, Cheuk Kwan, the former chairperson of the non-profit Toronto Association for Democracy in China, said they were now increasingly resorting to outright intimidation. ....... many mainland students he encountered struggled to adjust to the liberal norms of Australia because of a sense of grievance over past wrongs against China by Western powers combined with an inferiority complex towards Western countries. ........“They spend all their 20 years of life on studying but nothing else, and have little understanding of how democracy or freedom works in the West,” Gao said. “These students are laughingly naive about political and social issues.............. “But they become more defensive of China after they come to Australia because all they see and hear in the media is a one-sided, negative framing of China, if not outright China bashing.”....... most mainland students steer clear of disciplines such as international relations in favour of subjects such as commerce and accounting....... mainland Chinese students in Hong Kong, however, where 12,000 of them are enrolled at the city’s eight universities............The recent clashes between those supporting the Hong Kong protesters and the pro-Beijing group have sparked calls for greater scrutiny of Chinese influence at universities, including through the Chinese Students and Scholars Association, a Beijing-funded organisation that purports to help students adjust to life abroad and has about 150 branches on campuses worldwide.........

Media in Canada and the United States have published evidence that mainland students belonging to the association have coordinated with Chinese consulates to counter perceived anti-China activity abroad.

....... In Australia, the Chinese consulate in Brisbane issued a statement after the campus chaos at the University of Queensland praising the “spontaneous patriotic behaviour of Chinese students”. It drew a warning from Foreign Minister Marise Payne who said diplomats in Australia should not interfere with the right to free speech, even on contentious issues.......... universities had been caught off guard by the recent clashes and were yet to wake up to the “problems inherent in having

Chinese student groups effectively run and funded by PRC embassies and consulates”

......... the “excessiveness” of their reliance on mainland Chinese students for revenue........ this group makes up approximately 10 per cent of all Australian university students, with almost 153,000 mainland Chinese enrolled in higher education in Australia as of December 2018......... At seven universities, including the University of Queensland, course fees paid by these students form anywhere between 13 to 23 per cent of the institutions’ revenue....... concern that proactively defending people in Canada from coercion by the PRC regime could impact negatively on other aspects of the Canada-China relationship....... What Australian universities could do, Laurenceson said, was to “make it clear that physical altercations, tearing up pamphlets and ripping the megaphone out of the hands of those with opposing views, blocking other students from posting to Lennon walls, and so on, impinge on the fundamental value of freedom of speech and will draw consequences.”.......

A Hongkonger who recently graduated from McGill University in Montreal said universities needed to respond to the new reality that many Hong Kong students now felt afraid to express themselves freely.

....... “If nationalist mainlanders can threaten Hongkongers, they can threaten anyone who they do not agree with.......... the city’s supporters overseas are bracing themselves for more displays of patriotic fervour from pro-Beijing supporters.



Hong Kong protests: man seriously hurt after attack by anti-government demonstrators as street fights between rival groups erupt
Hong Kong protests: three months on and the anti-government activists want their enemies to burn with them. Is there any end in sight? They are strangers in a crowd. They do not know each other’s real names and have little clue how the other looks under the gas masks they call snouts, the 3M goggles and hard hats. But they regard each other as sau zuk, which means “hands and feet”, a Cantonese idiom to refer to how close they are that losing the other is like having a limb amputated......... For Kelvin, the image of a fellow protester whom he had just met on the frontline being hauled away by police and leaving a trail of blood stains in his wake left him feeling helpless. He says: “I keep awake thinking of it, and I blame myself.” ....... Over in Central’s Edinburgh Place on September 2 as thousands of secondary school pupils gather for a school boycott rally, a 15-year-old student surnamed Pang laments: “I can’t sleep and can’t eat, my heart is tired.”........ The disciplined service quarters in the working-class district – where police families such as hers live – have been besieged several times by angry protesters throughout the summer holiday. A window in her flat was struck and cracked by one of the many projectiles hurled at the quarter. Her parents shrugged off the attacks. Her younger brother, in Primary Two, cried....... The gamut of emotions felt by Katie, Pang and Kelvin reflects what the wider society is reeling from as Hongkongers try to comprehend how their city has changed from one renowned for its stability and orderliness to a place that has almost nightly protests in one corner or another.......

many admit they have no answer to when and how it will all end.

....... Lam has refused to entertain the remaining four demands, which are for the independent probe, amnesty for arrested protesters, a halt to categorising the protests as riots and genuine universal suffrage.......

Three months on, the young protesters have come to believe the movement offers them a now-or-never chance to fight for genuine democracy, or, for the extreme radicals, even breaking away from the control of the Chinese Communist Party. “If we burn, you burn with us,” they say. Many believe this is the denouement of their demand for democracy and appear prepared to risk everything.

........ The impasse looks set to harden, with further concessions unlikely from both sides.........But if the government’s strategy is to wear the protesters down, it is not working........ The psychological support offered to the protesters by the vast swathe of society, the moderate and middle-class ranks, is the political vitamin keeping the momentum going...... “It is a call to restore ‘one country, two systems’ and to defend their civil liberties and the way of life.” ...... Kelvin’s mother and sister used to be politically indifferent, but now they constantly monitor live broadcasts of the clashes. They know the drill if Kelvin disappears: trash all his belongings that could be linked to the protests and hide his laptop at a secret place no one can reach........ Over the three months, police have fired more than 2,382 canisters of tear gas, more than 776 rubber bullets, beanbag rounds and sponge grenades as of September 10 and arrested 1,359 people. At least 70 of them have been charged with rioting, an offence carrying a penalty of 10 years in prison........... As the protests have continued, demonstrators and police have clashed in pitched battles, each weekend encounter more bitter and seemingly surpassing the level of violence seen the weekend before. Police have been accused of using excessive force while protesters have now not just used bricks but also petrol bombs, some 100 of them a fortnight ago........

“Snape said, ‘the Dark Lord isn’t resting’. So we can’t rest.”

........On LIHKG, the Reddit-like site which acts as a virtual command centre for the movement, users have begun responding to recent talk the government might invoke emergency powers to end the unrest with slogans that they are ready to do battle and “want to perish together”....... most protesters, according to an academic survey, consider themselves to be from middle-class backgrounds. The ratio falls to half middle-class and the other half from lower middle-class when it comes to those on the front lines........ such sentiments reflect the total breakdown in trust between those in power and those on the streets......

Government insiders say it is almost a “mission impossible” for the administration to offer further concessions, especially after Beijing has spelt out some clear bottom lines.

....... the government is struggling to find solutions to the unrest and expects it to go on “for a very long time”....... between August 21 and 27 found that 68.3 per cent of 716 respondents expected the clashes to continue or become even more serious in the coming month........ While nearly half agreed both protesters and the government should make concessions to seek common ground, almost two-fifths of the respondents thought the opposite and argued the protesters should stick to their five key demands and not compromise....... In recent weeks, the police appear to have changed their strategy by going after mass arrests, apparently targeting hard core protesters and prominent pro-democracy activists........

the crackdown will galvanise rather than gut the movement.

........ To break the impasse, one needs to understand the defining spirit behind the movement....... Hongkongers’ anxieties if not anger at what they perceive as the local government’s bid to push the city towards being “one country” and eroding the city’s own identity........ Beijing, he says, should learn from how the tightening up post-Occupy through various actions, including the disqualification of six pro-democracy lawmakers, would only cause grievances to fester and grow again....... A lot of people still miss the old days of ‘the well water does not mix with the river water,’” he says, referring to a Chinese idiom once quoted by former Chinese president Jiang Zemin to suggest Hong Kong should not interfere in the affairs of mainland China and vice versa. .......



The US-China trade war has set in motion an unstoppable global economic transformation

at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Hong Kong, Non Violence Works

The Hong Kong protests are in their fourth month. That is a long time. That is a testimony to how utterly unresponsive the authorities in Hong Kong and Beijing are to the ordinary people in Hong Kong. That just proves the point, that the entire Hong Kong legislature and the Hong Kong Chief Executive need to be directly elected by the people of Hong Kong.

One of the five demands has been met. If that demand had been met on day one, or during the first week, that would have been that. But now one is not enough. All five demands have to be met.

Time is on the side of the protestors. Beijing can not afford to drag this on indefinitely. But the protestors must be organized enough to be able to say we do not engage in violence, we do not engage in property damage. Not only does non-violence work, but that is also the only thing that will work.

The five demands are clear. The protestors do have the option to shut down the city completely. If a near-total shutdown is not working, perhaps a total shutdown will.

The protest movement can not degenerate into mob behavior. That will show a lack of political organization, lack of political strategy, lack of leadership.

Since no good police and military options are available, the authorities in Beijing and Hong Kong might be tempted to engage in vigilantism. They might organize and fund small groups of violence-prone people to do their dirty work for them. An incident here, an incident there. They already have done that a few times. That is no solution. The authorities must recognize there is no physical solution to this. There is only a political solution. The political dialogue must be initiated. Small groups of people not wearing uniform doing the dirty work for them is not the way out. That will only bring confusion and chaos.

Both sides must refrain from violence.

In making conscious efforts to not engage in violence, you take the movement to new heights.

Hong Kong protests: man seriously hurt after attack by anti-government demonstrators as street fights between rival groups erupt People trade blows and verbal abuse, with outbreaks of violence occurring mainly in the North Point and Fortress Hill area...... Ugliest incident involved unarmed man being attacked by a mob of black-clad masked protesters .........















at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)