Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/11/14/fearless-but-afraid.html
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That’s a terifying image at the top of the article. I believe we’ll soon see scenes like that across the U.S. as capitalism breaks down and the oligarchs struggle to maintain power.
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This American Life went to China to interview the protesters which aired (I think) last week. It’s a pretty good overview of both sides and the protestors fatalism about the whole situation. That is not stopping them. It’s worth a listen.
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And then the clouds of tear gas drifted in our direction, as they so often do in Hong Kong these days, and we scattered.
Got’a get that into a song.
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I feel like there should be centrists here wringing their hands about the incivility
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Black man, white man, yellow man
Black man, white man, rip the system
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Give it time…
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All this going on in HK makes me think of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. The action is in such tight spaces it might as well be under a dome. Sadly, lacking the gravity well aspect.
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No, no, “by any means necessary” is fine for protesters in other countries
If this was happening in America, we’d be seeing long out-of-context quotes from Gandhi and MLK
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Ragnarok.
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Holy fucksocks, Hong Kong:
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What we are seeing with China must be understood as a warning to all of us. The more effective and unopposed China’s actions are, the more likely they will be used as models by other countries around the world.
The Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019 was passed by the House unanimously on 15 Oct. It’s in the Senate now (S1838) with with 39 sponsors as of today, but I don’t know when it’s going up for a vote.
There’s also the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2019 currently in committee in the House as HR649 (the Senate version, S178, passed by unanimous consent on 9/11/19).
I honestly don’t know how much affect these will have, but even so I urge everyone to contact your Rep and Senators to move these toward resolution ASAP.
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This is why we have the second amendment, and why Marx insisted that any attempt to disarm the workers should be resisted until the end.
Thinking we couldn’t wind up in a situation like that here is the height of American exceptionalism.
The government and law enforcement are the last people you should trust with weapons.
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Zeynep Tufecki is awesome. A notch above.
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Just grabbing my popcorn…
Tiananmen will go down as the most consequential event in 20th century history: the moment when it was proven that fascism could crush all hope and freedom in a country permanently. I wonder if there will even need to be one here.
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This.
Realizing that they’re going to die fighting, they’re going to have to ramp up their game and turn protest into true guerilla warfare. As demonstrated by groups worldwide against the might of the US military, you can wreak disproportionate damage against a much larger and more technologically sophisticated military force. It’s not a real chance against China, but it’s something.
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It’s a better chance than waiting for them to put you in a death camp.
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And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?.. The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation… We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
Solzhenitsyn - The Gulag Archipelago
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