{"id":195009,"date":"2019-09-19T06:09:22","date_gmt":"2019-09-19T06:09:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=195009"},"modified":"2019-09-23T07:18:25","modified_gmt":"2019-09-23T07:18:25","slug":"reporting-from-hong-kong-protestors-are-fringe-of-spoiled-rich-gay-antifa-wannabes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=195009","title":{"rendered":"Reporting From Hong Kong: Protestors Are Fringe of Spoiled, Rich, Gay, AntiFa Wannabes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pepe Escobar \u2013 Russia Insider Sept 18, 2019<\/a><\/strong><\/h1>\n

Fringe practicing wanton destruction for destruction\u2019s sake surely have learned tactics from European black blocs<\/span><\/p>\n

What\u2019s going on deep down in Hong Kong? For a former resident with deep cultural and emotional ties to the Fragrant Harbor, it\u2019s quite hard to take it all in just within the framework of cold geopolitical logic. Master filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai once said that when he came up with the idea for\u00a0Happy Together<\/strong><\/span><\/a>, he decided to shoot the story of his characters in Buenos Aires because that was as far away from Hong Kong as possible.<\/span><\/p>\n

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A few weeks ago I was walking the streets of far away Buenos Aires dreaming of Hong Kong. That Hong Kong that Wong Kar-Wai refers to in his masterpiece no longer exists. Unfortunately deprived of Christopher Doyle\u2019s mesmerizing visuals, I ended up coming back to Hong Kong to find, eventually, that the city I knew also no longer exists.<\/span><\/p>\n

I started my journey in my former \u2018hood, Sai Ying Pun, where I lived in a studio in an average, slim, ultra-crowded Cantonese tower (I was the only foreigner) across the street from the beautiful, art deco St Louis school and not far from Hong Kong University. Although only a 20-minute walk over the hills to Central \u2013 the business and political heart of the city \u2013 Sai Ying Pun is mostly middle class with a few working-class pockets, only recently marching towards gentrification after a local MTR \u2013 subway \u2013 station was launched.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The busy streets of Hong Kong\u2019s Sai Ying Pun district. Photo: Wikipedia Creative Commons<\/p><\/div>\n

Mongkok, across the harbor in Kowloon, with an unfathomably large population density, is the haven of frenetic small business Hong Kong, always crammed with students in search of trendy bargains. In contrast, Sai Ying Pun is a sort of languid glimpse of Hong Kong in the 1950s: it could easily have been the set for a Wong Kar-Wai movie.<\/span><\/p>\n

From retirees to Mrs Ling, the laundry lady \u2013 still there, but without her previous, sprawling cat population (\u201cAt home!\u201d) \u2013 the refrain is unanimous: protests, yes, but they must be peaceful. In Kowloon the previous night I had heard harrowing stories of teachers brainwashing elementary school pupils into protest marches. Not at St Louis \u2013 they told me.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hong Kong University is another story; a hotbed of protest, some of it enlightened, where the golden hit in humanities is to analyze China as a \u201cperfect dictatorship\u201d where the CCP did nothing but ratchet up crude nationalism, militarism and \u201caggression,\u201d in propaganda and in dealing with the rest of Asia.<\/span><\/p>\n

As we reach Central, the Hong Kong matrix of hyper turbo-capitalism, \u201cprotests\u201d dissolve as an unwashed-masses, bad-for-business, dirty word, dismissed at the restaurants of the old, staid Mandarin and the glitzier Mandarin Oriental, the Norman Foster\/IM Pei headquarters of HSBC and Bank of China, the headquarters of JP Morgan \u2013 with a swanky Armani outlet downstairs \u2013 or at the ultra-exclusive China Club, a favorite of old Shanghai money.<\/span><\/p>\n

Prada meets class struggle<\/h2>\n

It\u2019s on weekends, especially Sunday, that all of Hong Kong\u2019s \u2013 and turbo-capitalism\u2019s \u2013 internal contradictions explode in Central. Filipina maids for decades have been staging an impromptu sit-in, a sort of benign Occupy Central in Tagalog with English subtitles, every Sunday; after all they have no public park to gather in on their only day off, so they take over the vault of HSBC and merrily picnic on the pavement in front of Prada boutiques.<\/span><\/p>\n

To talk to them about the protests amounts to a PhD on class struggle: \u201cIt\u2019s we who should have the right to protest about our meager wages and the kind of disgusting treatment we get from these Cantonese madames,\u201d says a mother of three from Luzon (70% of her pay goes for remittances home). \u201cThese kids, they are so spoiled, they are raised thinking they are little kings.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Virtually everyone in Hong Kong has reasons to protest. Take the cleaning contingent \u2013 who must do the heavy lifting after all the tear gas, burnt-out bins, bricks and broken glass, like on Sunday. Their monthly salary is the equivalent of US$1,200 \u2013 compared with the average Hong Kong salary of roughly $2,200. Horrible working conditions are the norm: exploitation, discrimination (many are from ethnic minorities and don\u2019t speak Cantonese or English) and no welfare whatsoever.<\/span><\/p>\n

As for the ultra-slim fringe practicing wanton destruction for destruction\u2019s sake, they surely have learned tactics from European black blocs. On Sunday they set fire to one of the entrances to ultra-congested Wanchai station and broke glass at Admiralty. The \u201cstrategy\u201d: breaking off MTR nodes, because paralyzing Chek Lap Kok airport \u2013 one of the busiest on the planet \u2013 won\u2019t work anymore after the August 12\/13 shutdown that canceled nearly 1,000 flights and led to a quite steep drop in passengers coming from China, Southeast Asia and Taiwan.<\/span><\/p>\n

Two years ago, in Hamburg,\u00a0Special Forces<\/strong><\/span><\/a>\u00a0were deployed against black bloc looters. In France, the government routinely unleashes the\u00a0feared CRS<\/a><\/strong><\/span>\u00a0even against relatively peaceful Gilets Jaunes\/Yellow Vest protesters \u2013 complete with tear gas, water cannons and supported by helicopters, and nobody invokes human rights to complain about it. The CRS deploy\u00a0flash ball\u00a0<\/a><\/strong><\/span>strikes even against the media.<\/span><\/p>\n