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newsnigeria · 5 years

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New Post has been published on http://ooduarere.com/news-from-nigeria/world-news/behind-hong-kongs-black-terror/

Behind Hong Kong’s black terror

By Pepe Escobar – Hong Kong : Posted with permission

“If we burn, you burn with us.” “Self-destruct together.” (Lam chao.)

The new slogans of Hong Kong’s black bloc – a mob on a rampage connected to the black shirt protestors – made their first appearance on a rainy Sunday afternoon, scrawled on walls in Kowloon.

Decoding the slogans is essential to understand the mindless street violence that was unleashed even before the anti-mask law passed by the government of the Special Administrative Region (SAR) went into effect at midnight on Friday, October 4.

By the way, the anti-mask law is the sort of measure that was authorized by the 1922 British colonial Emergency Regulations Ordnance, which granted the city government the authority to “make any regulations whatsoever which he [or she] may consider desirable in the public interest” in case of “emergency or public danger”.

Perhaps the Honorable Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, was unaware of this fine lineage when she commented that the law “only intensifies concern over freedom of expression.” And it is probably safe to assume that neither she nor other virulent opponents of the law know that a very similar anti-mask law was enacted in Canada on June 19, 2013.

More likely to be informed is Hong Kong garment and media tycoon Jimmy Lai, billionaire publisher of the pro-democracy Apple Daily, the city’s Chinese Communist Party critic-in-chief and highly visible interlocutor of official Washington, DC, notables such as US Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and ex-National Security Council head John Bolton.

On September 6, before the onset of the deranged vandalism and violence that have defined Hong Kong “pro-democracy protests” over the past several weeks, Lai spoke with Bloomberg TV’s Stephen Engle from his Kowloon home.

He pronounced himself convinced that – if protests turned violent China would have no choice but to send People’s Armed Police units from Shenzen into Hong Kong to put down unrest.

“That,” he said on Bloomberg TV, “will be a repeat of the Tiananmen Square massacre and that will bring in the whole world against China….. Hong Kong will be done, and … China will be done, too.”

Still, before the violence broke out, hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong people had gathered in peaceful protests in June, illustrating the depth of feeling that exists in Hong Kong. These are the working-class Hongkongers that Lai supports through the pages of Apple Daily.

But the situation has changed dramatically from the early summer of non-violent demonstrations. The black blocs see such intervention as the only way to accomplish their goal.

For the black blocs, the burning is all about them – not Hong Kong, the city and its hard-working people. Those are all subjected to the will of this fringe minority that, according to the understaffed and overstretched Hong Kong police force, numbers 12,000 people at the most.

Cognitive rigidity is a euphemism when applied to mob rule, which is essentially a religious cult. Even attempting the rudiments of a civilized discussion with these people is hopeless. The supremely incompetent, paralyzed Hong Kong government at least managed to define them precisely as “rioters” who have plunged one of the wealthiest and so far safest cities on the planet “into fear and chaos” and committed “atrocities” that are “far beyond the bottom line of any civilized society.”

“Revolution in Hong Kong”, the previous preferred slogan, at face value a utopian millennial cause, has been in effect drowned by the heroic vandalizing of metro stations, i.e., the public commons; throwing petrol bombs at police officers; and beating up citizens who don’t follow the script. To follow these gangs running amok, live, in Central and Kowloon, and also on RTHK, which broadcasts the rampage in real-time, is a mind-numbing experience.

I’ve sketched before the basic profile of thousands of young protestors in the streets fully supported by a silent mass of teachers, lawyers, bewigged judges, civil servants and other liberal professionals who gloss over any outrageous act – as long as they are anti-government.

But the key question has to focus on the black blocs, their mob rule on rampage tactics, and who’s financing them. Very few people in Hong Kong are willing to discuss it openly. And as I’ve noted in conversations with informed members of the Hong Kong Football Club, businessmen, art collectors, and social media groups, very few people in Hong Kong – or across Asia for that matter – even know what black blocs are all about.

The black bloc matrix

Black blocs are not exactly a global movement; they are a tactic deployed by a group of protesters – even though intellectuals springing up from different European strands of anarchism mostly in Spain, Italy, France and Germany since the mid-19th century may also raise it from the level of a tactic to a strategy that is part of a larger movement.

The tactic is simple enough. You dress in black, with lots of padding, ski masks or balaclavas, sunglasses, and motorcycle helmets. As much as you protect yourself from police pepper spray and/or tear gas, you conceal your identity and melt into the crowd. You act as a block, usually a few dozen, sometimes a few hundred. You move fast, you search and destroy, then you disperse, regroup and attack again.

From the inception, throughout the 1980s, especially in Germany, this was a sort of anarchist-infused urban guerrilla tactic employed against the excesses of globalization and also against the rise of crypto-fascism.

Yet the global media explosion of black blocs only happened over a decade later, at the notorious Battle of Seattle in 1999, during the WTO ministerial conference, when the city was shut down. The WTO summit collapsed and a state of emergency was in effect for nearly a week. Crucially, there were no casualties, even as black blocs made themselves known as part of a mass riot organized by radical anarchists.

The difference in Hong Kong is that black blocs have been instrumentalized for a blatantly search-and-destroy agenda. The debate is open on whether black bloc tactics, deployed randomly, only serve to legitimize the police state even more. What’s clear is that smashing a subway station used by average working people is absolutely irreconcilable with advancing a better, more responsible, local government.

My interlocutor shows up impeccably dressed for dim sum on Saturday at a deserted Victoria City outlet in CITIC tower, with a spectacular view of the harbor. He’s Shanghai aristocracy, the family having migrated to Hong Kong in 1949, and he’s a uniquely informed insider on all aspects of the Hong Kong-China-US triangle. Via mutual Chinese diaspora connections that hark back to the handover era, he agreed to talk on background. Let’s call him Mr. E.

In the aftermath of dark Friday, Mr. E is still appalled: “Not only you’re harming the people making their living in businesses, companies, shopping malls. You’re destroying subway stations. You’re destroying our streets. You’re destroying our hard-earned reputation as a safe, international business center. You’re destroying our economy.”

He cannot explain why there was not a single police officer in sight, for hours, as the rampage continued.

Cutting to the chase, Mr. E attributes the whole drama to a pathological hatred of China by a “significant majority” of Hong Kong’s population. Significantly, the day after our conversation, a small black bloc contingent circled around the PLA’s Kowloon East Barracks in Kowloon Tong in the early evening. Chinese soldiers in camouflage filmed them from the rooftop.

There’s no way black blocs would take their gas masks, steel rods and petrol bombs to fight the PLA. That’s an entirely new ball game compared with thrashing metro stations. And color-coded “revolution” manuals don’t teach you how to do it.

Mr. E points out there is nothing “leaderless” about the Hong Kong black blocs. Mob rule is strictly regimented. One of the black shirt slogans – “Occupy, disrupt, disperse, repeat” – has in effect mutated into “Swarm, destroy, disperse, repeat.”

Mr. E asks me about black blocs in France. Western mainstream media, for months, have ignored solid, peaceful protests by the Gilets Jaunes/Yellow Vests across France, against corruption, inequality and the Macron administration’s neoliberal push to turn France into a start-up benefitting the 1%.

Charges that French intel has manipulated black blocs and inserted undercover agents and casseurs (persons vandalizing property, specifically during protests) to discredit and demonize the Yellow Vests are widespread. As I’ve witnessed in Paris first hand, the feared CRS have been absolutely ruthless in their RAND-conceptualized militarized operations in urban terrain – repression tactics – without excluding the odd beating up of elderly citizens.

In contrast, mob rule in Hong Kong is excused as protest against “totalitarian” China.

Most of the conversation with Mr. E centers on possible sources of financing for the initial nonviolent protest and, particularly, for the mob rule that the black blocs have brought in its place.

Motivation and opportunity will get you on the list, which is not terribly long – but is long enough to include names of people and organizations diametrically opposed to one another and thus unlikely to be working together.

Among governments, we can start with the still (if not, probably, for much longer) number one superpower. Trump administration officials, locked in a trade war with Beijing, would have no trouble imagining some advantage coming from a weakening of the People’s Republic’s rule over Hong Kong, and could perhaps see good in positively destabilizing China, starting with fomenting a violent revolution in the former British colony.

The United Kingdom, contemplating a lonely post-Brexit old age, could have pondered how nice it would be to get closer to its favorite former colony, still an island of Britishness in a less and less British world.

Taiwan, of course, would have had interest in provoking a test run of how One Country, Two Systems – the formula that the PRC and the UK used with Hong Kong in 1997 and that Beijing has offered to Taiwan, as well – might work out under stress. And after the stress of peaceful protest had exposed weak underpinnings, the temptation may well have arisen to go farther and make such a hash of Chinese-ruled Hong Kong that no Taiwanese would ever again fall for the merger propaganda.

The People’s Republic seems an unlikely protagonist for the initial, nonviolent phase, but there are plenty of Hong Kongers who believe it is now encouraging provocations that would justify a major crackdown. And we can’t completely rule out the possibility that a mainland CCP faction – opposed to the breach of recent tradition with which Xi Jinping extended his time in the presidency, say – is trying to discredit him.

OK, enough about governments. Now we need some on-the-ground agents, Chinese with plausible deniability who can blend in as they receive and disburse the necessary funding and handle organizational and training matters.

Here the possibilities are far too numerous to list, but one popular name would be Guo Wengui, aka Miles Kwok. The billionaire fell out with the CCP and, in 2014, fled to the United States to pursue a career as a long-distance political operative.

Even more popular would be name of Jimmy Lai, mentioned above. Confirming another of my key meetings, when Mr. E points to the usual funding suspects, the name of Jimmy Lai inevitably comes up. In fact, a US-Taiwan-Jimmy Lai combination may be number one on the hit parade when it comes to the common wisdom.

But when I tried that combination on for size I encountered problems. For one big thing, Jimmy Lai has made no effort to hide his aid to pro-democracy groups but in his public remarks has invariably encouraged nonviolent agendas.

As South China Morning Post columnist Alex Lo wrote not long ago, “What’s wrong with making massive donations to political parties and anti-government groups? Nothing! So I am puzzled by the media brouhaha over Apple Daily boss Jimmy Lai Chee-ying’s alleged donations worth more than HK$40 million to his pals in the pan-democratic camp over a two-year period.”

Let’s not give up so easily, though. I believe that some things are best hidden right out in the open in bright daylight.

Yes, Lai’s public voice happens to be Mark Simon, who worked for four years as a US naval intelligence analyst.

Yes, Lai has been good friends with neo-con guru Paul Wolfowitz since the latter became chairman of the US Taiwan Business Council in 2008, according to a Lai aide.

Wolfowitz served as deputy secretary of defense from 2001 to 2005 under Donald Rumsfeld, sort of by accident: He was supposed to become George W Bush’s head of CIA. But, alas, that didn’t work out because his wife got wind of an affair Paul, a member of the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED, had with a staffer, who was married at the time … and so it goes.

And, yes, according to Wikileaks documentation, in 2013 Lai paid US$75,000 to Wolfowitz for an introduction to Myanmar government bigwigs.

A document suggesting a transaction between Lai and Wolfowitz.Photo: Wikileaks via SCMP

But none of that really proves anything, does it now? Innocent until proven guilty. Colluding with arguably the most important US policy and intelligence operative of the past two decades, apparently yes – but can we establish active involvement by either the Pauls or the Jimmys of this world in black bloc provocations to achieve the bloody Chinese intervention that Lai forecast? Innocent until proven guilty.

This is going to take some further work. Back to the old drawing board with Asia Times.

There will be blowback

“We in Hong Kong are few in number. But we know that the world will never know genuine peace until the people of China are free.” – Wall Street Journal op-ed by Jimmy Lai, Sept 30

As much as there have been frantic efforts by the usual suspects to obliterate them, the images of black bloc mob rule and rampage across Hong Kong are now imprinted all over the Global South, not to mention in the unconscious of hundreds of millions of Chinese netizens.

Even the black blocs’ invisible financial backers may have been stunned by the counter-productive effects of the rampage, to the point of essentially declaring victory and ordering a retreat. In any case, Jimmy Lai continues to blame the Hong Kong police for “excessive and brutal violence” and to demonize the “dictatorial, cold-blooded and violent beast.”

Yet there’s no guarantee the black terror mob will back down – especially with Hong Kong fire officials now alarmed by the proliferation of online instructions for making petrol bombs using lethal white phosphorous. Once again – remember al-Qaeda’s “freedom fighters” – history will teach us: Beware of the Frankenstein terrors you create.

#China

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amlensusa-blog · 7 years

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New Post has been published on American Lens

New Post has been published on http://www.americanlens.com/2017/01/03/roots-national-uprising/

Radical Roots- The National Uprising & Chaos in America

The roots of what we at American Lens are calling The National Uprising began almost a decade ago with a meeting of the Democracy Alliance (DA) in December 2007.

The Democracy Alliance is an elite club of the wealthiest and most progressive philanthropists across the nation. They had the money, but they needed ground teams to get organized. They needed to recruit an army of volunteers to carry the message.

After 3 years of planning, organizing, and training The first test cases targeted Wall street and the bailout of wealthy bankers that got sweetheart deals at the taxpayer expense.

It began with a scream of, “MIC CHECK!”

In September of 2011, protesters calling themselves Occupy Wall Street (OWS) descended on Zuccotti Park in New York City. What looked like a spontaneous movement was anything but. Funded and organized by groups tied to George Soros and national labor unions, the OWS movement consisted of a coordinated effort by radical activists, democratic operatives and bare-knuckled union enforcers, and socialists seeking a political revolution.

US Senator Bernie Sanders shown at a camping rally, courtesy of Democratic Socialists of America.

The early talking points of the protesters were said to be about exposing “social and economic inequality worldwide.”

However, those early positions quickly dissolved into a laundry list of social justice gripes and far Left agenda items from ultra feminists railing against the patriarchy to gay rights to hapless college students wanting someone to pay for their college debt.

As publicity waned in the early days, violent anarchists joined the group using tactics known as ‘Black Bloc.’ The anarchists made sure the news would cover them with their outrageous destruction and scare tactics.

Property damage in ‘Occupied’ cities quickly rose into the millions. Public parks and facilities became unusable. The trash piled up, violent rapes were perpetrated, disease outbreaks became more frequent in the camps, riots occurred daily, Molotov cocktails were used and property destruction became the hallmark of the movement wherever they went.

The OWS playbook was ripped straight from the pages of East German anarchists of the 1970’s and Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals of the 1960’s. The goal was to create a false narrative for the media to carry across the globe about American injustice, inequality, and to rage against capitalism. As the movement unfolded it was praised by national progressive political figures and the media, many of which turned a blind eye the violence and destruction.

vimeo

The National Uprising #2 from American Lens on Vimeo.

Democratic politicians, including President Obama, legitimized the efforts stating that OWS, “expresses the frustrations the American people” and that “the protesters are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works.”

Nancy Pelosi also embraced OWS. At the time Pelosi was the Speaker of the House and praised them. “God bless them, for their spontaneity. It’s independent … it’s young, it’s spontaneous, and it’s focused.” Pelosi said. “And it’s going to be effective. The message of the protesters is a message for the establishment everyplace. No longer will the recklessness of some on Wall Street cause massive joblessness on Main Street.”

The chaos wrought by OWS was a prelude. A test case. An incubator for future chaos. What started with Occupy has splintered into a thousand variations that now march under their own banners. They got organized, identified new sympathetic people as they set out to recruit a new generation of disaffected youth with an axe to grind.

The media was more than willing to continue the charade of a nation in turmoil. It painted the picture that America was in decline because of segregation of economic classes, races, and religion. However, that’s a feature, not a bug. The National Uprising to follow would rely entirely on this foundation.

That splintering arguably helped give rise to a new movement, Black Lives Matter. It is this splintering that we at American Lens are referring to when we use the term ‘The National Uprising’.

The National Uprising – Built on Social Justice

OWS, with its never-ending list of complaints, also gave birth to the modern Social Justice Warrior (SJW). The SJW plays a key part in The National Uprising. The SJW isn’t the 60’s hippie upset at the war in Vietnam or the government, this is a new breed of far-Left radicals who live and die by the motto, ‘by any means necessary.’

But just what is Social Justice and what is a Social Justice Warrior?

Portrait of Thomas Paine, US Revolutionary War Hero

The origins of the term Social Justice trace back in part to the Catholic church in the early mid 1800’s. Its meaning there was a new virtue as the world emerged out agrarian society. Going even further back, circa 1795-96, Thomas Paine’s final pamphlet, Agrarian Justice, could be viewed as laying the foundation.

Paine opined that there are two types of property, natural and artificial. Paine writes that equality of property is impossible, as equal contribution to such a thing just doesn’t happen.

“Liberty and Property are words expressing all those of our possessions which are not of an intellectual nature. There are two kinds of property. Firstly, natural property, or that which comes to us from the Creator of the universe–such as the earth, air, water. Secondly, artificial or acquired property—the invention of men. In the latter, equality is impossible; for to distribute it equally it would be necessary that all should have contributed in the same proportion, which can never be the case; and this being the case, every individual would hold on to his own property, as his right share. Equality of natural property is the subject of this little essay. Every individual in the world is born therein with legitimate claims on a certain kind of property, or its equivalent.”

SJW’s have latched on to the idea in that very last sentence. They have managed to pervert it, apply to anything they can think of and it has thus been further co-opted over the years by progressive and radical activists.

The new Social Justice is akin to saying that all things belonging to the collective and should be distributed evenly and equitably. In other words, for an SJW, ‘what’s yours is mine’ regardless of circumstance. The Socialistic flavor is undeniable. Make no mistake, there are those who truly believe in this new definition, however there are many others simply using it as a political tool.

The Social Justice movements of today seek the systematic destruction of societal, religious and cultural norms. This is done for ‘the common good’ and fairness. The stated goal is that everyone will be free to live productive lives and be equal – at least in theory. They have delusions of recreating a ‘Lord of the Flies’ society.

The huge flaw in that theory is that in every society people are not equal, but unique. Someone will always be richer, smarter, better looking, faster or stronger. When this reality intervenes, SJW’s descend on anyone who stands out with a solid round of shaming, name calling and various methods of silencing opposition.

A prime real world example of these SJW tactics and a key piece in the National Uprising is what unfolded in the Fall of 2015 at the University of Missouri, or as it is nicknamed, ‘Mizzou’.

In September of 2015, a student led group calling themselves Concerned Student 1950 launched a series of protests which included a hunger strike and the boycotting of the school’s football games.

Concerned Student 1950’s reasons for these protests included the charge that there was rampant bigotry and anti-gay sentiment on campus. These claims were paired with a comment made on Facebook by the Mizzou student government President, Payton Head, who made unsubstantiated accusations regarding a random passing car’s occupants yelling racial slurs at him.

Head wrote in that post that, “For those of you who wonder why I’m always talking about the importance of inclusion and respect, it’s because I’ve experienced moments like this multiple times at THIS university, making me not feel included here.”

What ensued after the first Mizzou protests was nothing short of a full-blown SJW temper tantrum, led by a member of the faculty identified as Melissa Click. Demands for segregated spaces for blacks only and the establishment of other such ‘no go’ areas for media had arisen. These segregated areas would later become widely known as “safe spaces”.

This video screen capture of Melissa Click epitomizes the indignant disdain for a citizen exercising first amendment rights in a public space.

At the height of this lunacy, Click entered into a confrontation with a freelance photographer over the safe space zone and First Amendment rights. The altercation became physical and was recorded by a student named Mark Schierbecker.

During the altercation recorded by Schierbecker, Click points her finger at the camera, yelling, “you need to get out” and “I need some muscle over here”. Watch Click in action for yourself.

This moment by Click was a classic SJW attempt to shut down opposition. Versions of this tactic can be seen in SJW’s shouting down politicians at political rallies and at speaking engagements like that of Breitbart editor and gay activist, Milo Yiannopolous.

https://twitter.com/hannahoh16/status/723329698684624897

The manipulation of a targeted forum, event, or space is a key component for SJW’s and a key element in the National Uprising. The Social Justice Warriors take over and drown-out their targets and often uses ‘shaming chants’. This tactic, wherein the target shouted at, taunted and called various names, has been employed at protests like that of the North Carolina born Moral Monday and that of Black Lives Matter.

The purpose of The National Uprising is to use chaos to disrupt the cornerstones of a functioning society (Rule of Law, Freedom of Speech, Individual Rights) which all become impediments to the needs of the collective. Their methods and tactics are focused on silencing all opposition through intimidation, name calling, shaming, labeling someone as racist and/or un-American, frivolous litigation and economic extortion. The end game is control of the majority by a vocal, well-funded and radical minority with a thirst for power.

Follow American Lens as we continue to navigate the safe spaces, focus on the subversive actors the media ignores, and direct the foundations of these organizations. Welcome to The National Uprising.

#Social Justice Warriors #The National Uprising

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