Opinions
Black Hands
The Hong Kong revolt has gone several months, and is reaching riot proportions, with protesters using Molotov cocktails and other means to create havoc. A relatively peaceful and popular demonstration against a bill, however mistakenly perceived, was hijacked by a tenacious group of militants, amply funded by external groups, among whom US and UK interests loom large. In a past article, I raised the issue of funding such a huge and sustained undertaking, unlike a short-lived communal event, and requiring deep pockets, rather like a clandestine CIA/MI6/Mossad operation.
The US State Department rejected accusations of interference, yet later said that the government remained “staunch in our support for freedom of expression and freedom of peaceful assembly in Hong Kong.”Meanwhile, President Trump distanced himself from the situation, saying that it was up to Hong Kong and China to resolve, “because Hong Kong is part of China.” Trump called the protests “riots”, a term that echoed the rhetoric of Beijing rather than the State Department; no one who has seen the videos can call these peaceful demonstrations.
Unlike US State officials, Trump got it right, a pleasant change. Instead of backing off, the fomenters of unrest, the destabilisers, held meetings with Joshua Wong, Anson Chan and other protest leaders; a published photo shows Ms Julie Eadeh, political unit chief, US consulate, (? euphemism for CIA), with four leaders, presumably from the pro-democracy political party Demosistó, which obtained 2.3% votes in the 2016 elections. They were apparently handed funds. The Hong Kong Ministry of Foreign Affairs complained to the US consul-general about the meeting, and urged an immediate “clean break from anti-China forces who stir up trouble in Hong Kong; stop sending out wrong signals to violent offenders, refrain from meddling with Hong Kong affairs and avoid going further down the wrong path.” Wong was released from prison days before the onset of militancy.
State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus defended meetings between diplomats and local political figures as an established US practice. “American diplomats meet with formal government officials (and) opposition protesters, not just in Hong Kong or China...This literally happens in every single country in which an American embassy is present…The diplomat in question was doing her job, and we commend her...”
Instead of diplomacy, this arrogance promotes more unrest. Responding to Eadeh’s meeting with activists, China’s No 2 diplomat in Pakistan, Zhao Lijian, tweeted: “Embarrassing! The black hand was caught red-handed!” He attached a copy of the story in HK’s Ta Kung Pa newspaper. This Government dealing directly with a political party, smart enough to wave the US flag, even with just 2% electoral support, is not diplomacy; it’s meddling! Just as it does elsewhere; in Guyana, US is planting forces to complete a vice around Venezuela, while its protégé, Guaidó, consorts with Colombian drug lords. Immoral, to say the least.
It comes close to the Moby Dick syndrome: Herman Melville's tale captures the obsessive, violent, self-indulgent, vengeful, morally weak and self-destructive American in his portrayal of Ahab, the whaler.
In the beginning, University students were urged by way of pamphlet to: 'provoke the police, don't argue with them; ridicule them; goad them; let them attack you'. Protesters have done that; in July, they damaged and ransacked the Legislative Council building, ripped portraits of officials from walls, spray-painted slogans calling for the release of arrested demonstrators, defaced the white flower plaque symbolising HK; littered the streets with discarded umbrellas, street signs, broken fences; attacked police and civilians, placed graffiti on walls, one stating “Hong Kong is not China”, clearly betraying ignorance of their own history; was this British indoctrination?
In the last few days, they have flown the US flag, calling Trump to legislate support for Hong Kong and to back their revolt physically, an act verging on treason.
The US has hypocritically called on all sides in Hong Kong to show restraint, while stoking violence by its financial support, voicing solidarity with activists, and anti-China actions by the CIA.
The European Union urged anti-government protesters to avoid escalation. Pro-Beijing lawmaker Junius Ho Kwan-yiu said, “Some people have hidden agendas and have demonised the bill. That made … our university students suddenly become illiterate. Problem is that Hong Kong is still very much under the sway of the UK and USA, having practised anti-Communism for so long that it has nurtured a stereotype of “democracy” which is more oligarchic and foreign-indulged: UK, US, and Canada, with enormous real estate holdings in and allegiances to them, especially Canada, and its resources.
Unlike US State officials, Trump got it right, a pleasant change. Instead of backing off, the fomenters of unrest, the destabilisers, held meetings with Joshua Wong, Anson Chan and other protest leaders; a published photo shows Ms Julie Eadeh, political unit chief, US consulate, (? euphemism for CIA), with four leaders, presumably from the pro-democracy political party Demosistó, which obtained 2.3% votes in the 2016 elections. They were apparently handed funds. The Hong Kong Ministry of Foreign Affairs complained to the US consul-general about the meeting, and urged an immediate “clean break from anti-China forces who stir up trouble in Hong Kong; stop sending out wrong signals to violent offenders, refrain from meddling with Hong Kong affairs and avoid going further down the wrong path.” Wong was released from prison days before the onset of militancy.
State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus defended meetings between diplomats and local political figures as an established US practice. “American diplomats meet with formal government officials (and) opposition protesters, not just in Hong Kong or China...This literally happens in every single country in which an American embassy is present…The diplomat in question was doing her job, and we commend her...”
Instead of diplomacy, this arrogance promotes more unrest. Responding to Eadeh’s meeting with activists, China’s No 2 diplomat in Pakistan, Zhao Lijian, tweeted: “Embarrassing! The black hand was caught red-handed!” He attached a copy of the story in HK’s Ta Kung Pa newspaper. This Government dealing directly with a political party, smart enough to wave the US flag, even with just 2% electoral support, is not diplomacy; it’s meddling! Just as it does elsewhere; in Guyana, US is planting forces to complete a vice around Venezuela, while its protégé, Guaidó, consorts with Colombian drug lords. Immoral, to say the least.
It comes close to the Moby Dick syndrome: Herman Melville's tale captures the obsessive, violent, self-indulgent, vengeful, morally weak and self-destructive American in his portrayal of Ahab, the whaler.
In the beginning, University students were urged by way of pamphlet to: 'provoke the police, don't argue with them; ridicule them; goad them; let them attack you'. Protesters have done that; in July, they damaged and ransacked the Legislative Council building, ripped portraits of officials from walls, spray-painted slogans calling for the release of arrested demonstrators, defaced the white flower plaque symbolising HK; littered the streets with discarded umbrellas, street signs, broken fences; attacked police and civilians, placed graffiti on walls, one stating “Hong Kong is not China”, clearly betraying ignorance of their own history; was this British indoctrination?
In the last few days, they have flown the US flag, calling Trump to legislate support for Hong Kong and to back their revolt physically, an act verging on treason.
The US has hypocritically called on all sides in Hong Kong to show restraint, while stoking violence by its financial support, voicing solidarity with activists, and anti-China actions by the CIA.
The European Union urged anti-government protesters to avoid escalation. Pro-Beijing lawmaker Junius Ho Kwan-yiu said, “Some people have hidden agendas and have demonised the bill. That made … our university students suddenly become illiterate. Problem is that Hong Kong is still very much under the sway of the UK and USA, having practised anti-Communism for so long that it has nurtured a stereotype of “democracy” which is more oligarchic and foreign-indulged: UK, US, and Canada, with enormous real estate holdings in and allegiances to them, especially Canada, and its resources.
‘One day you will come to know…’
Romeo Kaseram
Ma used to say, “One day you will come to know…” She always left this sentence hanging, the ellipses trailing off to a time in the future, encapsulating in its uncertainty an unknown sense of the dire. Sometimes she accompanied her statement by wagging a forefinger in my young face; it was a threatening, physical indicator that somehow my “coming to know” would be an acquisition of knowledge that would be foreboding and ominous. I can say with certainty many years later, happy the decades remain countable on one hand with that wagging forefinger of predilection, that what Ma was foretelling has come to pass in many ways.
Indeed, many of those foreseen days in her moments of frustration, and with its ominous forefinger wag, have unfolded before me in ways that have taught me a few happy, and some hard lessons.
First the bitter medicines I have had to swallow in the steep learning curve that is this life in adulthood. The day has come when I now know one of the lessons Ma was trying to teach me was how impermanence is intimately and intricately woven into the pattern making this life. It took me many years to finally understand when Ma said, “One day you will come to know…”, she was leaving the ellipses behind so I could fill in the dots with my experiences many years later.
Mind you, more than a few of these have turned out to be difficult experiences. So, it dawned on me many years later how more difficult it becomes, year after year, to look at photographs in celebratory albums. Or worse, those moments captured in a video where friends, family, and events are recorded at significant gatherings, usually at weddings and other festive occasions.
Open what is now an antique photograph album, or hit the play button on a recorded video, and right away many absent faces begin making its lack felt by standing in line, and parading before eyes that are filling up. There are those who have passed, now promenading as ghosts in the machine, dancing happily here, making a toast there, blissfully unaware decades later I am watching through a blur of sorrow.
I never cease to be amazed at how many faces are no longer present in my world; among them, and keenly felt as each sun merges into another, is the face of my absent grandmother. With each passing day, and every year, the decades accrue beyond the countable fingers on hand as more faces are added to the list.
When Ma said to me so long ago, “One day you will come to know…” leaving the dots behind, her intention was for me to fill in the gaps with those among us who are taken away, who are missing, and who will never return to walk on the grounds at a banquet hall, or happily ascend the steps to a podium to celebrate a marriage, or the arrival of a child.
I find it to be among the more difficult lessons Ma left behind for me to unravel. She was preparing me to face what is at times an absurd world, an unpredictable universe; those at times cruel and ugly situations with woes wrought by the terrible people inhabiting the seats of power, deciding who will live and who will die in wars and do-or-die conflicts. Such an imparting of her wisdom via an unfinished sentence was her leaving with me a resonating legacy that continues to strike at my core, the way a bell sometimes tolls mournfully in a churchyard.
Then there are those moments when the ringing of the bell is for a joyful occasion. When Ma said, “One day you will come to know…”, what she left behind to finish the sentence was the word, “happiness”. So, to go further into the photograph album is to at times locate a moment when joy proliferated, such as that day I knelt during a visit to the homeland, uplifted by a single and delicate, purple flower, to photograph it in all its glory and ethereality.
Later, to my astonishment, I discovered a proliferation of this ephemeral blossom, thriving in luxury and resplendence throughout waterways, canals, and runoffs from bathrooms and kitchen sinks. Mixed with the disappointment my flower was not a unique one after all, I came to understand it was not about the photograph itself, but the moment of upliftment during my kneeling.
Once more the experience was a response to Ma’s eternal words, the moment of understanding resonating as yet another lesson acquired on the at times difficult path being followed.
In her moments of frustration, when my mind seemed impenetrable, and when my dear grandmother decided teaching me was beyond the instructive guidance of her famous “switch” stripped off the nearest shrub, Ma would deploy her, “Son, one day you will come to know…” Her doing so may have been two-fold: one, as a palliative to assuage her ascending temper; and two, a lesson to her “harden” grandson.
Today, it speaks to presence and absence, joy and sorrow.
First the bitter medicines I have had to swallow in the steep learning curve that is this life in adulthood. The day has come when I now know one of the lessons Ma was trying to teach me was how impermanence is intimately and intricately woven into the pattern making this life. It took me many years to finally understand when Ma said, “One day you will come to know…”, she was leaving the ellipses behind so I could fill in the dots with my experiences many years later.
Mind you, more than a few of these have turned out to be difficult experiences. So, it dawned on me many years later how more difficult it becomes, year after year, to look at photographs in celebratory albums. Or worse, those moments captured in a video where friends, family, and events are recorded at significant gatherings, usually at weddings and other festive occasions.
Open what is now an antique photograph album, or hit the play button on a recorded video, and right away many absent faces begin making its lack felt by standing in line, and parading before eyes that are filling up. There are those who have passed, now promenading as ghosts in the machine, dancing happily here, making a toast there, blissfully unaware decades later I am watching through a blur of sorrow.
I never cease to be amazed at how many faces are no longer present in my world; among them, and keenly felt as each sun merges into another, is the face of my absent grandmother. With each passing day, and every year, the decades accrue beyond the countable fingers on hand as more faces are added to the list.
When Ma said to me so long ago, “One day you will come to know…” leaving the dots behind, her intention was for me to fill in the gaps with those among us who are taken away, who are missing, and who will never return to walk on the grounds at a banquet hall, or happily ascend the steps to a podium to celebrate a marriage, or the arrival of a child.
I find it to be among the more difficult lessons Ma left behind for me to unravel. She was preparing me to face what is at times an absurd world, an unpredictable universe; those at times cruel and ugly situations with woes wrought by the terrible people inhabiting the seats of power, deciding who will live and who will die in wars and do-or-die conflicts. Such an imparting of her wisdom via an unfinished sentence was her leaving with me a resonating legacy that continues to strike at my core, the way a bell sometimes tolls mournfully in a churchyard.
Then there are those moments when the ringing of the bell is for a joyful occasion. When Ma said, “One day you will come to know…”, what she left behind to finish the sentence was the word, “happiness”. So, to go further into the photograph album is to at times locate a moment when joy proliferated, such as that day I knelt during a visit to the homeland, uplifted by a single and delicate, purple flower, to photograph it in all its glory and ethereality.
Later, to my astonishment, I discovered a proliferation of this ephemeral blossom, thriving in luxury and resplendence throughout waterways, canals, and runoffs from bathrooms and kitchen sinks. Mixed with the disappointment my flower was not a unique one after all, I came to understand it was not about the photograph itself, but the moment of upliftment during my kneeling.
Once more the experience was a response to Ma’s eternal words, the moment of understanding resonating as yet another lesson acquired on the at times difficult path being followed.
In her moments of frustration, when my mind seemed impenetrable, and when my dear grandmother decided teaching me was beyond the instructive guidance of her famous “switch” stripped off the nearest shrub, Ma would deploy her, “Son, one day you will come to know…” Her doing so may have been two-fold: one, as a palliative to assuage her ascending temper; and two, a lesson to her “harden” grandson.
Today, it speaks to presence and absence, joy and sorrow.
