We Will Be Back – When?
Definitions:
Peaceful – not involving violence or force
Radical – favouring drastic political, economic, or social reforms
Fanatical – filled with excessive and single-minded zeal.
The big question is, have Hong Kong’s protests become more radical? The simple answer, by looking at a photograph of September 28th is categorically NO.
We can see there is a significant proportion of people who are engaging in what some would describe as radical actions, or, putting pressure on the police to remove the political line they are holding and let the masses assemble outside their government to protest.
Behind them we can see a throng of so called peaceful protesters, or those, that wouldn’t dream of confronting the police, but wish to register their political discontent in a way that is absent of violence or force.
Here, the police line is described as fanatical, or overly excessive and single minded. This is an inarguable description of them. It was overly excessive of them to fire 87 rounds of tear gas and walk upon the streets of Hong Kong with automatic weapons. Their single mindedness to pursue a plan of intimidation without giving much thought to other possible outcomes, shows without doubt their fanaticism.
To this day, nothing much has really changed in the make-up of the groups. some radical protesters have behaved badly, mainly due to lack of leadership. Some police have behaved badly, mainly due to lack of leadership.
The only significant thing that has changed is that the peaceful protesters packed up and went home after the 79day Occupy and have not come back out again on a regular basis.
Why is this?
Maybe it’s for fear of being accused of being a radical or being scared of being abused by the fanaticals. Who can say?
But when the Occupy ended, everyone revelled in the new motto, “We’ll be back.”
Well, when is that?
If you truly want to create change you need to do it regularly, every week. Not every third Tuesday in a month when the moon is blue.
There isn’t going to be another Occupy, the fanaticals are now too violent to let you settle in anyone place ever again. But this doesn’t mean that every weekend you can’t peacefully show your discontent in huge numbers. Being too scared to protest for fear of being accused of being radical didn’t bother anyone on 28th September, so why should it now?
If the police are to be believed, they fired the first canisters of tear gas because of the radical actions on the frontline, the Umbrella Movement, is born from radical action and made powerful by peaceful protests.
The radicals are still out there!
The fanatics are still out there!
Where are peaceful protesters?
