Will Hutton, The Guardian: From Minsk to Hong Kong, people power just isn’t working any more
Last week’s detention of an activist in Belarus is only the latest of many signals that we must relearn how to defend our values
The west’s ineffectiveness in the face of the arrant use of torture, unlawful arrest, savage imprisonment without trial and flagrant abuse of international law, even close to home in Europe, is among the bleakest symptoms of our times. The people power we saw embodied in the strikes in the Gdańsk shipyards, the fall of the Berlin Wall and even the Arab spring has not presaged the new era of democracy we once hoped for. Instead, the 21st century is becoming defined as a new era of agile autocracy and vicious strong-man rule.
As the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, prepared the UK’s response to last Sunday’s forced landing of a Ryanair jet by a Belarusian MiG-29 over its airspace to secure the trumped-up detention of a well-known democracy activist, Roman Protasevich, it must have crossed his mind that Britain’s response would have been so much stronger within the EU. The UK is now a little Sir Echo, weakening the west. It is part of the reason why Belarus’s president, Alexander Lukashenko, can act with impunity, as he refuses to acknowledge his loss of last’s August presidential election.
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WNU Editor: Belarus, Venezuela, Hong Kong .... when the government has the will to stay in power and it has the support of the intelligence and security forces, people power is not enough to change the government. It is only when the general population have made the decision to match the "cracking of heads" that the government is imposing on everyone that everything changes.
Unfortunately for places like Venezuela, Belarus, or Hong Kong right now, that critical point has not been reached. The central governments are still in the driver's seat.
3 comments:
The Guardian appears to be one of the worst propaganda outlets of the New World Order, talking about the hope for a "era of democracy" led by "people power", as if the people spontaneously rise up and rebel. But in the case of the strikes in the Gdańsk shipyards, or the the fall of the Berlin Wall, the "people" were incited to protest by a well financed and organized power--probably the CIA. In the USA the Black Lives Matters movement is led by cynical opportunists and Marxists and could not succeed without the backing of the controlled media who takes their orders from forces that want the USA to descend into chaos-- China. There is no such things as "people power" really, the people are but pawns to be used by deep pocket organizations and discarded by them after the people have served their purpose. As an example, look at the poor people of the Philippines who rose up and threw Marcos out--only to sink into a sea of corruption and poverty from which they still have not recovered.
I think the general populace has very little to do with any revolutions. Most people simply aren't around to take part in them. "People power" refers to a very particular subset of the populace. And even then - you were right in the first sentence and wrong in the second. It's not up to "the people", how ever we determine them. It's up to the security apparatus. So long as the security apparatus is securely on the side of the government, there is nothing to fear. Well, not for the government, in any case.
That would not change in Hong Kong because Hong Kong is ultimately secured by a Chinese apparatus, which has no reason to change sides. It may change in Belarus if Lukashenko began to seem no longer worth the trouble of increasingly bitter confrontations with the population, but what good alternative is there, from the apparatus' perspective? (Or, I might add, from the population's. I don't see how anyone else could manage the very profitable balancing act between West and East even as imperfectly as Lukashenko does. Any alternative to him is likely to be either a Western puppet or an Eastern one, and to bring about a socio-economic downturn. Having to put up with Lukashenko is unenviable, but absent a compelling alternative that does not inspire such fears, put up with him they will.)
In other words, the CIA backed operations in these places has failed.
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