The meaning of re-provoking 721 | Lee Yee
LIHKG forum started a thread titled “Congratulations to the Hong Kong Police Force (HKPF) for Raising Global Awareness Again for the Jul. 21 incident (721).” There were continuous comments on the thread that linked to international media reports on the HKPF’s various deliberate misrepresentations. Many social media were also swept by a flood of all the videos previously published since 721: live broadcasts, subsequent comprehensive reports including Hong Kong Connection’s “721 Yuen Long Nightmare” which had 8.32 million views in just over five months since the clip was published, and “Truth of 721” which had over 1.3 million views since its upload last month. The large amount of visual media trending on social media is the explosion of citizens actions to challenge the copious amount of lies.
The biggest effect of HKPF re-provoking 721 is to let those Hongkongers, especially foreigners, whose memories of the incident have faded, to remember it again. How can people believe the fabricated lies when they once again witness the scenes and listen to the people who lived through it recount the experience? In that case, what is the purpose of reviving people’s memory? Surely it is not because the trust score of Carrie Lam’s regime is not low enough?
Hong Kong has realized the words of the Russian author and dissident, Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, of whom I once quoted: “We know they are lying. They know they are lying. They also know that we know they are lying. We also know that they know that we know they are lying. But they are still lying.”
A reader asked me the source of this quotation but I could not find it. It was only based on the Internet, nevertheless it is fantastic. Solzhenitsyn had written so many articles on deception and the authoritarian regime so it is possible that he had said it just once during a conversation. Another Russian writer, Elena Gorokhova, said something similar in a book published in 2010: “The rules are simple: they deceive us, we know they are lying, they know that we know they are lying, but they keep on lying to us, and we keep on pretending to believe them.” The significance of re-provoking 721 is spelled out in these two passages.
Why are they still lying when they know that we know that they are lying? This is because, under the tyranny of totalitarianism, the fabrication of lies is not to make the people believe but to make one’s case sound plausible when justifying with the superior. 721 was a defining moment in the timeline of the anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (anti-ELAB) movement that reversed the perception of the people of Hong Kong and the international community towards the HKPF and HKSAR government. In other words, after the incident, the image of the HKPF tumbled from the protector of the people to a tool of tyranny. Therefore, the distortion of facts is not for the people to believe but to let their “own people” including their superiors to “pretend to believe” so as to maintain the “legitimacy pretense.”
Another implication of re-provoking this incident is that the behavior of lying even when knowingly they cannot deceive proves the existing regime is a true tyranny.
Solzhenitsyn said, “Tyranny finds its only refuge in falsehood and falsehood in tyranny finds its only support.” “Tyranny must be interwoven with falsehood. Between them, they have the closest and deepest natural union.” Because of this intimate natural bonding, in the presence of deceptions regardless of whether people will believe it or not, it is tantamount to proclaiming the existence of tyranny.
The significance of re-provoking this incident is threefold. It also illustrates the greatest crisis in Hong Kong. It is not those in power and the pro-Beijing camp pretending to believe in the distorted facts, but that the increasing number of Hongkongers willing to tolerate the lies and also pretending that the stag is a horse. The Czech dissident writer and former President of Czechoslovakia, Václav Havel said that when people “have to acquiesce, endure and drift along with the lies, then every person can only survive in lies. People do not need to accept lies, it is enough that they endure a life of living in and with lies. In this way, people validate, perfect, create and become this system.”
The Chinese have “become this system.” Hongkongers must not only protect the truth, but also be wary of themselves and the people around them to not pretend to believe in lies and not participate in distorting facts for personal gain. Solzhenitsyn said, “If we are fearful even to detach from the participation of lying, then we are worthless and hopeless.” The sarcasm of Russian writer, Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, is most applicable to us: “Why give animals freedom? Their fate is to be bound by chains and flogged with whips, generation after generation!”
Hongkongers must take heed of this heart-wrenching remark!
同時也有10000部Youtube影片,追蹤數超過2,910的網紅コバにゃんチャンネル,也在其Youtube影片中提到,...
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明天的港台荚文信Happy Mother’s Day
It is hilarious that mothers began to enter into the recent political reform debate on the question "pocket or not pocket". Executive Councilor Bernard Chan was asked by a yum cha lady during his turn to go for street campaign: "If your wife was chosen by the Central Government, what would you do?" Chan answered by saying this is the same as my Mother choosing for me!!! This reminded me of the time of the Cultural Revolution when Chinese were told Mao Sze Dong was dearer to you than your Mother. Bernard Chan without thinking became Red Guards that waved the red little book at his Mother. Legislative Councillor Ng Leung-Sing representing the banking sector went further and said that over thousands of years in China Mothers had chosen the wives for their children. This is the Banker legislator who wanted to return Hong Kong to the feudal days of China that practiced blind marriage and think this is acceptable.
It was funny but also very sad that educated people in Hong Kong can bend so low as to refer the Communist Party as their Mother and is willing to give up the right to choose one's own wife. This led me to think of a more philosophical reason for not pocketing the political reform package imposed on us by the Chinese Communist Party. Hong Kong People should not degrade oneself to accept lies. This is the struggle of living in truth against living in lies and this is the struggle of life and death for the survival of Hong Kong and our value system of speaking out for truth. Living in truth is the central theme of the famous essay "Power to the Powerless" by Havel, the playwright dissident turned President of the first Democratic Czechoslovakia. Rereading this essay make us understand what the fight over true democracy is all about. This is how Havel described the Communist System:
“Government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his or her ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary use of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.”
Isn't this happening in Hong Kong today?It is here that Vaclav Havel makes one of his most compelling points about living within the Communist system:
Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, ARE the system.”
If we accepted the lies of the Government that passing the proposed political reform package with the 1200 so called elected representatives controlling the nomination process is a step forward and is a fulfillment of the promise of universal suffrage, we as the individuals are confirming the system and are the system. Also to quote Havel: a regime can lull its underlings at worst and convert them at best to “the cause”. And what, is “the cause”? Power… indisputably and unflinchingly secure in the hands of the regime. This is what exactly the Hong Kong Government is doing, to convert all of us to the Cause of securing power for the Regime.
To “live within the truth” is to defy the unreality – in big ways, or in small. Havel’s example of a green-grocer organizing an underground group, or simply not putting a propaganda poster in his window is excellent. There is no shortage of fear (or brutal consequence) under these regimes and Havel admits this with sympathy. At the same time, he reinforces that fissures in the edifice of lies can come in big forms or small – and no small act of “living within the truth” is without its impact on the oppressive regime. Havel reinforces the threat of “living within the truth”:
“By breaking the rules of the game, [the citizen living within the truth] has disrupted the game as such. He has exposed it as a mere game. He has shattered the world of appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system. He has upset the power structure by tearing apart what holds it together. He has demonstrated that living a lie is living a lie. He has broken through the exalted facade of the system and exposed the real, base foundations of power. He has said that the emperor is naked. And because the emperor is in fact naked, something extremely dangerous has happened: by his action, the greengrocer has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it IS possible to live within the truth.
It is our choice: truth or lies. We are already the fortunate one to be living under communist rule with a makeshift shelter of one country two system. We must defend this shelter by starting to live in truth and not accepting blind marriage by mothers.
Mothers have no desire but the goods for their children and comparing mothers to the Central Government is nauseating. Let us live in truth and believe in our mothers.
Lee Cheuk Yan
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