The USA has a long track record of promoting chaos and instability around the world. This violence can provoke regime change, like the 2014 Maidan uprising in Ukraine, or can put other world powers into a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation, forced to choose between allowing riots to burn down whole cities, or using deadly force to stop them.
Recently I wrote about the US-sponsored violence against Kazakhstan, which has the unique quality of sharing a border with both Russia and China, and the National Endowment for Democracy has been funding NGOs there for years. Or how about the rise of “ISIS-K” in Afghanistan, which is almost certainly a ploy to create instability in Russia’s sphere of influence? Possibly the most beautiful aspect of this tactic is plausible deniability. Like trained sheep, American audiences are fooled every time, seething in Orwellian “two minutes of hate” on cue, then immediately forgetting about the whole thing by the next 24-hour news cycle. The American government is always absolved of any responsibility, and by the time the truth leaks out months or years later nobody cares and the game continues.
Here’s yet another example: the Hong Kong riots in 2019. Read this report by Michael Edesess shared on the Friday Everyday website. Much like the Kazakh riots in Amati almost three years later, the Hong Kong demonstrations started relatively peaceful, then erupted into violence. Also like in Kazakhstan, that violence was apparently prearranged, and involved (surprise, surprise) NED.
A violent faction [of protesters] became prevalent, commandeering the streets, invading, trashing and desecrating Hong Kong’s legislature (called Legco), hurling petrol bombs and bricks pried loose from Hong Kong’s streets at police and eventually even shooting arrows, some flaming, and launching the bricks and bombs using catapults…
The protestors swarmed into Hong Kong’s metro stations and broke everything they could break. They demolished Hong Kong’s world-class malls and stores and businesses that had any perceived relationships to mainland people or even to Mandarin speakers (Hong Kong’s spoken language is Cantonese while Mandarin is spoken on the mainland). They killed one innocent bystander and set another on fire, and beat up a number of them who disagreed with them. They wounded many police officers, some severely. In the end, they took over two university campuses, where they occupied bridges over heavily trafficked highways and threw large objects down on the traffic, set up weapons manufacturing stations, and battled police…
The rioters blamed the police, claiming “police brutality.” They spread rumors that police had killed a number of protestors, perhaps thousands. Through all this the Western press continued to call the riots “pro-democracy protests,” and the cause of those protests suppression by Beijing..The much larger group of peaceful protesters drifted away from the demonstrations and no longer participated. Most of the erstwhile leaders of that group, called the pan-dems or pan-democrats did not roundly condemn the rioters, not even when they presented their absurd “five demands, not one less!”, which included the non-negotiable demands that they all be granted amnesty and that their protests not be called riots…
One of Vittachi’s readers made the Dave Barry-like comment: “They are literally rioting to protest against being defined as rioters,” he said, amazed. “You can’t make this stuff up.”
…The stories the protesters told the Western media were almost all lies, but the Western media sopped them up. Police brutality was not the cause of the riots.
Edesess heavily cites Nury Vittachi. Vittachi lives in Hong Kong and has published a number of fiction and non-fiction books based on his experiences there. The Other Side of the Story: A Secret War in Hong Kong gives a detailed breakdown of the chaotic and tragic events in 2019. See more of his work at Friday Everyday.
Cover Image: A national flag-raising ceremony is held at the Shek Kong barracks of the Hong Kong Garrison of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in Hongkong, south China, Aug. 30, 2019. The Hong Kong Garrison of the Chinese PLA held national flag-raising ceremonies at its barracks Friday morning. The flags were raised at around 7 a.m. simultaneously at the barracks of the garrison, which completed its 22nd rotation Thursday. Source: Chinese Ministery of National Defense
Ian Kummer
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