The examples of Venezuela and Hong Kong

Dissident Voice
Date: October 20th, 2019
By: John V. Walsh

The summer of 2019 has seen a series of events in Hong Kong beginning with two massive demonstrations that called for the withdrawal of the Extradition Bill to Macao, Taiwan and Mainland China. The demonstrations were peaceful and the bill was quickly “suspended” and labeled “dead” by the Hong Kong government and then withdrawn by summer’s end, meeting the demand of the demonstrations.

But that was not the end of the matter. Over the summer and to this day smaller demonstrations, of hundreds or at most a few thousand, broke out, mainly taking the form of marauding with Molotov cocktails and attacks on police stations, subway stations, police themselves and even on bystanders. Another four demands were added to the original demand to bury the extradition bill. Some, not the majority, called for the secession of Hong Kong from China of which it is legally a part.

But these events did not simply evolve internally in Hong Kong and the rest of China. Although internal forces were at work, the US government had a hand in these events.1 Unfortunately, this readily accessible material has barely been mentioned, if mentioned at all, in the US mainstream media. The most recent and in some ways most blatant examples of interference in the internal affairs of Hong Kong takes the form of the bipartisan “Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act (HKHRD Act)” (H.R. 3289 and S. 1838, an identical bill in the Senate). On September 15 H.R. 3289 was passed in the House by a voice vote. By threat of sanctions and other economic and political measures, the HKHRD Act seeks to determine which laws the Chinese city of Hong Kong will legislate and which not. This is clearly interventionism on the part of the U.S. How would the US react to such threats from another country? How would the U.S. react if China informed us that it was going to put sanctions in place against the U.S. if we would did not change our laws that result in mass incarceration which is clearly racist in character?    [FULL  STORY]