It Could Happen Here - What We Can Learn From Struggles Past: Hong Kong

Episode Date: September 2, 2021

Researcher, scholar and activist JN joins us to discuss the tactics, strategies, and difficulties of the Hong Kong protests and what we can learn from common struggles Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Welcome to the worst happenings here ever. Bastards. Pod shit. pod shit. I'm Robert Evans. This is It Could Happen Here, a daily podcast about the fact that everything

seems to be falling apart, and wouldn't it be nice if we tried to do something better than the stuff that's falling apart? That seems like a good idea. Do you agree with me? My panel for today's episode? Yes, I agree with that general concept. That's Garrison

Davis, and who else is agreeing with me today is that christopher wong is is that christopher wong mildly agreeing mildly agreeing mildly agreeing wow well that's extra disturbing because you you you're in charge of today's episode so in brief when we did our first so you know if you're new to the show come back check out the first five episodes of the show. They're scripted, evergreen, kind of lay out our philosophy on the crumbling of society and what to do next. But one of the questions we had is, okay, it kind of seems like one of the only ways potentially forward without just accepting that everything's going to keep falling apart is some sort of big general strike that forces action on, you know, things like

climate that we can't really wait on anymore. And of course, one of the big questions is, well, all right, you get a bunch of people to agree to strike. How do you agree what to do with the strike? How do you agree what, like, the terms are? You know, how do you put together a list of demands? How do you get millions of people to agree to a list of demands and then fight the government in order to institute those demands? And I don't know the answer to that question. But there are some people in the world right now who did a version of that in Hong Kong. And today we're going to talk with someone who can talk to us about that process

and hopefully kind of give us some insight both in how it worked and what didn't work over there. And that might inform us on what we might do here someday in the future uh if you know that'd be nice maybe did i get it right chris yeah yeah this is yeah that's good enough thank you for that ringing endorsement yeah so you know okay so so to to work more of this out um i've brought in JN, who is a writer, researcher, and organizer with the Laosan Collective. He's currently based out of Los Angeles. And JN, do you want to talk a little bit about what Laosan is and then also talk a bit about how, for people who sort of forgotten or weren't paying attention at the time how the the hong kong protest started yeah sure uh thanks for having me excited to be here and to talk about this kind of stuff because i've been wanting to kind of you know talk about this

and discuss the way things have gone uh with the protest for a while um It's been hard to find the time, I guess, with our cascading crises and whatnot. But yeah, so I guess Lausanne, I'll speak briefly about Lausanne since, you know, I'm not speaking on behalf of the collective in this interview, but just kind of like talking about how we started and then everything else after that is kind of just my view of things. So Lausanne has members with kind of like different

leftist orientations from anarchist to more social democratic. And it's been kind of a lot to work through as you can imagine, but I think that also kind of reflects the necessity of our political condition, which is that they're really, in my view, there hasn't really been any internationalist groups that focus on Hong Kong from those different perspectives. At least

for me, when I was growing up, most of the kind of like radical Hong Kong folks that I knew would tend to just be, you know, we would join different, we would join other movements and stuff like that. Like there was never anything that was Hong Kong centered. And I guess stuff in the diaspora is pretty conservative. You know, the diasporic folks that I grew up with were pretty conservative. So there wasn't that kind of avenue for organizing, unlike other kind of Asian diaspora groups, like Filipinx folks have like this kind this very long history of radical diasporic

organizing. I don't really think Hong Kong has had that ever. I think that's why Laosan is this very broad tent, big umbrella type of org where we do collect a lot of folks who are progressive, left-leaning

to otherwise. I guess our general orientation is the kind of neither Washington nor Beijing line with varying degrees of general anti-statism in the mix. And I think, you know, I'm hopeful that this is helping to build the foundation for more of that in the Hong Kong diaspora and then hopefully in the broader Asian diaspora as I see it since I think the general divide tends to be kind of like you know radical Asian folks will be anti-US imperialists which is great but then specifically

do that by expressing support for states elsewhere and yeah you know that can that can take good forms and bad forms and whatnot so and I guess just really quick, we do both kind of organizing and writing and translation. Those are kind of the three pillars of the group, I guess, and the bedrock of our work is really kind of aiming to create international solidarity with leftists around the world to kind of amplify leftist voices in Hong Kong, but then also kind of create non-state-centric connections across Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific.

Yeah, and how do you, I mean, I think one of the big questions that keeps coming to me over and over again is, how do you overcome the resistance to internationalism that's caused by kind of, I don't know, conspiracism may not be exactly the right way to frame it, but this belief that, you know, your struggle for liberation is really just a CIA op or whatever, like this case of brain worms that keeps, that I see as a major barrier towards, you know, kind of functional internationalism in a lot of cases, particularly within the United States. What are some ways in which you've actually seen some luck in combating that? Yeah, I mean, that's really the million-dollar question, I think, which is like, you know, I think if we had figured it out, it wouldn't be

an issue. And unfortunately, it's growing, right? The problem's actually growing. So in many ways, from one view, you could say that we haven't been very successful in combating that. But I think some of the leading groups in that camp, the campus, I think are very well funded, and they have very powerful connections. When you say campists, could you explain that term briefly? Because I don't think it's something – it's certainly not something we've talked about on the show, and I think a lot of our listeners probably wouldn't be familiar with that. Yeah, sure. I mean, I'm sure Chris could speak much more about this. I feel like you have your expertise is kind of in explaining these very kind of deep left traditions and whatnot. But I guess my understanding is just very generally that campus will, you know, it's like the anti-imperialism that sees the U.S. as the kind of number one enemy and everything kind of is, you know, they're the primary contradiction, I guess,

to use some Maoist terminology, and that everything must be subordinated to that cause of, like, being against the U.S. empire. And usually that requires supporting what they see as, you know, abbreviate as AES, actually existing socialism states that kind of use, that are nominally socialist, nominally communist, and use all the kind of like imagery and trappings of that to kind of like maintain that political identity despite the kind of material reality of their politics

and their economy and all that. So yeah, I can tell more about that later maybe, but I think one thing that I've been chatting with a lot of my kind of like radical Asian friends who are, you know, I am very kind of obviously against these campus because they are so virulently against Hong Kong. But, you know, other folks that I've talked to have said, you know, they really kind of understand that viewpoint in the sense that it's a very emotional attachment, right?

It's like folks for, you know, folks, let's say Vietnamese folks, who their families were refugees and had to come to the US because of the Vietnam War, for example, then when you're the child of refugees and you're like, why the hell am I here in America? And then you start to learn about the history and background of what happened, then it makes sense that you would have this kind of very emotional attachment to AES, these actually existing socialist states, and those histories and those radical anti-imperial histories and whatnot, despite the fact that, you know, clearly history has shown that they have either betrayed their own movements or gone down in defeat and whatnot.

Which, you know, I think there's two ways to react to that. One is to kind of continue to cling to the fantasy, and then one is to try and figure out what's next, right? It's like, how can we either revive that or continue that in the ways that make sense in this world, right? And so I think, you know, I guess to answer the initial question, I think it is a little bit easier to, especially for, like, young, newly radicalized Asian folks, it's a little bit easier to maintain that fantasy.

And then, you know, I think the way that media, you know, social media and online media has gone nowadays, it's like it's becoming distilled into the most simple and understandable nuggets of that infographics and stuff like that so I feel like that entire ecosystem tries to make it so that people do stay within that fantasy

rather than trying to do the harder work of how do we extrapolate this like how do we extrapolate this or how do we adapt this to our conditions now yeah and i think you know i can talk about this for a little like a brief amount because i don't want to spend too much time yeah talking about these people but you know i like i think like like one way to look at them is so campism is a thing from from the the cold war, right? It's basically like, okay,

you pick, you pick one of your like two, maybe three camps. You've got an online movement. It's like, okay, you're either with the Soviets or with you with the Americans. Right.

And you know, part, part of what's happening here is it's like, that that's a very easy way to look at the world. And this is, this is why it's so easy to sort of like condense it into infographics. Right. It's like,

there's two sides. One of them's good. One of them is bad, but you know, this is like the, the thing that's's that's sort of the problem here is that the cold war is over like it's done it's it's it's gone right the communist countries are gone none of this stuff none of this stuff exists anymore and so you know and it's it's very easy particularly for the diaspora to sort of get stuck suck it's like back into this politics where well

okay well no no hold on there's a new cold war the cold war is happening again it's all the same stuff and you can just sort of like tack all the same symbols back on but you know it leads you to down these paths where you know and this is like something jn i think has dealt with a lot which is like you know when when when the protests start happening in hong kong all these people are like oh this is all the cia and it's like not at all it's you know it's sort of yeah so it's they they they come to see this world in a way that's sort of purely conspiratorial and purely sort of based in this old cold war stuff that just doesn't exist anymore yeah i think part of the problem is that there's been this consistent failure and this isn't even really a left or right issue. This is like a culture issue in kind of how to refer to places that are outside of the US or sort of, you know, in the old days,

the USSR's influence block, like you have terms like third world and now global south, and all of them are really um bad bad terms and i'm i'm we're going to try to have joey iubon soon but i've come to like the term the periphery to refer to those states that are kind of outside of or at least kind of mingling influences from those you know the major power blocks um and i but um, it, it, I think has led to this, that kind of binary thinking, kind of the, the failure to, I think the complexity of the actual global geopolitical situation leads to a failure, leads to kind of a rejection of that complexity in which everything boils down to either pro or anti, um, uh, socialism or whatever on a lot of

people's heads. And I, I don't think that is a particularly good framework for making good decisions. Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, that, that piece by Joey is really amazing. And yeah, I think, I think the reason, you know, a lot of times folks are just kind of like, well, you know, these, these campuses, these tankies or whatever, it's just like, they have no real world impact. So like, just don't bother, you know, don't, don know, these campus, these tankies or whatever, it's just like they have no real world impact, so like just

don't bother, you know, don't spend too much time arguing with them or whatever, but I guess the part that really bothers me about all that is, I think what you're kind of just saying, Robert, is like it's reducing the complexity of places outside the US so much that it's dehumanizing, right? It's just like

people in Hong Kong aren't full humans to these people because they see it's like the cia can just kind of parachute one or two people in and lead like a two million person march right as if hong kong people have no political agency of their own uh or you know understandings of how complex their own situation is right just this kind of inter-imperial entanglement that they're stuck in. So, you know, there's this book called Nothing Ever Dies by Viet Thanh Nguyen

that I would really recommend folks read. And I wish a lot of these folks would read it too because, you know, he's talking about memory in the Vietnam War, but I think the thing that really stuck out to me in that framework that he develops is like, you know, everyone is capable of doing right and wrong and uh it's it's the way that we remember things like the vietnam war for

example there are always good and bad sides uh that people um each side will deploy those different types of memory in order to like villainize others and lionize themselves, right? And then so I guess, you know, he sees the true task as being able to recognize the agency of all of us to do good and bad. And that that earned him a lot of hate within the Vietnamese community, I think, right? Because you're encouraged to, you know, in Southern California, you're encouraged to be very anti-communist in Orange County, that community, because that's the Southern Vietnamese diaspora. And then, you know, people in Vietnam saw him as still kind of like this compromised person who lives in the U.S., the Vietnamese diaspora.

So it's kind of like, you know, no way to win there. And I think there's a lot of resonance with that in the Hong Kong diaspora. So it's kind of like, you know, no way to win there. And I think there's a lot of resonance with that in the Hong Kong diaspora as well. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonorum. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

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On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian.

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head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me in a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands,

for those who find themselves audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I kind of want to move us along, if I can, to actually talking about the five demands and sort of the process by which, first off, like how, you know, and this is a thing that like a lot of people who marched in the streets during the Black Lives Matter protests last year, the uprisings, whatever you want to call them. the uprisings, whatever you want to call them, we kind of kept running into this wall of,

well, what do we want? And a lot of folks were like, well, we want no police. But also, a lot of folks were like, well, we just want to defund, or we just want to reform the police. And even some of those folks were like, we want to reform the police by giving them more money, and they'll hopefully kill less people. And it was, you know, I'm trying to speak in broad here, right? There were different local kind of movements and organizations that were more specific, but you had this tremendous amount of energy, unprecedented amount of energy out in the streets, but you did not have concerted demands. I think the anger was pretty concerted. I think everybody was more or less pissed about the right things, but there was not, there was at no point did we come together, I think, in a meaningful

way on a big enough scale to force into the mainstream a very specific set of demands. And that's not even really a criticism. It's just an acknowledgement of the reality, right? Whereas in Hong Kong, I think one of the things that was really successful was the messaging, the way that kind of the messaging of the movement united around these initially five demands, um, which I think was very successful. And I'm kind of curious, first off, how did that come about? did kind of take center stage very quickly, I think. And I think some people maybe were a little bit surprised by that. But it did, I think it, you know, it really kind of crystallized around because, you know, the big protests happened kind of like June 9th, June 8th, June 9th in 2019. And it was just like millions of people on the street. And, you know, the 2019 protests were so singular in many ways, like it was the biggest protests were so singular in many ways.

Like, it was the biggest political mobilization in Hong Kong history. And that had been kind of just, like, been boiling for the past, like, decade before that. And I think it was just the atmosphere was kind of, like, crystallized in the sense that everyone, like, just everyone was scared of what the CCP was going to do next. And I think that created this kind of common understanding for people to come together very quickly and easily around these five demands. And, you know, on June 12th was when there was like the first really big escalation of police brutality. And people were kind of like, you know, police kettled people inside buildings and then tear gassed them, which was just like the most outrageous thing.

And, you know, a lot of Hong Kongers either were formerly not, they didn't really care much about politics or they didn't really care much about police violence. Because, you know, that's been going on for a very long time against marginalized people in Hong Kong but I think just the fact that it happened to be certain set of protesters nonviolent protesters at that time that was what one of the really big kind of like breaking points and then on June 15th there was a there was a protester called Marco lung and he had set up on a scaffolding at the top of like a really tall shopping mall in this yellow raincoat and he had a banner that had some of these demands on the banner and then you know eventually he fell off the scaffold and died and that was really kind of

like you know a wake-up call to a lot of people about how dire people were feeling about this so there was a lot of emotion behind it that allowed people to come together around these five demands. So like full withdrawal of the bill, retraction of the characterization that the protests were riots, amnesty for arrested protesters, establishment of some commission into police abuse, and then Carrie Lam resigning and universal suffrage. So it's a really interesting set of five demands. And I think, I guess to get to your question, I think it runs the gamut between like, very doable to not so doable, I guess, right? Like, the universal suffrage one, I think is like, you know, that's there because that's been the demand from Hong Kongers for like a very long time, at least a decade before that.

So but then, you know, I think that's not I don't think anyone have really thought that was going to happen. The government was never going to concede to that. But, you know, the very first time I full withdrawal of the bill was very doable and it did end up happening very soon after the death of Marco Leung, right? So I don't know. I don't know if that helps answer the question a little bit. It's just like the five demands were very pragmatic in some ways, but then also aspirational in other ways. And that gave a lot of different people different avenues to like, come into it. And there was, like, as I understand, there was like an app, right? Like, can we talk a little bit more about like the kind of methods by which, I mean, was that more for actually voting on actions or was that one of the ways in which demands were kind of arrived at as well?

Yeah, so there's, it wasn't, I mean, it was Telegram. A lot of people use Telegram groups, but, you know, LIHKG, which is like a really popular internet forum. I guess kind of the equivalent is something like Reddit. And, you know, I wouldn't say that they were kind of like the centralized site for where like decisions were like made and issued from there but it was the kind of most active site where people would go to discuss uh strategy tactics and uh debate things um and you know this might get to some later questions about like the the role of the right wing and all this but i would say that the overall character of the forum was slightly more right-leaning. Or at least they were sympathetic to that position, right?

So I think in that way, that might be how things eventually, a year and a half later, started moving more towards the right, through that forum, yeah. But there was never like, okay, we're gonna run a poll, later started moving more towards the right through that forum. But there was never like, you know, there was never like, oh, okay, we're going to run a poll and then whatever the decision of this is, that's going to decide what we do tomorrow. Like it was never that formalized. And, you know,

it was decentralized in the sense that like people would discuss what would be the best tactic. And then you could just like split off into like affinity groups. And then you could choose to follow that if you want the next day or not. Right. And a lot of times it was like people would be making these decisions on the fly the day of at the front lines on those telegram groups and stuff. And how was it that I guess the question I'm trying to answer for myself is like, it seems like, you know, for a movement that was in it, you know, it internally had a lot of

ideological diversity and a lot of disagreement. It seems like there was more of a concerted agreement about goals in Hong Kong than I've seen in anything, you know, stateside in my life. And I'm kind of wondering how that process of consensus, or if I'm even kind of approaching it from the wrong perspective by thinking that there was that white consensus. Maybe that's something that just reached out internationally. kind of like what decentralization meant in Hong Kong and in the wider context of like the political culture there because like I was saying, like the protests in 2019 were really singular in the sense that like, it was like a really big cultural shift from previous political events in Hong Kong.

So like the Occupy Central movement in 2014 that morphed into the Umbrella Movement was this kind of like 79 day occupation of like different parts of the city but like most notably the central banking areas and it was it was like very much led by student protest groups you know like joshua wong and all the all the other people that you would have heard of um and then also these kind of like old guard political parties and they were the ones kind of literally on a stage kind of like issuing, okay, this is what we should all do.

We've come to our analysis, and these are the best decisions. And, you know, the umbrella movement was, you know, from one perspective, from just kind of the pragmatic perspective of like achieving its goals, like it's just a complete failure, right? It was just 79 days occupation, and they were just like swept away by the police and but it you know I think that the consciousness of what happened which was just like we're gonna sit here and then we're gonna have leaders tell us what to do I think that really kind of affected people when the umbrella movement

collapsed and you know in in that five years afterwards, as the CCP was kind of like ramping up its repression, that's what was kind of like the light switch for people was like, we can't replicate this kind of like follow the leader style thing anymore. And, you know, movements before that too, there was an Occupy Central in 2011 and 2012 as well, you know, obviously to coinc was like the Occupy. There was an Occupy Central in 2011 and 2012 as well, you know, obviously to coincide with Global Occupy.

That was also this kind of like we're all just going to camp out here at the plaza beneath HSBC headquarters. And there was there was kind of like the Occupy Wall Street type of like trying to build consensus and decision making there. consensus and decision making there. But I think it was so, it was like so hemmed in based on the act of occupation that that's why, you know, people also learned from that, that just,

you know, camping out is not really going to do anything in the Hong Kong context. And then that's where all this kind of like decentralization, be water and the fluidity and all that stuff that's where that sprang out of so I guess if I'm understanding this right the demands kind of had been like

floating around and then you have this sort of political consciousness you have all of this stuff anger crystallizing and then is it accurate to say that when marco young like fell from the building like holding the signs like that that's how it sort of like became officialized like the sort of the rage around that like crystallize it into a thing they were i mean the the demands like existed before that but i think the, when Marco died, that's when, like, that gave a lot of people who

were either kind of like, um, either apathetic or they like, didn't really agree or, you know, they saw no way to like, kind of participate in what became just kind of like, it was just like, every, you know, eventually everyone had an avenue into this, into I think that's what crystallized that, and it made the demands accessible to everyone. So I guess the question is, where did they come from? Who actually wrote them? Yeah, I mean, that would have taken place on LIHKG, right? And as far as I know,

there's no authorship or ownership over them. People are anonymous on that forum, right? So in that way, it's like somewhat like 4chan-like. And yeah, I mean, there was definitely voting on LIHKG. And I would assume at some point that happened to bring the five demands together. Yeah. So there's another thing I think that,

that watching it from the outside was really interesting about the protest that like very much did like does not happen in the u.s which was the way that the sort of more militant factions who are willing to sort of fight the police more like main developed and maintained like a working relationship with the the not the very non-violent factions and my understanding if it was just sort of solidifies after the storm of the legislative council um could you talk about that a bit more and like is is that actually like is that what happened and how how did that actually happen because that seems like a very important moment something that just hasn't happened in the u.s yeah i think it's i mean the way that that happened

i think was just so um like there were were so many factors that enabled that to happen. Because, yeah, for the longest time, like, in those previous movements, especially the umbrella movement, and then in 2016, there was something called the fishbowl riots, which was, like, you know, police and government officials were trying to, out street vendors because of licensing issues or whatever. And then just a whole bunch of radical folks, they're kind of like independence-leaning folks, politicians and stuff, kind of fought back on that. And it became violent. You know, that was when one of the protest luminaries, Edward Leung, he came up with that kind of slogan, the Free Hong Kong Revolution of Our Time slogan. That's when he was imprisoned after that, the fishbowl riots. So there had been this kind of push and pull or tension between the moderates and the violent militant factions for quite some time.

And so I think a lot of people saw the umbrella movement and its kind of non-success as being attributed to the moderates, right? And so I think there was a general mood that things had to change. But then I think the fact that I would say, again, the overarching thing that enabled people to come together was this kind of people trying to like have their view, you know, their political analysis or their strategies and tactics take precedence. And a lot of people saw that as just kind of like pointless squabbling or like divisiveness that the government was able to use to like, you know, defeat the movement, right? So I think all those things informed what was happening there. And then there were two kind of, like, overriding philosophies in the movement.

So one was, like, the idea of, like, having no big stage. That's what it was called. And so that was, like, not taking any, not having protest leaders, not having people make the decisions up top. And the second thing was this idiom, like, called Brothers Climbing the Mountain, which basically means we're all climbing the same mountain of trying to defeat

the CCP, it doesn't matter how we're doing it. So there was this really kind of like, the question of method and means was really kind of put into the backseat. It was all just kind of about the end goal. And there was that kind of related idiom of not cutting mat, which means even if you have differences with folks in terms of how you choose to go about contributing to the movement,

you never sever ties with people over this. And so those were the two kind of overriding philosophies in the movement. And I think it was definitely very helpful in keeping this kind of like movement unity, but it definitely had its drawbacks eventually in terms of like decentralization. I can talk more about that later. Or I can talk about it now. I don't know. Yeah, no, sorry. I was, yeah, I would like that. Yeah, no, sorry. I would like that.

So, you know, in terms of decentralization, I think it was just kind of like in the right place at the right time for Hong Kongers, I think. You know, they were very fed up with all the ways that things had gone before. And so a lot of people were more open to trying this out. And I think the fact that, you know, there was a lot of fear around surveillance and whatnot at the time in Hong Kong, and obviously it's gotten much worse, but, you know, so everyone, there was never really the kind of that overriding fear in the umbrella movement or the Occupy movements of like having to stay anonymous or whatever. Whereas here, I guess the fact that it just went hand in hand with taking more militant actions that a lot of people kind of, I think the really interesting

part is so much of what happened in decentralizing, you know, the political culture in Hong Kong was that it adopted a lot of leftist tactics, you know, obviously like black bloc and stuff. a lot of leftist tactics, obviously like Black Block and stuff. I think the word leftism or leftist in Hong Kong, it's like you don't touch it because there's no way to dissociate it from the CCP and Hong Kongers' minds, which is very topsy-turvy because there's nothing leftist about the CCP as it stands right now. But it's very hard to convince folks there of that. And so it's very interesting the way that people were able to adopt the tactics and strategies without any of the ideological underpinnings to it. And so the no big stage and the brothers climbing mountain,

you know, the no big stage and the brothers climbing mountain, that eventually became a way to shut down dissent, right? Because any time people wanted to have, like, principled debate or to talk strategy or to question the way things were going, then that, you know, that philosophy would be kind of trotted out and you could be accused of, like of undermining movement unity and whatnot. And I think people were so fearful of either being accused of that or of causing that. I don't think anyone wanted the movement to fragment.

But people were so averse to doing that that those two philosophies really became a way to silence any other thing other than what was dominant in the movement and that eventually became you know the exclusionary xenophobic like pro-trump thing you know in the tail end of you know 2020 after covid and a lot of stuff so that's how i see it going down yeah yeah and it is this um i think there's this problem you saw versions of it in ukraine too where as the as a movement kind of predicated on on confronting the government goes on and as the, the clashes get more violent,

kind of the right wing, um, picks up influence because those kinds of folks tend to be more prepared for the, uh, for the fighting. Yeah, exactly.

And I mean, there's never been any kind of like, I don't know, there, there, there's no kind of conclusiveness about the ideology of the front liners like the more militant folks um but I think there's there's kind of a general sense that a lot of the front liners were um a little bit if not right wing then they were more sympathetic to the

to that right because if they were fired up enough to, like, you know, do that kind of street fighting, then likely their view of China is, like, you know, along the more kind of xenophobic and nativist wavelength. One of the struggles, I think, is that, you know, for the goals, as they as they were elucidated of the Hong Kong movement that could have worked, but that would have eventually provided a problem when it came to the whole figuring out what to do next thing. there's kind of a limited extent to which those tendencies can potentially coexist. And it is one of those things you have to think about, like, if you happen to get a broad movement, you know, like, again, looking at Ukraine, there's been this kind of very awkward compromise with the far right, which is a minority party, but, like, that compromise has led to some very ugly things happening over there,

including, like, the arming of a kind of a militant neo-Nazi movement, which is like. Yeah, and I don't know, like when you're there in the moment and you're just trying to deal with the state, I don't know how you entirely avoid that. Right. Because you need front liners. And if some of those folks believe fucked up shit, but they're going up against the cops, like, what are you going to do? Exactly. And, I mean, I guess it's, I don't think it's any small coincidence that, you know, those kind of, like, fascist Ukrainian people showed up at the Hong Kong protests, right?

And, you know, I think a lot of the frontliners who, like, took photos with them and stuff had no idea who the hell they were, right? They're just like, hey, like I think the, the overriding sentiment was like anyone who's, who's going to like show us support is that's good for us because we want this kind of global visibility to put pressure on China. That was just how basic it was and very understandable.

And, you know, so obviously those images were trotted out all over, uh, you know, Twitter and stuff to show, okay, well, Hong Kongers are fascists and whatnot. But, yeah, I think it's much more complex, like you were saying. It's just like when you're there, what do you do?

It's like you're not going to stop frontliners while they're fighting the cops to, like, have principled debate, right? And at some point it's just like when is that going to happen? at some point it's just like when is that gonna happen and I think the Li h kg as an internet forum, I think In some ways it could make that very possible But in other ways, I think it makes it much more difficult right because you're you're having these discussions with anonymous people who don't You know, obviously if you're anonymous on a forum it kind of like gets rid of so many Boundaries of like accountability and how you would treat each other with respect in a debate

about your shared goals and stuff, right? So, you know, I think decentralization was very important to Hong Kong in that moment, but I think the right wing folks, you know, who are a very small minority, I think they were able to instrumentalize those two philosophies very well and manipulate it very well to, like, position themselves as, like, the true inheritors of the movement by, you know, forcing through this idea that they were the ones that were protecting these kind of, like, secret like unity movement unity and uh no splitting and and all that stuff right and you know i think what i've heard from from leftist folks over there is that you know obviously the left is very marginalized in hong kong but what i've heard from leftist folks is that just like no one had the means either the means or the heart to fight back against that because i think the conditions just weren't right you know the people were living in such like everyone felt

like they were steeped in this daily kind of like extremity that everything was just like crisis mode and to ask people to slow down or to like take non-extreme measures became extremely difficult. And I can totally understand that. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's something we've seen in Portland too. Just this, not with the right wing so much, because there obviously has never been really any collaboration between right and left. But with this kind of, um,

if what you're suggesting isn't more extreme than what's been done before, um, then, then why would we listen to it? You know, this, um, which is,

I think a product of trauma as much as anything else. And I don't know, like that I think is one of the things you have to solve if you're actually going to like win, um obviously you know winning is a separate matter altogether like we've got i think there's a lot of lessons in what happened in hong kong um and one of those lessons is that uh it's pretty easy for the state to win yeah and i i forgot to mention this before we were talking about the five demands but i guess just just to jump back really quickly i mean there was, there was a sixth demand, right?

Yep. And, you know, that cropped up around October 2nd when, like, a cop shot a teenager with a live round. And, you know, it cropped up for obvious reasons because of that in protest chants all over the place. But that never crystallized into like a quote unquote official thing. Right. Because I think there was still that kind of barrier to the idea of police abolition for a lot of folks, I guess.

And cause it's the, it's the first time, you know, this is the only, or I guess this is the time in Hong Kong where the most people have had the most anti-police sentiment in its history right yeah um like 70 of people kind of like disapprove of uh you know how the police conducted themselves or whatever during the protest so um it's i think it's a start i

think it's a good place for to like plant the seeds of abolition, but I think that kind of shows the dynamics of what became official and then what couldn't become official in terms of those demands. Because I'm assuming on LIHKG, it's like a closed forum, so you can't join and discuss if you don't have a university address or whatever, so that's why I wasn't on there a hong kong university address um there was tons of

debate there about you know this idea of police abolition but i think it eventually also this is kind of a similar thing between the abolish the police or defund the police debate here which is like a lot of people saw the sixth demand as reform, like, we need to just like fire every single cop, and then rehire like the entire force, right? And they thought, we just need to clean house. That's like the bad apples thing, right? And then other people saw that as more like, we need to actually confront the practice of policing, practice and concept of policing. So I guess because there was that divisiveness over what abolition means, abolition or reform, then yeah, that's why it never took root as something official.

Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters

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i guess could you talk a bit about how the sort of like the how the like street fighting tactics spread because i know i mean but both both how they were developed inside the movement then you know because like like after that i mean i i remember there were these protests in indonesia in 2019 and like those people were also you know they they were doing the like water stuff and that formula sort of spread really quickly but i'm excited i know also that like they're there i saw some of these like they had these like really detailed infographics on like uh like you know this is this is how you form people in a line this is everyone's role this is what equipment you need so how did that stuff like appear and was it just spreading a telegram or yeah i think um and i think that's one of the ways i i guess this kind of connects actually

to the very first question was which is like how do we confront or like try and deal with this the campus which is like one of the ways we tried to approach it through lausanne was just kind of like this exchange of tactics actually is something that we can share transnationally. Because obviously states are collaborating in terms of exchanging strategies and weapons and munitions and all that stuff. So we should be kind of collaborating in the same way. And I think that's something that Hong Kong had to offer the world. In terms of how that actually happened, it's kind of interesting, right?

Because I was saying earlier how I feel like a lot of the protesters adopted Black Bloc without adopting any of the ideology. And then maybe it was, I think that seeing that similarity for a lot of folks online, like I think it was all like viral videos, right? That people would just encounter on their timelines without any real context of like what the hell was happening in Hong Kong.

Seeing clearly young kids putting out tear gas canisters with pylons and water and stuff, that's something immediately that you learn within 30 seconds that you don't have to, I don't agree with their aims or I don't agree with any of that. Using the umbrellas to block out security cameras and all that and tear gas and stuff. It's just like these things are so portable visually. And like we were saying before, in terms of infographics where there's drawbacks to that,

I think it's like the 30 second clip on like TikTok or Twitter or whatever happens to be. It's like that is the flip side of how social media is actually fucking amazing, right? Because it's just like you're getting this instant kind of political education and also like street fighting education just like that and without actually seeking it out, right? Because I think that's the key part. People who might be predisposed to being against what Hong Kong is trying to do or what they stand for and that type of thing,

you know, falsely or otherwise, that might just, like, be retweeted onto their timeline. And I think that's the kind of beautiful thing about Twitter that I really love. And I'm pretty sure that's how it's spread. I don't, you know, Lausanne tried to put on these formal exchanges where we would talk more about that. But I'm pretty sure that it was mostly all just viral.

Even mainstream media was picking that stuff up and sharing those videos because they want the clicks and they want the, yeah. Yeah, I think you're really hitting on something there with the spread of visual information because that's something we definitely saw last year in the states is a lot of people who were newer to protesting picking up on the visual cues that they saw from hong kong coverage and trying to replicate it um and for a lot of the time it didn't actually work out that

well like i remember like the first few weeks in portland we would see people like carrying around pylons but not knowing no what not really knowing what to do with them just because they saw people do this before online and then after a while we started to see them slowly figure out how to actually extinguish tear gas canisters sleeping with thing with leaf blowers and stuff. We see they first use the rhetoric, they first use the aesthetics, and then slowly they learn the actual practical skills.

Because you can't just learn something by watching it. You have to also kind of do it. It's trickier. You sometimes can, but you generally kind of have to practice the skills well. We saw that a lot and one thing that people never really learned how to do well but they kept the rhetoric of it is the whole like be water thing that's something that no one really figured out at least here in portland

it was like it would get chanted a lot people would say it but like it didn't actually do you weren't actually doing anything um and i think that is kind of like that is kind of the flip side of having something so reliant on like infographics and just like viral footage is that you'll think you're prepared for something because you've seen it and then when you're actually doing the thing you're like oh this is actually very different than sitting in my bed scrolling through twitter uh This is like, it's a whole different thing. But still, it's still incredibly useful, right? To have that base knowledge in the first place is very useful.

But you have to remember, you can't just think that you can watch it and then go do it immediately. And I was wondering, from your perspective, when you saw stuff happening in the States last year, and we saw a lot of aesthetic you know, like, a lot of, like, aesthetic mirrors of the Hong Kong protests, were there anything, was there anything that you think people really succeeded in? Or was there stuff that you think people kind of tried to replicate but kind of failed at? I mean, that's a really good point. And I think that kind of gets to what Chris was asking as well, in terms of just like, I feel like there had to be also the strategic exchange to match the visual exchange inons is just like you actually had to have like three or four dedicated people like one person to hold a pylon one person to have the water one person to like you know all these different things that really do need to be coordinated and then also like you said practiced uh before you can get it right and um i don't know i mean there i think just so many of the tactics like you know stopping tear gas with umbrellas is

not super effective right because it's just like first of all the the rounds are extremely you know they move very fast and they're very hot and then they're it's also not going to actually shield very much from you right so um i think visually it was very striking and it it's very helpful in terms of surveillance um but that was something that happened in hong kong and also happened over here that i saw that i was just like um that's not super useful um but i think i i have been encouraging people to to bring those out more still umbrellas and stuff because i've heard in toronto at least that the cops are like using surveillance drones yeah um umbrellas are great against cameras and

they do have a lot of advantages compared to hard shields in a lot of situations but of course when you're facing like heavy munition fire then they're they're not as useful yeah and i saw you know like i saw a lot of inventiveness with the heavier shields in Hong Kong in terms of using plastic barricades, but then that's not super portable, right? So then I saw a lot of people making them out of those things that help you float and swim because they're super light, but then they also reflect tear gas very well, the canisters. So I didn't see so much of that in the U.S. I saw people use more, like, big wooden boards and, like, you know, I don't know, street signs and stuff like that. So maybe that's just a difference in terms of, like,

what material is available to you and stuff. But I think the emphasis on mobility was a lot more in Hong Kong rather than the U.S., where it was just like the actual emphasis was on luring police to a location and then being able to quickly run away so that they're stretched so thin. Right. Like that was the that was the be water tactic. But yeah, the states did not do that at all. You know, well, I would say like, OK, I don't think the people who like said be watered that at all you know well i i would say like okay i don't think the people who like said be watered that at all but like i remember like in in the beginning in chicago before anyone was coordinating anything it was just a bunch of people running around like that actually did happen yes like that was yeah the police like in chicago collapsed and the reason they collapsed was that there's like you know there's just 600 people just on every street corner there were absolutely a few cities where that did happen and

um but generally from my experience at least on parts of the west coast there was a lot of a lot a lot of chanting about b water while you stand in front of a police station for six hours and there were definitely actions where people did that you know and would would go and and and you know get away with some mischief because they were willing to move quickly and not stick around. But yeah, there was a lot of chanting be water while repeatedly heading back to the same police station. You know, I wonder about that, like, because it seemed like like once this seemed like like once you were in Because at the very early stages in the US, my impression of it was it was just like... It caught everyone off guard,

and it was just a bunch of random people. And it's like they seemed to just do it, maybe just by the fact that they weren't very coordinated, and so it was decentralized just sort of... Just by the nature of the fact that it was just a bunch of random people but then when you started getting these sort of like we had another phase in chicago that was it was like it worked really well but it was there's sort of there's like a bunch of anti-statue protests and it was like

the anti-statue people would they would just like surround uh like a statue and they would just throw things at it and that was very much more similar to Portland, I guess. So I don't know. Part of me is wondering whether it was like, there's something about the organizational structure that in the States where people, that like heavily favors getting a bunch of people to go to one place and sitting there

in a way that didn't happen in Hong Kong. I think it was that there was a certain point in the protests in a number of US cities where you still had intense interest in people being out in the streets, but you hadn't had, number one, there wasn't necessarily a concerted agreed upon list of demands, but also there wasn't a clear understanding of how to achieve them. Like, you know, in Portland, there was a point where the hardcore folks,

the folks showing up every night, pretty much we're all in agreement that like, yeah, we don't want any more cops, but there was also not a white agreement on like, well, how do we, what's the path to that?

Is it, is it showing up and trying to make their lives miserable every night? Like, is it, there was kind of a, there was a, there was a point at which their motivation to be on the streets was there,

but the understanding of how to achieve the goals was not. And so folks were... You would see the same thing being done a few times without it necessarily making progress. And eventually, you know, people did move on, but it was this, this thing of like, I think what you need, if you're going to actually force through significant changes is, um, a continually evolving understanding of your goals and methods. Um, and that's, it's a really hard, like I'm saying, this is what's necessary.

I have no idea how to do that when you've got this very decentralized large group of people out in the streets. You don't have, you know, leaders or a central organization. In fact, having those things is going to endanger people in the movement because that stuff always gets infiltrated, you know, or winds up to be in some other way problematic. So it's kind of, I'm acknowledging this as a problem, and I don't want that to mean like I'm pointing at like activists in Portland or activists in wherever and saying, you dummies didn't figure that, no one's figured it out. We don't know, like nobody knows how to do this yet, because it hasn't been done. But that's clearly where I think

you can see, that's where the problem is, is that you get these situations where there's motivation, people are willing to be out in the streets but there's also not outside of be angry and in the streets there's not necessarily a clear understanding of like well how okay how do we what are we trying to achieve specifically and how are we achieving it like how are we furthering that golden eyed yeah well I'm not sure if I mean because eventually you know street fighting I don't not really like lost luster, but people were just kind of like, what is this doing in Hong Kong as well? And it's, you know, eventually it stopped because all the kids who were doing it were like traumatized or bodily, you know, exhaustion or mental exhaustion and all those different things where they were all arrested, right? So it just kind of petered out like that. I think the problem was that it was very anti-CCP for most of it, but then I think eventually

it became just so anti-police that I think a lot of people eventually lost sight of what, yeah, like you were saying the goal was or what what's the best way to achieve what we want and if it was just continually attacking the police on the street then it wasn't going to accomplish that what i mean no no yeah yeah and i don't want any of this to come as like criticisms it's more just like a well this this didn't do it you know like there's still cops right like if that's if that is the goal, and for some people, right, for the broader tens of millions of Americans in the streets, there was never that kind of a consensus.

It was much more muddled. But the dedicated activists, there was a consensus, but it also didn't, it ain't done yet. So I think there is, like, there's a continuing question everybody needs to be asking themselves, which is like, well, how do we get from A to B, you know? Or A to Z, as the case may be. Is there any places that people can go to learn more about this type of stuff online,

or any resources that you would like to share? Yeah, I mean, of course, I'll plug Lausanne in terms of our website. You can go to lausanne.hk, and then all of our social media stuff like that. I don't know, yeah, if folks are more interested in, we're trying to put together a kind of non-status anti-militarist coalition soon, and our first event is gonna be hopefully in a month or so, to try and provide some solutions to what we see as kind of like anti-war activism

that is like, it's just about kind of marching from A to B and then holding PSL signs and answer coalition signs and stuff like that. So I guess I'll just pre-plug that for now and keep an eye on that. Great, yeah. And thank you so much for coming on and talking with us yes thank you very much topic yeah thanks for the invite happy to be here this has been it could

happen here talking about a place where it did in fact happen and then yeah it did it didn't happen enough yeah and it didn't happen enough here either, and we have a lot of questions in common. I hope nobody thinks when we say we're going to talk about how to potentially come to agreements about a list of demands, and even of a general strike, that we're saying, here's the solution to this. I've said a couple of times, I think the problem confronting is getting a mass movement to agree on a list of demands and then take mass concerted action to force them like is a is a a cultural task uh probably exceeding in difficulty the moon landing um so no like we're not we're not coming here

trying to say like here but like here's what everyone needs to do it's more of like well this is a question we all need to be asking ourselves and i think our role in that is to be asking that question of some people who have spent a lot of time trying to practically ask that question in another part of the world and learning what we can from that example, because we don't have a tremendous amount of time, so we should probably be studying. Yeah. You can find us on Twitter at HappenHerePod and CoolZoneMedia. You can listen to other episodes of It Could Happen Here five days a week, Monday through Friday, on this feed. And other podcasts, you know where to find them,

Find the Bastard's Worst year ever, that kind of stuff. Thank you for listening. We will, we will be back in the next, in the next day or after the weekend, whenever this airs. Allegedly. Allegedly.

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