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Where to start? For nearly 40 weeks
hundreds of thousands of French people have been on the streets in anti-government
demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron's rule. Some have lost eyes and hands in the police response. The public has begun to view the smell of tear gas as a normal part of a weekend in Paris. France is 29 miles from the coast of England. Siri just told me that "Hong Kong is about 5,992 miles from London as the crow flies." So complete has been the British media blackout on the Yellow Vests that many believe, wrongly, that there is some British government order banning on any mention of "les événements en France." The truth is that there is no need for one. Like a homing pigeon in reverse the entire UK media has flown like a bat out of hell away from France all the way to Hong Kong (as they had earlier flown to Caracas until the big protests turned into the wrong kind of protests). There is nothing, except the shoe-sizes, of the demonstrators in Hong Kong that I don't know thanks to the veritable blizzard of in-depth analysis of the protestors there and their each and every demand. Protesters in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain can be executed, but we will never be told their names. And the hypocrisy of the media is just for starters. If a group of British protesters broke into the British Parliament and hung, for argument's sake, a Russian flag over the Speaker's chair it is "highly likely" that a commando force would quickly and violently overwhelm and arrest them accompanied by volleys of accusations about Russian interference. If a crowd of British protestors occupied Heathrow Airport in such numbers and so disruptively that British Airways had to stop flights in and out of the airport, causing massive financial loss, dislocation, and personal inconvenience, I promise you that their protest would have been cleared out by the above mentioned commandos on the very first day of their protests. If protesters in London were hoisting Chinese flags and singing the Chinese national anthem then, well, I'm sure you get my point. The struggle between the government of China and its citizens is no more the business of the British than it is of the Slovakians. It's true that Hong Kong was a British colony for 150 years but the least said about the shame and disgrace of how that came to be, the better, I promise you. Suffice to say that to acquire territory by force, followed by unequal treaty at gunboat-point to punish the actual owners of the land for resisting the British opium trade, is, even by British Imperial standards, extraordinary. So shameful is it you'd think the British would want to draw a veil over it. But not so. The British tell us that Hong Kong want democracy but nobody ever says that across a century and a half of British rule in Hong Kong the people there were allowed no democracy of any kind. They tell us about the justice system without ever mentioning that even today the ‘draconian' courts of Hong Kong are still stuffed by white English judges. They tell us about NGOs and "civil society" without telling us whose pounds and dollars the "NGOs" are stuffed with. In fact, these foreign-funded and guided organisations are carefully stabled Trojan Horses chomping their British and American supplied hay until the time came for them to be told to gallop, and gallop they now are. This is all plain hypocrisy! No other country in the world would have shown such forbearance in the face of foreign-sponsored rioting destruction and sabotage of the national economy as China has. If in the days to come China's patience runs out, it will not be before time so far as the great majority of Chinese citizens, including Hong Kong citizens, are concerned. China signed up to the one country, two systems in the territory. It did not agree to two countries, two systems. Not one inch of Hong Kong belongs to anyone but China. The days when foreign countries could impose their will on China are long gone. George Galloway was a member of the British Parliament for nearly 30 years. He presents TV and radio shows (including on RT). He is a film-maker, writer and a renowned orator. This article originally appeared on RT.com. |