How dare you not stand with Hong Kong?
Don’t pretend you haven’t seen what you’ve seen
How dare you? Hong Kong has been in flames, liberty being crushed under the iron heel of despotism, and you stand by mute and idle.
Not everyone, of course. And obviously my question is not addressed to the many who are not standing silent. There may be little we can do, because China is big and far away. But my Twitter feed is buzzing with denunciations of the latest atrocities by the butchers of Beijing, as vile as Tiananmen and maybe worse. Voices are being raised. But others are not.
Where is our government? Too cosy with China for decades, under both parties, Ottawa displays a shameful lack even of rhetorical courage. Justin Trudeau called on Quebecers to fight Jason Kenney and Doug Ford. Yet he does not urge them to fight Xi Jinping. He speaks endlessly of human rights, and says Canada is back. Yet the thousands killed at Tiananmen are nothing to him, nor those now fighting and dying for the right to say even silly things. How dare you?
It’s especially galling in those who for years, even decades, have been preening about their superior morality. It used to be understood that virtue-signalling was obnoxious even if you actually were virtuous. Lately that understanding seems to have been replaced by the idea that provided you praise yourself sufficiently highly, you don’t need to behave very well. But what if you’re not just sanctimonious but hypocritical?
What if you’re in high dudgeon about a man not being allowed in a women’s bathroom even if the women don’t want him there, when the real problem is bullets and tear gas tearing apart old-style freedoms like free speech and free assembly in Hong Kong?
What if you’re full of rage because politicians you don’t like are liars, when the real problem is that politicians you do like are liars? What if you applaud Greta Thunberg’s fact-free diatribes against invented media silence on climate change, and nod and wink at Communist censorship that really kills, sometimes slowly and horribly?
Yes, communist. So I’ll add: What if you mock those who oppose communism, when its bloodstained philosophy denies human dignity in theory and smashes it in practice, leaving a pile of 20th-century bodies far higher and longer than anything Hitler managed, and is still killing today? How dare you?
What if instead of opposing Chinese tyranny, or the Iranian kind also now being challenged, you smirk about the decline of American power and urge us to accommodate the rising power in the East? What if instead of putting principle first you focus on the money we might make, and call it sophistication not venality or cowardice? What will you say when the reckoning comes due?
Perhaps you think it never will. Perhaps you deny the existence of God, an afterlife, a conscience or even a realization in this world that those who said nothing were guilty. After the Holocaust we said “Never again” but didn’t mean it, and today we’re in more trouble for defending Israel than for boycotting it. Perhaps you think God is on the side of the big battalions, and devil take the hindmost, without believing in either. Perhaps you say virtue is for fools.
If so, again, how dare you? How dare you virtue-signal if in private you scoff at honour? How dare you virtue-signal if in public you show no honour?
Consider Malcolm Muggeridge, whose life saw a long and complicated path through darkness toward the light. Initially so enthusiastic about communism that Britain’s Guardian newspaper posted him in Moscow, he made an unauthorized trip to Ukraine in 1933 to investigate rumours of mass starvation and sent back searing dispatches the Guardian cut, then fired him. He paid a heavy professional and personal price for telling the truth. But inside?
In his diary he wrote, after seeing peasants kneeling in the snow begging for bread, “Whatever else I may do or think in the future, I must never pretend that I haven’t seen this. Ideas will come and go; but this is more than an idea.” Supposedly it’s hard-hearted conservatives who put theories ahead of human beings. But Walter Duranty denied the famine in print, despite telling a friend that at least 10 million had been starved to death “but they’re only Russians.” Muggeridge’s aunt by marriage Beatrice Webb called his reports “base lies.” The Dean of Canterbury praised Stalin’s “steady purpose and kindly generosity” from the pulpit. Bernard Shaw said there was ample food in the Soviet Union. And so on.
Now consider: Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize. Webb was lionized. So was Shaw, and still is. There was no day of reckoning, at least on Earth. But Muggeridge never pretended he hadn’t seen.
How dare you not stand with him and with Hong Kong?
WHERE IS OUR GOVERNMENT? TOO COSY WITH CHINA FOR DECADES, UNDER BOTH PARTIES.