My Take | Why I welcome the new national security law
- Hong Kong will be different, but it will be more prosperous and successful once we put behind us the anarchy and foreign influences
There is no such thing as freedom in its universality, only freedoms in their particulars. It may be that some freedoms are more basic to human existence than others, and that some, when realised, conflict with and undermine others.
But which freedoms are more basic or important?
Well, we will never agree on which is which. Most likely people would rather fight and go to war over the freedoms they themselves privilege against others. These they like to call “universal”. They say, “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” Perhaps, but which freedoms?
People say the introduction of a national security law will be the end of freedom in Hong Kong and therefore Hong Kong itself. That sounds deep at a rhetorical level but what does it even mean?
I agree the law will likely diminish, to an extent, freedoms of speech, assembly and the press, though not absolutely. But this is nothing exceptional. All such state security laws that have ever existed – and the United States has had more than two centuries of such laws – in democratic countries have diminished all those freedoms to a degree.