Just Saying | It’s not only law and order, Hong Kong’s protest crisis is taking a tragic toll on basic humanity and decency
- Yonden Lhatoo says the breakdown of law and order is worrying enough, but far more troubling is the proliferation of pure hate that is tearing apart Hong Kong’s social fabric
“A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.”
Sounds like your pretty-much-average, friendly-neighbourhood rally outside any Hong Kong police station on any given night, but this was how George Orwell described a mob being whipped up into a frenzy of irrational hatred in his great dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Except that in Hong Kong, in the year 2019, there is no need for the state-sanctioned “Two Minutes Hate” sessions that citizens depicted in Orwell’s cautionary tale are required to attend daily – many Hongkongers are doing it for themselves in a citywide epidemic of ill will.
Just look at what’s happening all around us, on the sidelines of the mass anti-government rallies and violent clashes between protesters and police.