#paid protest

[jangillman]

[girlactionfigure]

[yourhelenwolf]

Paid Protest (2017)

[justsomeantifas]

what do you think about the current protests in hong kong? im hearing that theyre coming from us imperialist money...

The thing with any mass mobilization - including Color Revolutions - is that they are a manifestation (in some Spanishes, "Manifestación" literally means "Protest") of discontent. In some cases the target of that discontent is misdirected by opportunists looking to crack a hole in the Civil Infrastructure of a combatant State, sometimes disinformative propaganda is dispersed through unmoderated channels of communication, sometimes groups are even directly paid to protest & try & redirect the momentum of the mass, but not even the CIA can make a mass protest appear out of whole cloth.

At the moment it's too early to tell what vector the HK protests are moving towards. There's been talk of a general strike, but last time that happened it fizzled out. The locus of organization for this is a bill in HK parliament which would allow for extradition of dissenters to mainland China (I haven't looked much into the actual text of the bill, my Chinese is still rusty & most English sources don't quote it), but it represents broader discontent as well so it's tough to say what it's "really about".

There's an image I can't find that I saw floating around of a protest sign saying "the queen made us a jewel, the communists shattered it" or smth which also represents a trend within the residents - HK is/has been a very prosperous city for some after all. But to pin that on the movement as a whole would be the same as painting the entire Gille et Jaune movement as Antisemitic just because Antisemites chose that as a good opportunity to try and enact & normalize their garbage. Everything is Manifold, there is no True Universal, but that doesn't stop people from acting as if there were one.

Protests are time of pointing toward Contradictions. The question is to what degree those Contradictions are understood, because that inscribes their (dis)Solution.

Chuang generally has good opinions and good articles & journals, This is a good article abt the last round of protests a few years ago, and This is a decent interview w/ a participant.

Keep a keen eye to spot shifts in wind & propaganda, but also reach out to people participating, bc their lived experience is invaluable.

[thenosemilk]