Just to be clear: when Hillary Clinton heralds the 1.7 million Hong Kong protesters, she isn’t doing it because she feels any political affinity with the protesters. She isn’t doing it to impugn socialism of the Chinese Stalinist kind: sweatshops, child labor, Uyghur genocide,Tibet occupation, arming Rohingya genocide, neoliberal plunder of Africa, political repression, gulag, environmentally reckless, working people living in dog kennels. She managed that kind of oppression as US Secretary of State, most egregiously in turning Haiti into a sweatshop nation, in supporting dictatorships all over the world, & promoting the several US wars. The reason she’s doing it is to mock & get her knocks in against the very notion & possibility of human society free of exploitation, inequality, racism, war.
In the 1980s, I took a quite valuable course on interpreting media at the University of Massachusetts. During one segment, we were addressed by the NY Times reporter who covered the 1968 uprising in Czechoslovakia against Soviet rule. Media in the USSR was reporting it as an uprising against socialism to justify the occupation by Soviet troops. So was the NY Times, but to make it appear that socialism was an oppressive system. Several other media sources around the world, including Le Monde, were publishing manifestos, documents, reports from the Czech protesters themselves proving they were not trying to overthrow socialism but to democratize it, to get rid of Soviet domination, the gulag, & bureaucratic rule. The evidence for that was massive & irrefutable. The reporter agreed with me when I presented those manifestos. But when I asked him why the NY Times coverage corresponded with USSR coverage & didn’t report about democratization, he went all weepy that I had cornered him unfairly. Maybe he didn’t control what the NY Times published from what he reported. But, as a retired journalist, he could have just stated that rather than whimper like a whipped puppy when questioned about the contrast in reporting.
The point is that when media favorably reports such protests as Hong Kong or in Venezuela, their political agenda is entirely different from those of us who want to build societies suitable for human beings to live & love in. Such societies would necessarily exclude the Stalinist barbarisms of the Soviet & Chinese kind.
