Real, Phony & Failed Revolutions: Hong Kong vs. "Extinction Rebellion".

it would be hard for me to say what is
the stupidest comment I've ever received here at this YouTube channel what is the stupidest complaint I've ever gotten but one of them may be somewhere in the top ten it's the complaint that when I record this show I dress up like a medical doctor or a research scientist we referring to this jacket especially people click a medical doctor for research scientists guess again alright guys it's just cold enough here in Taiwan that I I do feel like I need an extra layer on as I'm recording this now talking about two issues one of which is the ongoing pro-democracy rebellion in the streets of Hong Kong and the other which is the entirely phony rebellion in the United Kingdom in England called extinction rebellion now what do these two political events have to do with each other well they are forever in two solely linked in my own mind and experience because about five months ago now little less than five months ago I spoke to Roger Hallam so if you don't recognize the name Roger Hallam he's one of the three public faces of extinction rebellion and I would say he is the more respectable and more erudite sounding of the three major spokespeople who represent that movement so he's been interviewed on the news many times on many different news programmes by newspapers and this sort of thing and he's one of the founders one of the people who defined what that movement was in what circumstances did I speak to him I attended a vegan event there was a mass audience and Roger Hallam or his glowing Specter appeared before us by Skype or by some other teleconferencing software equivalent to Skype which is to say he was not there in person and then they took questions from the audience and I've stepped up and spoke to him and he replied to me so I was pleased to have the opportunity to in effect speak directly with Roger helm but it was in front of a live studio audience now the first thing I said to him was that he had given me a much more positive impression of his organization and its objectives in its methods in that lecture he just presented to this audience then I had ever gotten from his own website or from his YouTube channel which was true I had prepared had done some research before coming to this event and had a really pervasively negative sense of what extinction poems about and I put in the question how confident was he really in what he claimed were the hard facts of social science research what he claimed with the clear and indisputable lessons of history basically in which he just claims that this type of very marginal public protest brings about dramatic changes in the history of the world said right now in Hong Kong this is true four months ago or five months ago now right now in Hong Kong you see the pro-democracy protests that are tearing the city apart I could say that again today now four or five months later how do you think that's going to end that's a movement that represents a much greater population as much more force behind it it's really achieved the methodology that he set out it's brought the city to a standstill it's brought the economy to a standstill it's completely dominated you know the news and Parliament and the police and so on if you really believe in the methodology of extinction rebellion that would basically mean applying the same pattern of activism and disruption that we've seen in Hong Kong in the city of London or in the city of Paris or in the city of Glasgow Scotland wherever they manage to to pull it off if if this is what you believe in then the parallel between the two is striking how do you think the current protests in Hong Kong will end still today this is really a very meaningful and even terrifying question for all of us to reflect on now I probably know somewhat more about the political history of China than the average member of my audience the Tiananmen Square massacre the problem with that event historically is that it's not the people who were killed on camera at that location at that time it's the long shadow of people who disappeared in the weeks and months and decades afterwards the vast majority of the killings that mattered that snuffed out the Tiananmen Square produce a movement in China were not people who were killed by tanks or bulldozers or something at that moment at that time already every single person's face who attended the event was captured on film and video camera yes all that technology already existed and believe me the government of China had the staff to go through a hold of the footage and identify the people and so on and the people they couldn't identify you could interrogate someone else and figure that was people could be tracked down people's parents could be tracked young people's grandparents could be tracked down the whole web of you know what was initially a student movement so they were predominantly young people of course there were some some other people but still when you look at the footage which you mostly see your young people at the genome and Square protests all of their family connections or connections their colleagues their friends could be tracked down and silenced one way or another and with a terrifying inexorability this is what in the next several years would unfold in China not not a massacre in the sense of a unique moment in history you know sir like in history of India the Amritsar Massacre or the British military kills a group of people at one protest at one time in one square the problem is the Chinese government's habit shall we say of tracking down and extinguishing opposition now the situation now in Hong Kong you will notice that many of the confrontations between students and the police or between students and journalists sometimes they're legitimate journalist sums they're a sensible journalists who are suspected to be working for the Chinese government but it makes it matter very often the students become extremely angry if someone photographs their face up close and they start attacking that journalist or start attacking that police officer and I think that is because they're aware that the threat against their life will never end right you know it is possible that the government of China will wear kid gloves as the saying goes it's possible they'll talk to some of these young people and say look we've got your name on a list we're watching you we know exactly what you did during the protests we have videotape footage we have photographs and you know maybe we won't put you in a gulag today or tomorrow maybe we won't kill you and prison your family but if you don't conform all the way from now on it's gonna be game over it's it's quite possible they'll do that the current generation of the Communist Party they're uh they're genteel although menacing in their methods of repressing dissent and you know even a government is brutal and terrifying as Saudi Arabia you might be surprised if you start going over the human rights record how often it is that they hold back from just killing their enemies how often is they just have somebody come and knock at the door and explain what the situation is and ask people to comply rather than disappear so it's that's kind of the best-case scenario imaginable for young people more now again I'm sharing this with you because I think some of you might be looking with incomprehension at the ferocity of the Hong Kong protesters when indeed the the police themselves are quite nice towards the moment it sounds ridiculous to say but it's true the Hong Kong police who were on duty themselves they're not some kind of brutal terrible you know authoritarian force they're the normal police officers the city of Hong Kong and yet you know these student protesters really fight with fear of their lives and that's because it's not the police we're meeting them now face to face at this the problem the massacre is not going to happen here and now in the streets of Hong Kong over six months or over six years over a long period of time after the protests end if these young people and again they're predominantly young people I don't know if they're entirely on people so if if these protesters do not escape to Taiwan or California or Paris France if they don't escape to some other country if they don't get some kind of refugee status then indeed at a minimum their name will be in a list and it is quite likely they will be hunted down and killed so this gives the protests a very different sort of mood spirit tenacity there's nothing like the fear for one's own life and the sense that by participating in these protests already they have sacrificed their future they've sacrificed any possible career they might have if not put themselves in real peril of disappearing into a prison into a political re-education camp into being tortured or into being executed entirely now by contrast the man I spoke to you at extinction rebellion Roger Hallam he managed to get himself put in prison over rather silly and contrived circumstances where he went and had a picnic with a drone but the drone so that but the drone you mean here are remote controlled flying toy and it was just a toy but the toy didn't have a battery in it he intentionally set up situations so he'd get arrested but in fact it was impossible for him to fly the drone and cause a problem he had a picnic adjacent to the airport and nevertheless he was put in prison briefly and I assume played his case what you can see with all the British footage is that the the police in the United Kingdom are being as sympathetic as they possibly can toward what is ultimately a destructive form of public protest and I would like to announce very plainly that we can now say extinction rebellion has failed they may not say it's over I think it genuinely already is over and like so many political movements our time it has begun and ended right here on YouTube this isn't itself a reason to get on YouTube guys if you if you care about politics YouTube may not be the poetry of our times but it really is the political Agora of our times shall I say um anyway they are still to this day being interviewed by major mainstream news broadcasting companies still to this day those interviews are going on and on and nevertheless they're uploading videos to YouTube with 1000 views 1,500 views they managed to get a celebrity to appear and then maybe they get 3,000 views you know these these kinds of numbers alright so again if my own channel gets this number of viewers of course there's nothing surprising with this people only see these videos because they know me or because one of you literally emails a friend with the link or sends the link to somebody through Facebook that is the only promotion for this channel there's nothing else I don't even post to Reddit anymore I used to in years past and I lost patience with it I don't need I don't attempt to promote or advertise this channel in any way when you are receiving the promotion of being on the front page of the newspaper being interviewed on mainstream radio mainstream television again and again and you you present yourself as the leaders of a mass movement and a mass movement that has received a considerable amount of money in donations and as organization and so on behind it isn't it a worrying sign when in that context you're only getting 1200 views 3,000 views on YouTube so on and so forth when the world has simply gotten tired of hearing your message now again we have to compare extinction rebellion to the promises that define their movement and the methods they endorsed they said again and again this is not a protest it's a revolution it's a rebellion they said again and again that they had something new and different to offer that this wasn't the same as every other street protests that in before they said they were going to take over the British house of parliament by force that is not unprecedented in the history of England that's happened several times before in this view England they fail to do that in case you haven't heard what they did was a 100% typical series of street protests that accomplished nothing except except except it created the careers of the three leaders of this organization to now be talking heads on the news and opinion circuit especially in England especially in Europe and to some extent internationally and around the world is provided at least these three people with Fame and money and power and status and in every other way their movement is a failure right and among other things something they promised was to innovate was to do something new and different and as I've already stated look you can look at the footage of what actually happens at their protests there is absolutely nothing new all they did was get together a bunch of hippies on the streets holding up slogans written on cardboard and they called this over billion it's very instructive and very useful to contrast what's happening in Hong Kong right now alright in its spirit and in the terror of the people who participate what's going on in Hong Kong right now is a rebellion I wouldn't say a revolution but it is an act of rebellion and what they're demanding is simply democracy now you tell me how that's going to end I have the same question for you now that I had for Roger Hallam because Roger Hallam's claim it's not worth repeating in greater detail I find it completely phony and completely insincere is that if you just study the history of political movements you can thoughtlessly and recklessly and optimistically embrace this form of activism because it basically always works that you know well people wanted gay rights and then they got gay rights and people wanted civil rights for african-americans and they got supports every migrants it's an unbelievably facile and insincere interpretation of history every bit as specious and a phony and false as the dialectics of Marxism and communism were before it all right sorry but here off the top of my head I could give you a more meaningful summary of how it was in the United States that civil rights legislation got passed has a lot to do with the assassination of JFK has a lot to do with the guy who took over presidency in the United States immediately thereafter Lyndon Johnson and his wife Lady Bird Johnson at home up they tell you this there's a really specific legislative history and specific political context that was not created by rebellion on the streets it wasn't created by a bunch of hippies holding up placards it really wasn't okay and then you can examine that history and you can indeed reflect on what would be the implications for what we would do now in advocating for ecology veganism animal rights advocating against climate change or trying to improve aerial pollution ocean pollution what-have-you those might be interesting question to ask people like extinction rebellion are not asking those questions and they're not answering those questions and for me it will remain a tremendously memorable even if minor turning point in my own life that when I asked Richard Hallam straight to his face if you really believe this theory you're advancing well then look at what's happening right now on the streets of Hong Kong and you tell me what's gonna happen next because you're claiming that this is a cannot failed strategy for a bright and powerful future that this is gonna transform government that this is gonna transform public policy like clockwork this is the heartbeat of history you look back at the history of the world you use your social science methods and you've extracted this transcendent truth that is at all times consistent in all these different culture and political circumstances you tell me the protests that are happening right now in Hong Kong and this is what I asked them why do you think the end of this story will be any less tragic than the pro-democracy protests that we saw before in Tiananmen Square and the truth is Roger Hallam did not have an answer for that question then he still doesn't have an answer for that question now and that's why extinction rebellion is a failure because it's led by idiots