@leicam6:
The movement needs a leader that can stand up to China but also has the balls to call out bullshit behaviour from the protesters' side. The current leaders of the movement are either so caught up in their agenda or they're so afraid of losing protesters' support that they don't even address violence from their own side.
When a protester sets a civilian on fire because he had the audacity to express different views and then social media proceeds to start blaming the victim and excusing those sorts of behaviour, this is when I draw the line. When an elderly man gets killed because of a brick thrown by one of the protesters, and then a large response I see from social media is "he deserved it" and "he shouldn't have provoked the protesters", this is when I realize the movement lost its moral compass.
Just because I support the idea of democracy and freedom, it doesn't mean I have to support the means to it. The ends don't justify the means.
How do you propose one leader is able to stand up to China? You're talking about a regime that kidnaps people in the middle of night and for them to never be seen again. Look up the Causeway Bay Books kidnappings. China has millions of people locked up in re-education camps and there is no rule of law in the country. The rest of the world is standing by and watching genocide because China is rich and we gorge ourselves on Chinese capital and cheap goods. That the movement is leaderless is entirely by design because China refuses to play by the rules and makes up new rules as the game goes on. So, the protesters adapt and that's why it is leaderless.
There has been millions of people protesting and perhaps some of them have resorted to violence. It is unfair to condemn the entire movement. But even then, so what if there's violence? Literally every resistance and civil rights movement in history had violent elements to it because the people are fighting the entrenched system, that is what happens. The colonized throughout history didn't win their freedom from the colonizers by asking nicely and hoping the colonizers would let them catch a break, no, they resorted to armed conflict that was fueled by a sense of nationalism because that is what it takes. It is no different in Hong Kong. Hong Kong tried peaceful protests in 2014 and it amounted to nothing so some new measures needed to be taken.
The fact that they were able to get China to suspend and abandon the extradition bill showed that you can still stand up to China and achieve some results in a largely peaceful manner. I don't have an elaborate plan; I'm not a movement leader, but you know better than I what China is capable of and how brutal they can be, so I'm not convinced fighting fire with fire is really any more productive than a lengthy and painstaking diplomatic process attempt.
And I wasn't even talking about the violence against the police or the state. The police has their own ethical issues; there's not much to say that hasn't said about them already, but it's the protesters' violence against other civilians that bothers me the most. If the protesters can justify or even praise someone for brutally injuring or killing a civilian just because they don't share the same views, then those people need to be re-educated on the values of democracy and freedom.
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