Comments by "Alan Friesen" (@alanfriesen9837) on "All over for Hong Kong? China orders corporations to comply with new sedition laws" video.

  1. I don't agree that Hong Kong was on the verge of collapse, but I do agree that the security law needed to happen. It is draconian, but really, the protesters made a less draconian law impossible.
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  2. Hong Kong is not a Chinese colony. It is a Chinese city.
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  3. He's saying that pushing democracy on other countries is a white supremacist stand, and there's reason for suggesting it. Even non-white democracies like Japan and South Korea were pushed into democratic governments by the United States, the obvious exception being India. Fortunately for the East-Asian democracies, it's worked out pretty well. Democracies that are not predominately white demographically aren't really pushing democracy onto other countries to my knowledge. That seems to be the MO for Europe and the United States. And while I don't think that all democratic evangelists are racist, there are certainly a large number that believe that western culture, including liberal democracy, is superior to anything else. This is clearly an example of western chauvinism, and to someone on the outside that values their own culture, it looks a lot like white supremacy.
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  4.  @hamzasyed  I appreciate the amount of thought you are putting into this conversation. You certainly have some good knowledge and you're pretty smart. I would argue myself that there is a difference between perception and reality among the regular people that live in western democracies. Democracy, defined as decisions made based on a majority agreement, is as old as humanity most likely. It probably was invented in Africa because that's where we all come from. Most westerners firmly believe though that democracy was invented in Greece because that's what we were all told in middle school. And for most westerners, embracing democracy means embracing western civilization and accepting that western civilization is the culmination of political, economic, and until recently, technological progress. What you've described in your second point is the cleavage between western humanitarian idealists and western ideological pragmatists. Both groups are western chauvinists but the second group has a stronger grip on foreign policy within the strongest western countries. And even when one of the former gets into power in the U.S. or the U.K., they usually morph into the latter. That certainly was the case with Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, which is why many of their early supporters view them as sellouts. Western democracies absolutely install and support friendly dictators as long as they are useful. Once their usefulness ends, however, we're very quick to criticize their nondemocratic structure and to undermine their regimes in order to placate our more idealistic domestic populace. My point is that regardless of actual practices, the assumption that liberal democracy is both a superior political and fundamentally western system is ubiquitous in the minds of most westerners. And whether or not the liberal democratic missionaries that insist that other countries move towards adherence to this model are actually white supremacists, they are almost to a man (or woman) western chauvinists. Considering that western civilization is usually viewed as white (though certainly there are non-white influences) both by most people within western civilization and most of those outside of it, it's certainly understandable for non-westerners feeling this pressure to view it as white supremacy. It's also a usefully brutal criticism for those wanting to undermine the whole concept, which I suspect is the reason the panelist dropped the term.
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  5. Hong Kong has a huge future if for no other reason than because it sits right next to Shenzhen. Whether that future pivots away from international business towards a more domestic agenda is what we'll have to wait and see.
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