Leftist quandary: Hong Kong protestors wave American flag, sing our national anthem

Don't be a coward, Lee; quote me so I can see your thoughts. But since I happened across this anyway, I actually hope Trump, like Obama did in Iran, stays out of a foreign conflict. You've seen enough of my posts to know that I believe the U.S. taxpayer is quite tired of paying for the defense of Europe, Japan, Israel, South Korea and other countries and I support the closing of all overseas bases.

The point of my OP was simply to point out how many American-hating leftists are quite uncomfortable with any signs of patriotism and how they must be in a quandary seeing foreign POC celebrating the American flag in a way to similar to what normal Americans do. Add to this the recent tendency of liberals/progressives/socialists to equate virtually any display of patriotism to white nationalism and you can see how I'm quite entertained by all of this.

 

I agree with this; the point of my OP was simply to point out how many American-hating leftists are quite uncomfortable with any signs of patriotism and how they must be in a quandary seeing foreign POC celebrating the American flag in a way to similar to what normal Americans do. Add to this the recent tendency of liberals/progressives/socialists to equate virtually any display of patriotism to white nationalism and you can see how I'm quite entertained by all of this.

But there is little chance Trump will commit any military assets to interfere with China. If he does, he will little popular support for any sort of intervention...

 

Yes, lots of ironies here. But ...
... when a Chinese person waves the British or American flags, that's not an expression of Chinese patriotism. It certainly won't be seen that way by ordinary Chinese people. We got spoiled by the pro-Americanism of East Europeans, who would have been happy to see the 82nd Airborne descending from the skies onto their soccer fields. But there, it was the Communists, the quislings for the Russians and the Russians themselves who were the occupying imperialist power.

China is totally different. Sure, their educated classes probably are able to coolly evaluate the American role in their history -- we were by far the least worst of the imperialist powers. They're probably like educated Iranians who haven't forgotten Mossadegh, but aren't going to be childish about it, especially when they can sell us their stuff.

If you go to Cuba, every other bus and taxi has little American flags flying from it. I'm not sure what that means ... a kind of silent protest at the horrible economic mess the Cuban Communist leadership has led their country into? I doubt that it's a call for another Bay of Pigs. It's probably a call for Yanqui tourists to feel welcome and incidentally to spend a little money. In its way a call to end the embargo. Or maybe the Communists have so screwed things up in that beautiful country that they really have managed to extinguish all patriotic and national feeling among ordinary Cubans, few of whom remember when their country was an American brothel.

What was going on the mind of that person who waved an American flag? Did he think that would bring American 'intervention'? Or was this an MSS agent (look it up) preparing Chinese public opinion for the crack-down. Unlike Cubans, the Chinese people are very happy with what their Communists have presided over in their country, economically.

Grant immediate American citizenship to all citizens of Hong Kong. Except the MSS agents.

 

Hard to imagine they average uneducated trump supporter even knows where Hong Kong is and what their issues are...The just want to babble and bash the "left"

 

Did not "sell" it....Part of treaty to hand it over .in 1997...Now go blame Obama

 

Hong Kong protesters are sort of in the position of walking point. What's gonna happen is gonna happen and there ain't a damn thing they or anyone else can do about it. Brains are gonna be hanging in convolutions out of skulls.

 

The absence of anything close to authoritatively pointing it out is what made your post a complete failure.

 

I can't help it that you refuse to ingest virtually any information that doesn't emanate from your echo chamber. I've posted links, but you have apparently failed to read them?

Once again (and this time I'll provide info from the propaganda rags you more than likely follow):

Slate points out that there is virtually no difference between patriotism and white nationalism:

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/11/trump-nationalism-patriotism-difference.html

The far left extremist Adam Serwer spews forth much of the same for The Atlantic:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/trump-white-nationalism/595555/

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/reagan-nixon-trump-white-nationalism/595465/

And this, as I know you'd never seek this out on your own:

The findings reveal a deep fissure between the political left and right in how each defines patriotism. Those findings indicate that America’s political struggles are actually reflections of a struggle between two very different underlying worldview.

https://townhall.com/columnists/tim...ives-see-patriotism-very-differently-n2424874

 

+100,000. You give me no choice but to nominate this as Post of the Year.

 

"Why is it that the left-of-center PEW Research organization demonstrated conclusively that conservatives are generally more knowledgeable about civics, law, world affairs and foreign policy, economics, as well as geography than liberals?

The results were not even close!
To quote: ““Republicans generally outperformed Democrats on the current quiz. On 13 of the 19 questions, Republicans score significantly higher than Democrats and there are no questions on which Democrats did better than Republicans.”

That Democrat-Liberals didn’t prevail on a single qualification is a curiously charitable way to describe the results, which went from previous blowouts to a complete shutout.

“Those Pew results are confirmed by some surprising other sources. According to a New York Times headline….“Poll Finds Tea Party Backers Wealthier and More Educated.” Shattering widespread myths, that survey revealed that Tea Party supporters were more likely to possess a college degree than their counterparts (23% to 15%), and also more likely to have completed post-graduate studies (14% to 10%). Tea Partiers were also more likely to have completed “some college” by a 33% to 28% margin, and substantially less likely to have not completed high school than non-supporters (3% versus 12%), or to possess only a high school degree (26% versus 35%).

Those results will probably come as a rude awakening to [Democrats].”

 

It's a universal human characteristic, if not a noble one, to want to feel that one's caste is superior to some other. Young leftists are mainly college graduates, although today I don't know if that means very much in terms of actual knowledge, and they see the stereotypical conservative as a religious fundamentalist who works behind the counter at B&Q advising customers about the right sort of circuit-breaker to buy. (Well, they probably wouldn't know what B&Q is and probably not even acircuit-breaker but you get my meaning. Or maybe that's just my caste prejudice.)

Do you remember this:[QUOTE/"If you put everyone's mouths together in this video [ of a rally of Trump supporters], you'd get a full set of teeth," says Politico reporter Marc Caputo in a tweet.[/QUOTE] He got into some trouble for saying that, but it's how young Lefties feel.

What a contrast to the Old Left! With a white working class, in the 1930s, far more socially backward than today's, they just said, "False consciousness, which will be burned away in the fires of the Class Struggle," and they rolled up their sleeves and proceeded to wage that struggle, building the CIO in the process, bringing together Black and white workers (the auto industrialists used to break strikes by bringing in poor Blacks -- so the Reds made sure that their new unions were openly committed to Black rights, got the leaders of the Black community on their side, and went on to win).

These effete snobs don't even deserve the appelation of "Left"! The old Commies, regardless of their higher loyalty to the "world's first workers state" on the other side of the planet, would not have dreamed of burning an American flag, and if someone had tried to do so at one of their meetings, they would probably have assumed he was a rightwing provocateur and would have beaten him to a pulp.

 

Fortunatly Trump has expressed strong support for Hong Kong getting Liberty and freedom. Just kidding.

 

The tea party is dead!

 

he already has sided with Xi... course after the next person he speaks too he may change his mind again

 

Yes, and with Trump's, or anyone else's support, and five dollars, you can get a cup of coffee.

 

It's a little more complicated than this. You are not wrong in the main burden of your argument, but ...

(1) There is a spread of Leftist opinion. The whole of the Left is moving further Left, like a slow ocean current carrying boats whose crew don't realize they're in motion, but ... there is still a 'patriotic left' ... let's call them old-fashioned liberals. Then there are 'Progressives' ... they don't burn flags, but aren't unhappy when it happens because don't you see, it's just a piece of colored cloth, and didn't you know that the highest expression of patriotism, etc. Some of these people pretend to be patriots when they defend smashing the statues of Southern generals ... TREASON it was, you see. Makes me laugh.

Then we go on out to the folks who are pulling along the rest, the real Left. They have a deep, visceral hatred for America, for many reasons. Some of them express this by burning flags, others express it by using Howard Zinn's textbook to teach history in high school and college. The latter is a much more effective way of burning the flag.

Anyway, we mustn't put them all in the same boat. All their boats are moving in the same direction, yes, but some are in the 'lead', if you can call it that.

Note that the Hard Left -- Marxists -- originally scorned patriotism of all sorts. They wanted to split society along class lines, and they saw patriotism as uniting workers with the bosses, making them tools of the latter.

But that was when they were out of power, before 1917. A few years after the Russian Revolution, when the rest of Europe's workers didn't rise up and emulate the Russian Bolsheviks, some of them began to change their mind.

The newly-formed Comintern found that 'bourgeois nationalists' from European colonies -- the young Maos and Ho Chi Minhs -- scorned by Woodrow Wilson with his Right-of-Self-Determination (for white people only) -- turned to Moscow. So the Marxists became more friendly to Third World, anti-imperialist nationalism (which is the extreme of patriotism).

More than that -- they started to find some merit in European nationalism -- including that most potent of all, German nationalism. No time to explicate it all here, but if you're interested click on 'National Bolshevism' and the 'Schlageter Line'. (The latter may be a bit esoteric if you're not already familiar with Russian and German history of that period, but the first link is very accessible.)

The American Left, even those who looked at Soviet Russia as their model. has always pretended to be patriotic since 1936, and the mask grew into the face for many of them, or they recruited many new members who were American radicals first, "internationalists" second. I know that's hard to believe but it's true.

But that was then, when, in their own way, the Left loved the American working class of all colors. Things have changed. The American workers proved unresponsive to the Left, so, by the 1960s, the new generation of Leftists began to lose interest in them, and look to other ways to bring down the Empire.

Some turned to terrorism, some became very active cheerleaders for Third World leftist nationalism-plus-Marxism (even nationalism-plus-Islamism), but most just took up jobs as journalists and teachers and college professors ... with the results we now see.

Now, although they have no time for American patriotism, and certainly not American nationalism, they are not at all unhappy with Mexican nationalism, or Black nationalism. They'll work the 'identity politics' angle along sexual and sexual-identity lines among the whites.

But, yes, it must have caused a wee bit of cognitive dissonance among some of them, to see freedom-lovers waving the American flag (even it was done as a provocation by an MSS agent, which I believe is entirely possible.)

 

I could care less what Trump does, I just hope he doesn't entangle U.S. taxpayers in a costly military intervention.

The point of my OP was simply to point out how many American-hating leftists are quite uncomfortable with any signs of patriotism and how they must be in a quandary seeing foreign POC celebrating the American flag in a way to similar to what normal Americans do. Add to this the recent tendency of liberals/progressives/socialists to equate virtually any display of patriotism to white nationalism and you can see how I'm quite entertained by all of this.

 

I disagree with your characterization of both the old left and the new left. Commies on the old left were notoriously noisy but were never a significant factor in Democrat politics, with most old-line Democrats fervently anti-communist. Many communist-desired policies were implemented, such as Social Security, but at the same time, many KKK-desired policies were implemented at the same time, such as compulsory free education to inculcate the Catholic children in American patriotism. As for the new left, you have unabashed socialists trying to run things at the top while the old guard democrats are trying to win elections, but at the bottom you've got the looney left pushing for tranny rights, hate speech codes, and depriving conservatives of employment; the minority left pushing for redistribution of money from white people to minorities; and the privileged left pushing for open borders, student loan forgiveness, and free college. In some cases like AOC, these things overlap, but most of your minorities are not interested in rights for transsexuals or even open borders.

https://www.theclassroom.com/types-democrats-11944.html

Note the almost complete disappearance of the union left.

Don't know what B&Q is, we have Home Depot here, but I do know what a circuit breaker is. Was talking to a guy on a plane once who camped next to a lawyer and the lawyer couldn't figure out why his water line was leaking. He'd never heard of an O-ring before.

 

Interesting response. B&Q is like Home Depot but in the UK, my mistake. My cousin's son works in Home Depot -- a qualified electrician but ruined his knees wiring up attics.

I think we're mixing up different historical periods here ... I'm thinking of the 30s through today, several generations. The 'Left' has changed a lot over that time. (So has the 'Right' as well. In some sense, American conservatism only began as a self-conscious movement in the mid-50s, atthough there were certainly individual thinkers, and the reflexes of both Republicans and Democrats were culturally conservative, and the Republicans economically conservative.

A lot of Lefties today don't believe that the Republicans were more isolationist/non-interventionist than the Democrats until Mr Stalin persuaded them otherwise after the war. Nor can they take on board that the Socialist leader Eugene Debs was put into prison for ten years by Woodrow Wilson's Democratic regime -- and Debs was refused pardon by Wilson after the war was over -- and then pardoned by the Republican Harding, who also invited him to the White House for tea and a chat.

We seem to disagree on some things but it's not clear to me on exactly what.

The Communist Party supported the Democrats from 1936 on, although largely from the outside. Where they did infiltrate they were fought to the death by liberals, like Hubert Humphrey in the Minnesota Democratic Farmer-Labor Party. Our most socialist Senator of his time -- and also the major sponsor of the Communist Control Act of 1953 which actually outlawed the Communist Party -- never enforced, of course.

Now they're inside. An old friend of mine from when I was on the Far Left is an open Communist Party leader and also a Precinct Chairman for the Democratic Party, in Texas of all places.

I agree with you about the tastes and interests of the different components of the Democratic Base, and the divergence between the interests of much of the whole base from the elite. We see this in the UK -- the college graduate left is in favor of the usual things -- gay marriage for example, and bringing in lots more Muslims even though those two things are in severe tension -- the coal miners and dockers and auto workers, not so much. But the latter support the party that was strongest for the former because, hey, you've got to think of your pocketbook first.

This split is happening in many countries. I believe that Thomas Picketty, he of 'Capital' fame, has written a book about this. The French industrial working class shifted smoothly from the French Communist Party to the Front Nationale.


On the other hand, I think Mr Trump revealed the divergence between the Republican base, and its globalizing donor class. As well as forever destroying the image of the Democrats as the party of a peaceful foreign policy, suspicious of the FBI and CIA. The world turned upside down!!!

Never knew about the KKK and free education. Very interesting.

He didn't know what an O-ring is? Good Lord ... I thought everyone who knew about the first Space Shuttle disaster knew what an O-ring was.

 

This is a communist regime vs a Democratic society trying to protect itself. Never has a President of the United States been "neutral" in a fight between Democracy vs Communism.

Your equivalence to the Arab Spring is idiotic and uninformed because involvement by the U.S. would have been counterproductive to the protesters, who were being accused precisely of being "Obama's puppets". Hong Kong is begging for U.S. support, and Trump is siding with the communists. Who would have guessed that this would ever happen in the United States.

 

What form should this support take?

 

Iranians were being murdered in the street, he did nothing. Obama’s only puppet was the Muslim brotherhood dictator he supporter in Eygpt.

Trump has directly spoken to Xi, not taken his side and asked for a meeting with him directly. That’s called diplomatic response

 

Yes, and good for him.

But we don't have anything beyond, perhaps, more sanctions to back up words with action. This is something which is critical for the Chinese. They
don't care a fig for words.

At Yalta, when Stalin and Churchill and FDR were discussing the what should happen in Eastern Europe, Churchill said that the views of the Vatican
should be taken into account. Stalin replied, "How many divisions does the Pope have?"

We don't have any divisions.

We could argue about what Obama should have done that would have helped the demonstrators. Send in the CIA like we did when we overthrew their elected government in 1953, because the British were cross about getting their oil company nationalized?

Or announced that the USA was 100% with the demonstrators, that they were doing just what we wanted them to do ... maybe airdropped little American flags for them to wave?

Iran and China are not Poland and Hungary. There, we would have been welcomed. We have had a different history with Iran and China. We can't change that, unfortunately. We have to play the long game with these countries.

 

Absolute unequivocal support for Democracy. Ask Reagan!

 

Why is he meeting with Xi and not the protesters? They're the ones asking him to take a position. To side with Democracy. To, at least, give a public statement of support.

What this is called is siding with the communists!