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More excellent on-the-spot coverage of the semi-insurrectionary Hong Kong rebellion by Red Flag Newspaper editor, Ben Hillier. "The last week at the Polytechnic is illustrative of the lengths the young people here will go to make the point that is scrawled in graffiti around the city: “If we burn, you burn with us”. For days, hundreds of young women and men raced frantically to barricade every entrance and exit. In the canteen they stockpiled noodles, biscuits, muesli bars, and bottles of water. Along with their supporters, they took over the retail shops and turned them into 24-hour communal kitchens. They set up medical stations with boxes and boxes of supplies. They collected for distribution hundreds of gas masks, goggles, fresh clothes, towels and soap. They armed themselves with bins full of broken paving bricks and garden stones, baseball bats, hammers and metal bars pilfered from railings along the roadsides. And they built an arsenal of Molotov cocktails, gas bombs, flour bombs and dye bombs. By Saturday afternoon, there were hundreds of petrol bombs to feed the front lines – and for the next 36 hours, a group of about 30 young people worked tirelessly to keep production going as the war raged around them. “The rule is dead, and our life is alight”, Tin, a recent graduate from another university, said as he rested outside PolyU’s smashed up administration building. “The world has been reversed. You are supposed to follow the rules and that makes things work smoothly. But now the rules are the problem; we have an obligation to protest.” Tin is a member of what Au Loong Yu, a respected veteran activist and author, calls “Generation Catastrophe”, otherwise known as the ’97 generation – those born several years each side of the return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty. “This generation is very unlucky”, Au says. “At first, the older generation couldn’t understand – why are they so without hope? Why do they talk about revolution? It’s because they sense the catastrophe. Like Greta Thunberg and the climate, but much more intense in some ways. This generation has continuous bad news.” https://redflag.org.au/node/6958 And there's an excellent podcast interview on the same issue: https://redflag.podbean.com/e/red-flag-editor-ben-hillier-reports-from-hong-kong/ <https://redflag.podbean.com/e/red-flag-editor-ben-hillier-reports-from-hong-kong/?fbclid=IwAR1q_HeyRwXwSSPPZWQrIz3KrFXLc3DnAZ78DQHX7igLM_2CbF-4WJ3xbIk> -- Subscribe to Socialist Alternative's fortnightly newspaper - *Red Flag* <http://www.redflag.org.au> Check out our theoretical journal - *Marxist Left Review* <http://www.marxistleftreview.org/> And put away the Easter Weekend for our annual conference, *Marxism 2019* <http://marxismconference.org/> _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
