History, it is said, does not repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes. This may explain the meaning of seen already that overwhelmed me when I read about the case of Mr. Raymond Wong – a 55-year-old construction worker, not the former journalist of the same name – who appeared in the West Kowloon Magistrate’s Court a few weeks ago.
The allegation against Mr Wong was that he had on two occasions thrown home-made leaflets, or in legal parlance “sheets of paper written with statements”, from near his 12th-floor public flat into the public area of the property.
The first time, many were caught by an angry county councillor, the second by a member of the estate management staff. How did this lead to Mr. Wong did not explain himself in court, but police eventually discovered his fingerprints on two of the offending items.
Mr Wong was subsequently charged with violating the local national security law, on the grounds that the words in the leaflets were seditious. The first group called for action against corrupt police men, which I assume is automatically rebellious because it implies that THERE corrupt cops, which – of course – is not true.
The second set of leaflets included the phrase “free Hong Kong; don’t vote”. Surprisingly, Mr Wong was not charged with voter discouragement, although that is an offence. Worse, we can assume, was the fateful phrase “liberate Hong Kong”, when – as we all know – the law assumes that Hong Kong is already as liberated as it wants to be.
Mr Wong reasonably pleaded guilty and will be sentenced later next week.
In the meantime, I was haunted by the thought that some time ago subversive leaflets had been distributed in public places. And after some research I found it in Geert Mak’s book, “In Europe”. Mr. Mak was commissioned by the Dutch newspaper he worked for to spend a year touring Europe while also taking a tour of the continent’s 20th-century history. The resulting pieces were published as written in the newspaper and compiled into the book, which is excellent, though now a little out of date, afterwards.
Thus, at the right time, Mr. Mak arrived in Munich, a city with a full set of capital equipment, because it was once the home of the Kings of Bavaria. One of them gave its name to the local university, Universität Ludwig-Maximilian. Apparently this is a pretty bombastic piece of architecture.
Let me turn the microphone over to Mr. Mak:
“Here at the university everything converges: the pompous staircase, the pseudo-Roman statues next to them (in reality, two Bavarian kings in costume) the magnificent dome that covers the hall, but also the innocent desperate little pamphlets that the students Hans and Sophie Scholl let flutter from here below the name of the students Hans and Sophie Scholl18. To the youth of Germany we demand the return of our personal freedom from the state of Adolf Hitler…’ They had spread tracts and had left behind graffiti on previous occasions: ‘Down with Hitler.’
Now, nothing like that can happen here. We don’t wrap up national security issues in four days. It takes us four years, which may or may not be an improvement, but it’s certainly different. We do not do the death penalty.
We don’t have to worry about our personal freedom, at least as long as we don’t dare such things appearing near Victoria Park with a red thread OR an inflated question mark.
However, we should not rejoice that we have joined the club of countries where the channels of public communication have been so choked by fear and restrictions that citizens who want to express their views are reduced to distributing anonymous leaflets.
Our government seems to have inherited the thin skin of our notoriously sensitive police. now even the legislators – carefully vetted patriots to a man or woman – are complaining that any comment on government policy which does not have a stirring approval is branded as dishonesty or worse by official spokesmen.
Undoubtedly, government policies are usually well-chosen and efficiently implemented. However, our leaders should perhaps take a tip from Oliver Cromwell, who famously wrote to a group of stubborn opponents: “I pray you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be wrong.”
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