Hong Kong Crisis Starts To Look Like Prague 1968

By Paul Atkinson, Special to the Sun | August 16, 2019

A movement by an enclave in the communist bloc to grant its people the greater freedoms enjoyed in the West — that’s the drama playing out in Hong Kong today. Yet as youthful protestors wave American flags and sing our national anthem, American support for their cause is being tepidly expressed, at best.

 

As Communist China’s strongman, Xi Jinping, deploys his troops at the border of the former British Crown Colony, clearly threatening armed intervention, the best President Trump has offered is to urge him to “quickly and humanely solve the Hong Kong problem.” To what “problem” is the president referring? What prior example of the regime’s humanity is he summoning?

It may be that there’s more going on behind the scenes than Mr. Trump has let on, but he at least appears not to grasp that it’s China’s intent to systematically strip the city of its special status guaranteed by the Sino-British declaration of 1984. That parchment supposedly guaranteed that Hong Kongers “rights and freedoms, including those of the person, of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association” would be “protected by law.”

They are, though, communists. So as the fate of millions hangs in the balance, let us recall the anniversary of another communist assault on democracy in the territory of one of its semi autonomous constituencies. On August 21, 1968, a quarter million Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops entered Czechoslovakia to crush the movement known as the Prague Spring............To Read More....