Photo by Joseph Chan on Unsplash

None of us are without sin. Neither in our personal lives nor in political life. The Hong Kong “frontliners” are not angels and nobody expects them to be. But do imagine for a moment that you are only allowed a certain number of sins, and you have the luxury of deciding in advance how you will use them. Would you even bother to decide?

The sin is violence, and the protesters have indulged themselves in increasing levels of “self-defense” and acts of destruction, and in turn, a lot of rationalization and defensiveness about it. Calls for restraint in the violence are met with almost universal condemnation on the part of “our side,” and the objection that Beijing is seeking to divide the protest movement this way. But the division cuts both ways. By hectoring critics from the pacifist side, many supporters are being cut off from attachment to a movement that they backed in an earlier incarnation. If you don’t see that, you may be in a partisan bubble.

Looking at the scenes of street violence — people bleeding from the head — we can comment on this from several levels; a personal moral standpoint, an ‘advocacy’ or normative standpoint expressing what we would like to see happen, and a more cold, neutral analysis of how we think it affects things strategically. We’re doing that in retrospect, debating each act of violence after it happens.

How about doing this prospectively, instead? By that I mean deciding in advance how to allocate our ration of sins. If we are going to excuse a certain level of violence after the fact, why not plan a certain level of violence ahead of time, and stick to the plan with discipline? It’s called war.

The reason for doing that is to maximize the utility of the use of violence. The reason for not doing so is that you have to ‘declare’ war, which would invite escalated punishment from the other side. But the problem with the violence that we have seen from our side so far is that it is reactionary and out of anyone’s control, and worst of all, it is useless and wasteful: it does nothing to advance the cause.

This may be partially another unfortunate side-effect of the unintentional but necessary leaderlessness of the movement. In any case, one certainly has to ask whether we would decide to have executed these specific acts of violence if we had a choice about it. A winning political movement does not offer up the image of a middle-aged woman bleeding from the head for international news media. None of these fights — starting with the incident at the airport in July — have been anything that anyone would have planned as a active campaign to win hearts and minds.

However, if we were to step back and choose, one would look at the matter rationally and say, how many people does a guy have to kill to obtain the right to vote in this town? This is a rhetorical exaggeration, but it makes sense to use the public’s tolerance for violence carefully, respectfully, and rationally — to advance the political agenda that the majority of people agree on. As Von Clausewitz observed, “War […] is an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfill our will.” We don’t see that going on in Hong Kong. Not yet.

Instead, the so-called ‘frontliners’ have been lionized into a martyr class who can do no wrong. This encourages senseless and self-indulgent destructiveness — the molotov cocktails, pile-ons with pro-Beijing thugs, etc — and a religion of rationalization around it. The key defense that is used to justify destructiveness is backward looking; that it is understandable considering everything that people have suffered and gone through. We’ve heard this argument from dozens of allies. It may be true, but it’s not a plan.

People might even feel satisfaction of their own moral feelings in this spectacle, but the violence is not effective. Protesters have been dragged into tit-for-tat street battles — as if this is a turf war between gangs — rather than something more like a proper fight for political self-determination. Everyone knows Beijing actively wants things to play out this way. Paradoxically, part of the reason that this scattershot, vengeful approach is tolerated is that nobody believes that a forceful resistance can win. So this all plays out like a ritual — indulgence for wounds received and wounds expected in the future.

It shouldn’t go on this way. In making decisions like a swarm of gnats through online forums, this protest movement is up against some valid criticism that it may not be capable of planning and executing specific policy goals in a disciplined way— whether violent or not. We do hope that a change in that system emerges. If people involved in the movement don’t acknowledge the need to contain and control any violent force carried out in its name, it is legitimate to question whether this is a political movement, or just a subculture for expression of rage and despair.

If the author had written this comment from the point of view of his moral principles — the first of the three levels above — he would have zero tolerance for any act of violence against any other man, ever. But in political action, there is reason to look at things from other levels of analysis than one’s own feelings — and this is a lesson lost on those in the fog of war and CS gas.

Maybe the despair is justified and Hong Kong can’t win. But it is worth reconsidering whether the pessimism so pervasive in Hong Kong is really rational — or perhaps just driven by fear and muddled by poor planning. The author will not be convinced of the rationale for violence on the part of this movement until it is used — or withheld — intentionally.