The Hong Kong Protests Tell Us What We Have Forgotten About Ourselves.
The Hong Kong protests have given an emotional reaffirmation to something many in the Anglosphere have sadly come to reject — our unique and exceptional foundation and our equally exceptional legacy.
There are reasons why mentions of this exceptionalism are sometimes rejected. Its critics often speak on our historic wrongs with some truth, though usually without considering the necessary context. We’ve done things out of lust and vainglory, greed (the all too human flaw), and many other vices. For all of that, we ought to be self-critical. However, what makes the West stand out despite all these failings is that it is our very ideal of what we ought to be that acts as the standard by which we judge our failures.
This ideal is something that is not spoken of enough. It is something that the protesters in Hong Kong seem to believe is represented in the flags of our nations — yes, the same flags that our students and athletes (some of the most privileged in society)burn, step on, and disrespect. It is a heritage based around a deep-rooted ideal that all men should be equal under the law, that government should serve the people, and that tyranny is to be opposed whether foreign or domestic.
The foundations of this ideal are espoused in the Anglo tradition, intertwined in England’s unique history from the romanticism of the Saxon cause to the Magna Carta. It is equally ingrained in the core of American culture, from The Constitution to the “spirit” of the pioneers and early pilgrims. It is a tradition and a desire for personal freedom — a willingness to pursue one’s own destiny while accepting one’s responsibility to family and nation.
This spirit resides at the heart of the other great settlements across the former empire: Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. To paraphrase the piercing words of Rupert Brooke, in each of these lands there remains “some corner… that is forever England.” After all, these nations were not only colonies but settlements in which Britons brought their culture and customs and established similar versions of this heritage in their own unique ways. At their core, each of these nations is England in the same way that a son is a representation of his father.
It is this ingrained ideal of freedom, this very culture, that now provides hope for the people of Hong Kong. This is what the protestors in Hong Kong appeal to when waving the flags of The UK and The United States. And, dare I say, this is what governments and the tyrants that often find their way into positions of authority fear — not just in Hong Kong and China but across the world, even the Western world.
This legacy is so well known throughout the world that when the time comes for any people in any nation to cry for liberty, they turn quickly to the nations in which it was founded.
While we must understand the failings of the past — how human nature plays into the potential for tyranny and how the desire for power over others can misuse even the noblest of founding ideals — we must never forget the legacy for good that was left behind: The abolition of slavery and its enforcement across the British Empire and beyond, the idea of individual freedom and liberty (progressing from the rights of lords and freemen to eventually encapsulating all men and women), the connecting of the world, and the introduction of systems of law and administration along with modern technology, science, and medicine.
We must not allow ourselves to fall into the ways of thinking of those who can only see through low resolutions, believing this legacy was either all and only good or, as is now more popular, all and only evil. If we can, in the words of Mufasa, “remember who we are,” we can once again take pride in the legacy of our nations and culture while observing our own ideal and holding ourselves accountable to it.
The people of Hong Kong remind us of the old hero within. One that, through time and vicious propaganda, has become a fading memory but one that they rightly believe still exists. These protesters, these freedom fighters, remind us that if we can shake off what holds us back, we can be that hero once again and come to their aid in this, their time of need.
As Tennyson writes in the final line of his great poem, Ulysses:
“Tho’ much is taken, much abides;
and tho’ we are not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
