I find it arrogant when a poster on a political thread insults a people or an electorate to be too stupid to know what's good for them.
The U.S. has refrained from publicly supporting the HK dissidents. I'm sorry if it offends you that HK people are waving U.S. flags as a symbol of freedom.
Stating that you are gullible is a statement of fact. I could have said instead 'you will believe anything the mainstream media tells you'.
It is widespread, and the greatest example was the narrative gobbled up by the masses that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. The US mainstream media was complicit in that lie, and Canadian mainstream media went along with it, since they too, tend to not question the current mainstream narrative. What happened in 2003 was the classic example of what Chomsky characterized as 'Manufacturing consent for war'. There was a huge bandwagon effect where the general population was whipped up into massive frenzy of hubris and wholeheartedly backed the invasion of Iraq... all based on a complete lie. The very few news media that dared to question this narrative (Night Ridder News Service) were ridiculed and labeled unpatriotic. France refused to go along and Americans started calling their chips Freedom Fries.
You may have freedom of the press in the US, but you don't have journalistic freedom. Corporate owners of mass media tell you what to believe by imposing on their editors an editorial policy, and its all for corporate profits.... war is profitable. As a journalist, if your articles do not reflect the narrative, then you simply do not get published, and eventually lose your job. Seymour Hersch, the greatest investigative reporter of all time, cannot get published in the US anymore. He goes through an obscure literary publisher in Germany.
The lessons of 2003 have not been heeded. It's business as usual. Corporate greed, especially the US military Industrial complex, steers US foreign policy through massive funding of Belt-Way think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, where most of the original neocons came from, and those pundits influence politicians and viewers alike.
As for foreign meddling in Chinese/Hong Kong affairs, here's 2 articles, one from HK's South China Morning Post, and the second, a republish in Singapore's Straits Times of an article in Kuala Lumpur's The Star:
https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3017613/course-foreign-forces-are-work-hong-kong
https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/the-cost-of-the-hong-kong-protests-the-star-columnist
"Over the past month, the media has been reporting that groups involved in the protests have received significant funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), "a CIA soft-power cut-out that has played a critical role in innumerable US regime-change operations, " according to writer Alexander Rubinstein.
The report claimed that the NED has four main branches, at least two of which are active in Hong Kong: the Solidarity Centre (SC) and National Democratic Institute (NDI).
"The latter has been active in Hong Kong since 1997, and NED funding for Hong Kong-based groups has been consistent, " Louisa Greve, vice president of programmes for Asia, Middle East and North Africa, was quoted.
While NED funding for groups in Hong Kong goes back to 1994, 1997 was when the British returned the territory to China, it was reported.
The report said in 2018, NED granted US$155, 000 (S$214,286) to SC and US$200, 000 (S$276,499) to NDI for work in Hong Kong, and US$90, 000 (S$124,424) to Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor (HKHRM), which isn't a branch of NED, but a partner in Hong Kong.
Between 1995 and 2013, HKHRM received more than US$1.9mil (S$2.6mil) in funds from the NED.
This isn't the first time the NED's name has cropped up either."
One need not believe 100% any news item. But the existence of a different point of view should be cause for reflection.
