What is at stake in today's liberal protests? "Blue Island" as posing the question

The film “Blue Island,” on the Hong Kong protests of 2019 and their suppression, with many of the protesters facing long prison sentences, is a documentary that fulfills the genre’s promise of posing questions rather than arguing answers. This is a documentary film made with actors re-enacting the roles of real protestors. It also juxtaposes different scenes from different times and involving political struggles with different stakes.

The nationalist and ideological character of many political social movements usually gives them a definite teleological meaning, given by the goal they aim at. The Cold War, globally, divided opposition to oppressive systems according to two ostensibly opposing types. It took the intellectual and tactical ingenuity of many people who were dissident voices within camps that were, depending on one’s standpoint, both oppositional and establishmentarian, to show that the two systems had much in common or were variants of the same one. However one theorizes it, today it is easy for some of us to look back and see that both traditional Marxist or national liberation oriented politics were at least partly right in terms of what they were against and how, while on the other hand, capital c Communism was of course also very repressive. The latter conviction is the one shared by more people around the world today, unsurprisingly since in a certain sense the ‘West’ obviously ‘won’ the Cold War. Think of this however you like, the film makes few nods to any robust theory (save one that I will come to), but in juxtaposing in a temporal montage of sequences, several struggles and causes, and in the process making a jumble of all the nationalist claims except the ones made for Hong Kong itself as prospectively its own independent state, and in this way indeed redeeming both nationalist and liberal-democratic aspirations. This nationalism is the sole possible survivor when British, Maoist, and the current mainland CCP domination are all called into obvious question, though nothing is said of it apart from its tactical invocations in the context of the recent struggle, which, we are reminded, is not over, if only because some of the legal proceedings continue.
But along the way, we see fragments and relics of various protests and struggles, always showing the participants acting with and enunciating inspiring courage: a Chinese couple, the woman dressed in Maoist unisex clothing, escaping the Cultural Revolution for freedom in Hong Kong; Hong Kong protesters at the same moment (1967) protesting on behalf of that same Maoist enthusiasm; the 1989 Tiananmen protests in Beijing for democracy and their violent suppression; evocations of British colonialism with a nasty paternalistic white Briton interrogating a Hong Kong Chinese prisoner, and a choir of Chinese people singing “God save the Queen”; aged veterans of various past protests; and somewhat more attention to the recent protestors. The most interestingly eloquent among them gives a lovely two-minute speech near the end of the film, in his status as criminal defendant in one of the legal proceedings meant to squash the protests by punishing their participants, speaking vaguely about the idea of being a participating citizen in a polity that is oriented partly by its openness onto an uncertain future. This is the film’s most interesting moment theoretically, since it actually could be taken as referencing both the claims of certain radical left thinkers today, like Italy’s Antonio Negri and France’s Alain Badiou, himself a former Maoist, and at the same time to articulate an implicit idea of liberal political thought. The Hong Kong situation does certainly raise the possibility, as did the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, which met with a similar fate, of a militant oppositional politics that might seem leftist apart from the fact that it plainly invokes more than anything the English and American political tradition of liberty and representative constitutional government. This is a real theoretical quandary today as the left is concerned. The right, of course, is happy to suppose that the American system represents the happy end of history, except that today’s world is a bit more troubled than that of the early 90s when that sanguinely optimistic notion was being widely iterated and credited. But that protestor is right: we don’t know what our future will be, but certainly a minimal thing to insist on is some kind of democratic and liberal system in the way that China today is not, and the Hong Kong protestors of 2019 were hoping to at least preserve. They lost, and the world shuddered, again, as it does now with some regularity, even as many of us read the newspapers periodically wondering if this or that protest somewhere, or more horribly this or that war (what if it happens in Europe, and not just in some African or middle eastern country people like us care much less about?), is the thing itself when it comes to the political opportunity or opening we are looking for. I remember in 1989, both shuddering about the Chinese government’s crackdown in Berlin and the opening up of Eastern Europe, that briefly seemed for some of us to pose the possibility, again or finally, of the emergence of a truly liberal and democratic socialism. Alas, that window was just as quickly shut. And just as much of left or liberal oppositional politics (the film does pose the question of their possible relationship, their coalescence and/or difference) is always looking to open windows onto a happier future constructed participatively, in line with the most enduring political values that modern regimes have inherited, those of the Athenian polis, the forces of state power that repress dissidence in order to protect the status quo and those with power or property are all too often closing the windows not long after they were so remarkably forced open at last. A breathing space, or one open enough to admit of any hopeful anticipations of a future, anything more than the tired reiteration of the status quo referenced in the film both by the prominent display of corporate logos on the top of Hong Kong’s skyscrapers in the background of protests in its streets, and by the sad reiteration shown at the end of all the convictions of activists on, without exception, absurd crimes, most of which amount to the prohibition of politics as such. This is a global specter that leftists and liberals both fear, few among us knowing for certain what is the way out. The film’s sequential montage does what such an aesthetic can do best: pose the question of how different possibilities, and different statements declaring what the nature of the situation is and what it is people want. This film is one of those who relevance may exceed the concrete particularity of what it shows.