When a totalitarian country annexes a part of another, more democratic country, the latter faces a little-analyzed and understudied phenomenon that involves transformation of
democracy and its metamorphosis into a semi-totalitarian country.
The latest related event was the onslaught of the Soviet government against democratic aspirations of the Eastern Europeans in the aftermath of the Second World War. Analysis and study of this problem can contribute to improving the lives of millions of people who live in Hong Kong, Crimea and other regions.
Normal men who watch news every evening hardly understand the needs and feelings of Hong Kong people who wave British flags over their heads, forcing their way into government facilities that already operate in the new realm of the Communist totalitarian China.
We cannot but notice, however, the utterly egregious deadlock the young men and women got trapped into. These young Hong Kongers were raised surrounded by European-type democracy and freedom and they had no experience of being smashed by the dreadful political machinery, which for dozens of years was excused by the global community, even mass executions and terror against ideological backsliders. Crimean activists and Crimean Tatars, who are abducted on the streets and right from their homes never to return, undergo the same hardship.
Murders of Anti-Russia activists in Crimea run rampant and those dissatisfied with the new regime’s exposing a lack of democracy in Crimea would be very lucky to receive a prison sentence.
Ukraine welcomes its citizens who migrate from the annexed Crimea and provides them with jobs, decent living conditions and opportunities for personal growth in the free and democratic country, but Great Britain evidently does not wait for democracy fighters to come from Hong Kong.
While Crimean freedom fighters risk life and limb to a great extent, Hong Kongers feel utter hopelessness because they are likely to have to sacrifice their freedom to living in their motherland and the future of their children.
We cannot push British leaders for acting in the same way as they did with their Afghan guides who served alongside British troops – to provide refuge in Great Britain for all democratic protest spearheads and their families in Hong Kong.
We should do something because one cannot merely look any longer on how the human freedom is becoming an empty phrase in Hong Kong and Crimea.
Dr O.J.Kozerod, Fellow at CEDS