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Showing posts with the label autocracy

On People Who Don't Seem to Care About Democracy

Several years ago I met an elderly British man in Hong Kong who had recently travelled to North Korea as a tourist. When I heard that, I became curious. It doesn't happen very often to bump into someone who has visited the secluded Kim dictatorship. To my surprise, he started to rant about how “biased” Western media were. I don't recall his exact words, but the gist of it was that North Korea was very clean, there was no graffiti, no crime, the buildings were modern, in short, the country was not at all how Western media always portrayed it.   I took these pictures during the 2014 pro-democracy Occupy Central movement in Hong Kong   I was quite startled. But in retrospect, I shouldn't have been. Throughout the years, I came across a lot of people who voiced sympathy for authoritarian regimes. I grew up in Italy. Even though fascism was defeated militarily in 1943-1945, and it seemed (for a time) to be a taboo subject to better be avoided in public, there are still people wh