After a big mediatic scandal fulled by Western mainstream media (prompt to repeat any allegations without any ounce of critical sense), it seems the police finally confounded the Hong Kong Democrat representative Howard Lam.

Self-inflicted injuries

In fact, it would appear that Howard Lam self-inflicted those injuries and invented the whole story for unclear motives. The repercussion was enormous both for the Democrat party which had supported Lam, as well as activists such as Joshua Wong.

As a consequence, the pro-democracy movement took a serious slap to their own arguments on Beijing’s ruthlessness, just two days before the main leaders (among which Joshua Wong) were jailed for invading civic square in 2014.

Discredited once more

Three years after the “occupy movement”, both the democracy movement and its leaders foundered in their typical combination of hastiness and indecision.

Somehow, the Lam fiasco foreshadowed the final curtain call on the “Occupy” activists which took place today.

With today’s jail sentence, Joshua Wong and his pals are assured to be kept away from any election for at least five years. So much for plans to influence the future of the city. But if the Hongkongese even had any distant hope of seeing the young students become leaders, these hopes were dashed after several of the young LegCo members kicked themselves out by making a circus out of their swearing in (the “Oathgate“).

So, today, Wong and his pals can complain all they want of being shut out of politics by Beijing, for starters, they never proved that they were capable of leading anything else than anarchists in an utopic “occupation”. Politics is the art of the possible and there is a reason why old cynics succeed better at it than young idealists.