There was a frenzy of joy and jubilation shared within the pro-democracy quarter in Hong Kong when the news of the death of a 57-year-old policeman broke. The police constable reportedly shot himself in the head in a police station because of financial issues on Tuesday; in less than 24 hours, another news broke which again sent Hong Kong’s pro-democracy supporters into transports of delight and gleefulness – this time of the death of Leticia Lee See-yin, a vocal pro-Beijing activist whose support for the police force, offensive speech, and controversial actions had elicited the contempt, or even hatred, of many supporters of the pro-democracy movements – myself included. I have always thought that it is rather poor taste to celebrate any person’s death, even if the deceased was deemed to be morally reprehensible. But I have to say that, after all that we have been through in the past few years, especially since the anti-extradition bill movements in which police brutality was widely reported and documented, I have no remorse for owning up to the fact that I do not have so much as a jot or tittle of pity for the untimely demise of Miss Lee, or for that matter, that of the impecunious policeman.

The public and flagrant celebration of the recent deaths of a policeman and a pro-Beijing activist, which in other circumstances would have been deemed socially unacceptable, shows the extent to which Hong Kong has divided: not only does the possibility of a reconciliation between the two camps – pro-Beijing and pro-democracy – in the foreseeable future seem far-fetched, Hong Kong is now so divided that the only way to resolve the division would be the total annihilation of either camp. The reason why this is the case can perhaps be explained by the fact that picking a political stance in Hong Kong is, unlike in other countries, no longer a matter of socio-political attitude or preference between the left and the right, but one of morality: with the arbitrary persecution of dissidents, crackdown on civil society, usurpation of civil liberties, and police brutality, it is simply morally untenable, if not reprehensible, for one to side with the authorities – the issues that we are dealing with here transcend common politics and fall in the realm of morality. As a matter of fact, I would even go so far as to claim that it is no longer possible for a Hong Konger to defend oneself morally without actively taking a stance against the Chinese Communist Party and its marionettes in Hong Kong; it is incumbent upon oneself to at least be unambiguous about one’s disapprobation of Beijing and everything it stands for, given the gravity of numerous crimes and evil deeds that the Chinese Communist Party has committed in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet and elsewhere.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt, in her book “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil”, introduces the idea of “banality of evil”. Reporting for the New Yorker magazine in the early sixties on the war crime trial of Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi operative responsible for organizing the transportation of millions of Jews to concentration camps, Arendt was grappling with the puzzling fact that Eichmann was but a “terrifyingly normal” bureaucrat who was “neither perverted nor sadistic”. Eichmann’s humdrum existence as an ordinary-looking functionary, however, did not mitigate the gravity of his crime. Eichmann’s culpability hinges precisely on his failure to think – in the face of incontestable evil, a reluctance to exercise one’s judgmental ability and act in accordance with one’s moral imperative is itself a crime, not least because the consequence of non-thinking could often be catastrophic (in Eichmann’s case, genocidal).

The celebration of the deaths of Miss Lee and the impecunious policeman last week might be poor taste to some, all the same one should not forget the reasons behind people rejoicing at their demise: after all the two had, in one way or another, played a part – however minute – in Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong. Pro-democracy supporters celebrated the demise of the two with good reason.

(Joseph Long is a London-based writer and linguist from Hong Kong.)

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