The death of Nuon Chea is a reminder of the days when Britain had a Prime Minister who was known to the Soviet Union as "the Peking Plotter". She never saw a Maoist whom she did not like, from Ceaușescu, to Mugabe, to Pol Pot. She even sent the SAS to train the Khmer Rouge.
People who thought that the Cold War was not just fundamentally real, but an "anti-Communist crusade" for "values", should never have been allowed anywhere near the running of anything, and in Britain they were not so allowed until the Blair years, when the consequences of letting them in, by then constantly searching for the latest monster, were catastrophic. That mentality can still be heard in the demands to "stand up to" this or that, such as Vladimir Putin, as if somehow we could, and as if that were our role in the world.
It can also be seen in the curious obsession with minor civil disorder in a randomly selected provincial Chinese city. It was of course Margaret Thatcher who negotiated the deal for what had always been the inevitable transfer of China's own territory back to its control at the end of the lease.
Her key advisers and her core supporters were horrified at the idea of slitty-eyed, yellow-skinned persons being allowed to "swamp" Britain, the rule of which the inhabitants of Hong Kong had in any case been known to resist far forcefully than anything that has been going on there in recent weeks, leading to far more brutal repression, especially under the Labour Government of the late 1960s.
There was no "Anglosphere" then. There is none now, come to that. Have the Pacific "Anglosphere" powers of Canada, Australia and New Zealand said anything much about Hong Kong? Meanwhile, Donald Trump, hardly a friend of China's, has stated the obvious, that Hong Kong is an internal Chinese matter. And, one might add, hardly the most pressing of internal Chinese matters.
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