More weapon are not the answer

"In order to maintain stability across the Taiwan Strait as well as peace in the Asia-Pacific Region, the Ministry of National Defense will do its best to purchase advanced weapons to enhance our national capabilities." These words from what one Taipei daily billed as a "routine press conference" hardly break new ground in the annals of defense-extolling doublespeak: robust defense expenditures somehow always make for enhanced peace and stability. They boost their missile-wielding potential, we jack up our missile-frustrating interception. The arms race is on with a vengeance, all in the name of peace and stability.

When it comes to coming up with a charming term for "contradiction," one is challenged to do better than the Chinese: maodun (矛盾, literally "spear-shield"). As I understand it, the term derives from the story about an armorer who boasted to one client that he could provide him with a spear strong enough to break any shield, while boasting to another that he could provide an impenetrable shield that would withstand any spear. As the world's foremost peddler of these snake-oil remedies, Uncle Sam wins top honors in the contradiction department hands down, with Taiwan leading the ranks of suited suckers.

But, whether they consider themselves Taiwanese or Chinese, both or neither; whether they are recent arrivals or have roots going back centuries or even millennia; and regardless of whether they plan to spend the rest of their lives here or are just passing through, myriad are those who rightfully fear that all of this smacks of a reawakened brinkmanship certain to provoke the militarist elements in Beijing. For China too has its fair share of spear-shakers and shield-wielders, people whose conception of certified long-term unthreatened job tenure lies entirely in promoting this deadly game. And, as with their US counterparts, everything the Chinese militaries do and say is backed up by appeals to the common good.

So many times has this been repeated in the past, and so often with cataclysmic results, that you would think that by this late millennium we would have learned the harsh lessons sufficiently that the market for military merchandise would have long since hit abject bottom.

But no, we are now marching in identical cadence to the same drumbeat that took us into World War I ("the war to end all wars"), into World War II ("well, make that one more," and "not to worry, the 1941 Atlantic Charter pledges top-of-agenda priority to nonviolent self-determination of peoples"), and so on and so on and so on.

The abstract causes were always the loftiest, while the tally of lives paid for advancing democracy and stability and peace mounted and mounted until by century's end they numbered over 100 million. Central to the process of trading lives for abstractions was the proliferation of semantic contradictions, as the patriot-scoundrels shouted down the doubters, the pacifists, and the historians of a long-view bent.

Since their accession to position of ruling party, both the DPP and the president have proven utterly powerless to withstand the defense-toy blandishments of the US military-multinational multiplex. It is no trouble at all to find DPP politicos who will shake their head with wistful fatalism, saying that you can't change a tiger's stripes, that this is the direction that things are taking in the US, that with Bush at the helm everything suddenly is accelerated, and that democracy does not rule in the US, but rather the power of huge corporate interests prepared to reap huge profits in the arms business.