In a country where ancestor worship is an essential part of the culture, paying respect to the dead should not surprise us. Objections to the recent visit by Taiwan Solidarity Union Chairman Shu Chin-chiang (蘇進強) to Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine to do so, however, does. It is based on the reasoning that Chinese can pay respect to the Republic of China's dead in China and set up shrines to them in Taiwan, but Taiwanese cannot respect those who fell for the former colonial power, Japan.
The absolutist and exclusivist notion of the pan-blue camp that only they can pay respect to their dead reeks of the desecration of royal tombs by incoming dynasties in China. The Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese Nationalist Party's (KMT) bedfellow, failed abysmally to do away with such feudalistic tendencies with their Cultural Revolution. Here, one would hope that the cultural transformation to democracy would have relegated such a mindset to the trashcan of wacky old ways.
Alas! The pan-blues are still suffering deep psychological dissociation from the reality of what constitutes the Taiwanese electorate and what democracy actually means. For the sake of the nation, they need urgent psychological help to get closure about losing the civil war, being a nasty colonial power, losing two presidential elections, being the opposition and not being in China, free or otherwise.
William Meldrum
Taipei
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