EDITORIAL: 228 bill fights injustice with injustice

A Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislator has proposed a bill that seeks to extend a degree of legal responsibility for the 228 Incident and the White Terror to the spouse, direct descendants and other relatives of suspects.

The proposal is ridiculous, both in political terms and for the fact that it would constitute bad law.

The proposal seems to want to mobilize support from the most steadfast supporters of the pan-green camp.

Using historical atrocities to strengthen the pro-Taiwan vote has worked before, and rightly so, because the pan-blue camp has never offered genuine contrition for the pillaging and abuses its political forefathers committed against Taiwanese people.

With this obnoxious and juridically ignorant suggestion, however, the DPP seems to be either running out of viable strategies or else the ability to keep its small minority of feral members in line -- all at the worst possible time.

Some Taiwanese regard the 228 Incident as a symbol of ongoing injustice and many -- for very good reason -- bear a grudge against the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), whose soldiers and agencies have killed so many innocent people and tormented so many others.

The problem is that almost all of the identifiable perpetrators have died of old age. What should be pursued and discussed now is historical and institutional responsibility, not launching some flaccid attack on relatives for events of which the great majority are either ignorant or cannot recall.

DPP Legislator Wang Sing-nan (王幸男), who proposed the bill, said relatives of the accused would have the right to argue in the defense of the accused and that they would not be punished for the crimes of others.

This is disingenuous. The law already provides for witnesses to be called to testify if they have first-hand knowledge of a crime.

Forcing relatives of the accused to act as proxy for the accused would be unprecedented. This would not only hurt the nation's reputation but also its human rights environment.

The era of deifying Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) is virtually over. Correcting how he is described in school textbooks, removing statues of Chiang on the streets, changing the name of the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall -- all are examples of defensible symbolic attempts to remove this criminal from the national fabric.

However, to hunt down the families of anyone accused only creates another injustice. Truth and justice is, we can only hope, the common goal of the nation, but over-emphasizing the incident or demeaning the victims of KMT abuses by drawing up hare-brained legislation to increase a party's electoral chances is wholly inappropriate.

Politically, the DPP, by not pulling this bill and disciplining Wang for his strategic ineptitude, has given the KMT a big boost, allowing KMT hardliners to prey on the vicious stereotype of independence advocates as extremists and autocrats-in-waiting.

Wang, for his part, seems to be mostly interested in preaching to the converted to beef up the legislator-at-large vote. But the potential damage that this kind of dumb, gratuitously confrontational politicking can wreak on DPP candidates in marginal seats cannot be underestimated. Except, perhaps, by clueless DPP strategists.