Despite what the Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) administration has said, this isn’t free speech. Free speech ends at the shore of hatred and has additional limits when it is a government official doing the writing.
Society has its share of deranged individuals — white supremacists, anti-Semites, Islamophobes and so on — whose skewed views and ideas they might interpret as “freedom of speech.” But societies, built on systems of laws and hundreds of years of accumulated wisdom in the domains of “race,” “ethnicity,” morality, philosophy, religion and so on, should know better. And they do.
This is why my home country, to use one example, prosecuted Ernst Zundel, a Holocaust denier, and in 2005 deported him to Germany, where he was charged on 14 counts of inciting racial hatred. That is why France, to use another example, has made denying the Armenian Genocide at the hands of Turks a crime.
Zundel’s few apologists were nutcase white supremacists and neo-Nazis whom nobody would entrust their children with, let alone allow to run a country. Everybody else recognized evil when they saw it.
Views like those expressed by Kuo are aberrations — that is, unless people in charge and society at large fail to appropriately condemn them, in which case they become dangerous undercurrents, if not systemic, within a specific ethnic group or organization, such as the one I left back in Canada.
Deplorably, it took the Government Information Office far too long to do the appropriate thing: suspend him. This it did on Monday, after Kuo admitted in an interview that he was indeed Fan Lan-chin (范蘭欽), the author of the racist articles.
The Ma administration and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) dragged their feet before stating, in no uncertain terms, that they would not brook such opinions and that there was no place for such hatred within Taiwanese society — both in and outside government.
Surely, had a similar incident occurred in the US or Canada, and African-Americans or Quebecers been the targets of venomous articles, the leadership would have reacted far more promptly. Ma finally did so on Tuesday, but an earlier condemnation was warranted.
Sadly, Kuo isn’t alone in holding those views, and in fact some have wondered why such a fuss was made over this specific case, arguing that the comments were in fact fairly common.
The Ma administration and the KMT must therefore distance themselves from such hatred, or their silence will be tantamount to condoning the view that the woman that I love with all my heart and the beautiful and precious nation she is from are deserving of nothing more than hatred, oppression and cleansing — the very mindset of the White Terror era that had compelled her parents to offer her, her brother and her sister a new life by emigrating to Canada.
J. Michael Cole is a writer based in Taipei.
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