Oxford Dictionaries this month announced that its editors had chosen “post-truth” to be its international word of the year.
The term refers to “circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief,” the editors said, linking the expansion of its use to the US presidential election and the UK’s vote to leave the EU.
Unfortunately, there is nothing new in such manipulations, but several news stories this week showed how common post-truth speak has become inside and outside Taiwan. The first example came from the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), which blamed the collapse of TransAsia Airways on President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) cross-strait policy and the resulting drop in the number of Chinese tourists visiting Taiwan, while ignoring the effects of two deadly crashes in less than 19 months, including massive compensation payouts, and aggressive airplane purchases on the company’s finances — although it did note that TransAsia had “some internal problems.”
The post-truth moment at Tuesday’s news conference was when KMT Culture and Communications Committee deputy director Hung Meng-kai (洪孟楷) said Tsai needed to “stop leading the nation with ideology.”
Such a comment from an official of a party that ruled this nation based on ideology for decades was ludicrous. Yet it was just par for the course, given the KMT’s endless attacks over the past 16 years on the Democratic Progressive Party for “trying to stir up ethnic tensions” when it was the KMT that created such tensions in the first place.
The second example came from the Russian government, which, like the KMT, has a long history of faking its facts. The Guardian on Wednesday reported on the controversy surrounding a new Russian film about a famous 1941 World War II battle, amid questions about the accuracy of the story about a military unit commonly known as Panfilov’s Men.
The newspaper quoted Russian Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky as saying: “It’s my deep conviction that even if this story was invented from the start to the finish, even if Panfilov never existed ... it’s a sacred legend, which it’s simply impossible to besmirch. And people who try to do that are total scumbags.”
Oxford Dictionaries should include his quote in its examples of post-truth appeals.
The third example came on Thursday in Taipei during the Legislative Yuan’s hearing on legalizing same-sex marriage. While there were many choice quotes to choose from, there was one person who stood out for the malevolence of her remarks.
After boasting about a lack of discrimination and tolerance in Taiwanese society, former New Party legislator Hsieh Chi-ta (謝啟大) said the Ministry of Justice had failed to consider the “domino effect” that legalizing same-sex marriage would have, adding: “If I see a cockroach, it does not mean there is only one, but that there are hundreds of cockroaches behind it.”
Conjuring up the image of hundreds of cockroaches would send most people running to stores to buy cockroach traps and bug spray. In Rwanda in 1994, it did just that, only it was machetes that were used.
“Weed out the cockroaches,” ie, kill the Tutsis, was the favorite term used by Hutu extremists.
A bill to legalize same-sex marriage would “destroy the fundamental structure of society,” Hsieh said. “How can we allow a minority to dictate policies for the vast majority of people?”
Like the KMT, from which it sprang, the Mainlander-centric New Party and its members are in no position to preach to anyone about not allowing a minority to dictate policies.
The first casualty in a post-truth world is tolerance. It is hard to tolerate, or forgive, those who willfully disregard and twist the truth in pursuit of their goals. It is post-truth tellers such as Hsieh who threaten the “fundamental structure of society,” not those they oppose.
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