Students at Hsinchu Kuang Fu High School at the weekend triggered controversy by wearing costumes resembling Nazi uniforms and wielding swastika flags at a campus cosplay event, prompting shock and condemnation from the Israeli and German missions in Taipei, with the Presidential Office and the Ministry of Education also quick to denounce the event and chastise the school for administrative negligence.
The incident was certainly deplorable, as it was utterly inappropriate for the students to take lightly a traumatic part of human history — when millions of people in Europe were persecuted and killed by the Nazis — by thinking that they could treat the Nazi uniforms and symbols as mere “decorative elements” in their “creative design.”
However, among the government agencies and educators who rushed to fault the school and its students for their ignorance about one of the most abominable crimes in human history, are they themselves doing any better?
Taiwan has its own tragic past, too, when tens of thousands perished as the result of the brutal and bloody 228 Incident instigated by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) autocracy under Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) that ushered in the White Terror era.
To this day, many relatives and friends of the victims of that political oppression still do not know why their loved ones were killed, or where their remains might be.
Yet, look around now and despite the atrocities committed by Chiang and his regime, statues of the main instigator of the massacre are everywhere, in places such as school campuses, railway stations and public parks, not to mention the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei — more than 25 hectares are devoted to Chiang with a 76m-tall monument sitting proudly at its center.
There are also streets that bear Chiang’s name, figurines and other souvenirs that portray Chiang as a “benevolent grandfather,” and the ubiquitous presence in daily life — his image on the NT$10 coin.
How do we expect youngsters to grasp the meaning of the Holocaust, transitional justice and universal human rights when statues of a dictator still stand on virtually every campus?
Taiwanese have been educated in a system controlled by the party-state and as such, quite a large proportion of the nation’s educators grew up during the White Terror era and therefore followed an autocratic curriculum. As a result, it is little wonder that ignorance and distorted values are widespread, as educators have little understanding of the true nature of transitional justice.
The poisonous stain of authoritarianism remains in many parts of everyday life in Taiwan and the incident at the school exposes just how little transitional justice has been implemented, despite Taiwan touting itself as a flourishing democracy that values human rights.
“The responsibility of the education authorities is to teach students that peace and the values of a pluralistic society are not easily won, and free thinking must be built on justice and respect, not to leave them free to use improper words and deeds,” a Presidential Office statement said in response to the incident. “The incident has shown an urgent need for education about transitional justice.”
It is hoped the incident at the school will serve as a catalyst for the government to start putting more emphasis on transitional justice in the curriculum, implementing transitional justice from the bottom up.
Failing to so do would suggest that the administration of President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) is no different from that of her predecessor, former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) — good at talking the talk, but failing at walking the walk.
On May 7, 1971, Henry Kissinger planned his first, ultra-secret mission to China and pondered whether it would be better to meet his Chinese interlocutors “in Pakistan where the Pakistanis would tape the meeting — or in China where the Chinese would do the taping.” After a flicker of thought, he decided to have the Chinese do all the tape recording, translating and transcribing. Fortuitously, historians have several thousand pages of verbatim texts of Dr. Kissinger’s negotiations with his Chinese counterparts. Paradoxically, behind the scenes, Chinese stenographers prepared verbatim English language typescripts faster than they could translate and type them
More than 30 years ago when I immigrated to the US, applied for citizenship and took the 100-question civics test, the one part of the naturalization process that left the deepest impression on me was one question on the N-400 form, which asked: “Have you ever been a member of, involved in or in any way associated with any communist or totalitarian party anywhere in the world?” Answering “yes” could lead to the rejection of your application. Some people might try their luck and lie, but if exposed, the consequences could be much worse — a person could be fined,
Xiaomi Corp founder Lei Jun (雷軍) on May 22 made a high-profile announcement, giving online viewers a sneak peek at the company’s first 3-nanometer mobile processor — the Xring O1 chip — and saying it is a breakthrough in China’s chip design history. Although Xiaomi might be capable of designing chips, it lacks the ability to manufacture them. No matter how beautifully planned the blueprints are, if they cannot be mass-produced, they are nothing more than drawings on paper. The truth is that China’s chipmaking efforts are still heavily reliant on the free world — particularly on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing
Keelung Mayor George Hsieh (謝國樑) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) on Tuesday last week apologized over allegations that the former director of the city’s Civil Affairs Department had illegally accessed citizens’ data to assist the KMT in its campaign to recall Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) councilors. Given the public discontent with opposition lawmakers’ disruptive behavior in the legislature, passage of unconstitutional legislation and slashing of the central government’s budget, civic groups have launched a massive campaign to recall KMT lawmakers. The KMT has tried to fight back by initiating campaigns to recall DPP lawmakers, but the petition documents they
RSS