A few days ago, Kuo Chien-kuo (郭建國) of the Taiwan Nation-Building Working Team and I received the court’s verdict regarding the second attempt to decapitate a statue of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) in Taipei’s Yangmingshan National Park.
The statue has been beheaded twice, first in April last year, after which the head was restored, but I was involved and wrongly prosecuted for the second attempt in June last year.
With the verdict, a chapter in the story of this incident has been concluded and I will explain my thoughts on the outcome.
The court dismissed the public indictment for the following reasons:
First, the statue does not belong to the Parks and Street Lights Office of the Taipei Public Works Department.
Second, as the office is not a public juridical person, it cannot act as a complainant under the Criminal Code.
Third, the statue’s function — allowing people to pay their respects to Chiang — was not diminished.
I would like to thank presiding judge Kuo Hui-ling (郭惠玲) for allowing Kuo and myself to escape prosecution by Taipei’s Chinese bureaucrats and for providing assurance to future activists who also want to eliminate the symbols and monuments of foreign Chinese colonizers.
There are many Chiang statues and other relics of the Chinese colonizers — just like the one on Yangmingshan, erected in public spaces by people who want to fawn over Chiang and his son Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) — that are neither registered as public property, nor belong to a government agency.
They are large pieces of scrap occupying public space.
Clearing away large pieces of scrap that destroy Taiwan’s international image and take up space that could be used for local monuments is the best possible reason for removing and destroying Chiang statues and other relics of the Chinese colonizers.
In addition, the judge’s opinion could be an effective weapon for other people taking action against the symbols of the Chinese colonizers when they need to counter the party-state judiciary and Chinese bureaucrats.
It is gratifying to encounter a judge of conscience, but the party-state judiciary was designed to serve the interests of the alien Chinese colonial regime and it has created a small, closed circle in which judges capable of safeguarding the colonizer’s interests are more likely to pass through the selection process, and take up more influential positions.
This also means that people who refuse to serve the alien Chinese colonizer’s interests are under pressure and given more marginalized positions.
Consequently, individual judges with a conscience can normally do very little other than to partly and temporarily paralyze the party-state judiciary’s ability to suppress Taiwanese, but they are unable to fundamentally rectify various injustices imposed upon the nation.
The necessity to overturn the party-state judiciary and rebuild Taiwan’s judiciary from the ground up must not be ignored just because I was lucky.
Bak-tsan Ko took part in an attempt to decapitate a Chiang Kai-shek statue in Yangmingshan National Park.
Translated by Chang Ho-ming
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