People First Party Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) epitomizes the “banality of evil,” veteran activist Shih Ming-te (施明德) said yesterday, criticizing the presumptive presidential candidate’s ties to the regimes of former presidents Chiang Kai-Shek (蔣介石) and Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國).
Shih criticized Soong for using “performing duties in accordance with the law” to defend his actions during the Martial Law era, adding that many of Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin’s followers had used the same excuse to justify ignoring their consciences.
Soong served in a number of positions in the former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government beginning in the 1970s, including heading the Government Information Office from 1979 to 1984, while Shih was imprisoned for two terms totalling more than 25 years during that period for his political activism.
“This mediocre, evil person wants to revive the old regime and become Taiwan’s president,” Shih said, using political theorist Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil” to refer to Soong.
If Soong was elected, people would be reminded of the tragic history of colonialism and anti-colonialism, he said.
Shih, who announced his presidential bid in May, criticized Soong as well as KMT candidate Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) and Democratic Progressive Party candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) for failing to clearly explain the direction they would take with major policies if elected.
“The campaign is being conducted like a township and village election, with candidates hogging [newspaper] space by ‘acting cute,’” he said, criticizing his rivals for spending their time wearing bamboo hats and eating at roadside stalls.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
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