AT THE END of last month, President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) invited a number of retired generals to a banquet as an early celebration of Armed Forces Day September 3. At the banquet, some of the generals put up huge posters bearing the characters: "Who to fight for?" and "What to fight for?"
In Taiwan, retired military generals get regular pensions until their death. And yet these generals don't know who and what to fight for. It was clearly an insult to the president, the supreme commander of the armed forces.
In the Chiang Kai-shek (
Also, some retired generals recently went on a group tour to the PRC -- a place they had viewed all their lives as an enemy state -- to receive blessings from high-level communist officials. In Beijing, they reportedly made comments that were detrimental to Taiwan. Earlier, there was even news that some high-level retired officers from Taiwan took up military posts in the PLA.
The people of Taiwan should not continue to support people who bite the hands that feed them. They should start a movement and push the Legislative Yuan to amend laws, so as to make sure that such soldiers don't get their pensions and that they get punished.
If publicly insulting the president and the people become a practice among retired officers, it will certainly spread to active servicemen as well. If the president cannot take proper command of the armed forces, if our officers don't even know who and what to fight for, then how can Taiwan deal with a Chinese military attack?
During the KMT era, these retired officers were the ones in power in the military. For decades, they created and broacast television programs for servicemen every Thursday. The programs were meant to educate both the servicemen and the general public on who and what they should fight for. Now they are asking "Who to fight for? What to fight for?" Does it mean that what they said in those education programs were all big lies? Were they just perpetrating swindles for their salaries?
All this has been caused by the KMT's indoctrination over the past decades. These retired officers believe that being loyal to the KMT equates to loyalty to their country. Without exception, they are all KMT members. In those days, non-KMT members could not even become platoon leaders, let alone generals. Naturally, the officers were loyal to the KMT, their leaders being Chiang Kai-shek (
When Lee Teng-hui (
In the past, the KMT openly set up party branches within military units and government agencies, and used public resouces to carry out party work. President Chen should order the Ministry of National Defense to ban all partisan activities in the miltiary. Soliders should be banned from joining political parties. They should be loyal to all the people of the ROC without ethnic discrimination.
Soldiers need to stay neutral. Otherwise, they will become the army of a particular political party. Finally, I would like to warn those pro-unification retired officers and civil servants that all their lifetime pensions will go up in smoke once China manages to unify with Taiwan. They should not bite the hand that feeds them.
Translated by Francis Huang
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