On Tuesday last week, the legislature passed the Act on Promoting Transitional Justice (促進轉型正義條例), which calls for the establishment of a Cabinet commission on the topic.
The commission is to have five main objectives: to open political files to the public; to remove authoritarian symbols, while preserving the sites of historical injustices; to redress unjust judicial cases, restore historical truths and promote social reconciliation; to handle assets improperly obtained by political parties and put them to legitimate use; and to deal with other matters related to transitional justice.
Taiwanese have been looking forward to this legislation for a long time, but it has been greeted with widespread suspicion and opposition from the remaining subordinates of the old party-state system.
These opponents characterize transitional justice as a “cycle of violence” and a “vengeful struggle,” while highlighting the potential disturbances and financial waste they say would happen if schools and colleges have to change their names or if coins and banknotes are redesigned.
However, the transitional justice that the Democratic Progressive Party is promoting is not vengeful, but centers on truth and reconciliation.
In other words, it does not seek to bring all the subordinates of the former authoritarian regime to justice or to pursue them indefinitely — it has more to do with investigating and clarifying historical truths.
Those responsible for past misdeeds should sincerely admit and apologize for their mistakes, and help bring the truth to light to console the victims and obtain their forgiveness. By this process, the two sides can achieve full reconciliation, so everyone can lay down their mental burdens and work together to build a future that can compensate for the faults of the past.
However, there is still an atmosphere of confrontation in Taiwan.
The act is moderate compared with Germany’s pursuit of the Nazis after World War II — so moderate that it brings its effectiveness into question.
Some remnants of the authoritarian regime are still stubbornly resisting. Whenever transitional justice is mentioned, they do all they can to misrepresent it as vengeance and bring up exaggerated ideas about the economic costs and annoyances of replacing coins and banknotes, changing the names of streets and schools, and so on. They are trying to portray transitional justice as the kind of vengeful struggle that took place during China’s Cultural Revolution.
However, no one wants to take vengeance on them; that is not what the act is about. Maybe they are blinded by the ruthlessness with which they oppressed others, so that they still imagine others will take revenge on them in the same manner.
However, Taiwanese society is much more kindhearted than they think.
There might be another, unspoken purpose in their persistent portrayal of transitional justice as a vengeful struggle, namely that they do not want the truth to come to light, and are unwilling to admit and apologize for their mistakes.
They do not think that their “low-end” victims are qualified to reconcile with their “high-end” selves. They believe “we are the rulers and you are the ruled,” and that this kind of relationship can never be reversed. If democracy seeks to reverse this relationship, they would rather go over to the side of their historical enemy to safeguard top-down subordination.
Of course, there are not many such people left — it is just that they are entrenched in key posts and departments that give them the power to mislead the public.
Although the long-awaited act has finally been passed into law, people should not make the mistake of thinking that from now on justice has won and good will always prevail.
For more than a year now, subordinates of the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) “blue” party-state have been turning into subordinates of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) “red” party-state. They have abandoned their anti-communist stance and want to hasten unification with China. They claim that people are no longer allowed to mention the existence of the Republic of China (ROC) and that the ROC’s continued existence depends on the CCP.
All the nonsense they come up with is enough to make your head spin. By seamlessly merging into the “red” party-state, these subordinates of the “blue” party-state show that they have no concern for truth and reconciliation. They might even hold out hope that the “red” party-state will set Taiwan’s freedom and democracy back to zero, so they can go back to lording it over Taiwanese as subordinates of a new regime.
When transitional justice is kind to people like this, it is cruel to justice. The subordinates of the party-state are still resisting the government’s attempts to recover the KMT’s ill-gotten assets and make inventories of the party’s affiliated organizations.
Meanwhile, a minority of people are using the issue of pension reforms in a desperate attempt to shake the loyalty of military personnel, civil servants and teachers to the nation and its government.
The judiciary’s evasive tactics when handling cases involving former president and KMT chairman Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) is another example.
As for those who pose as the “Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) guard corps,” their loyalties lie elsewhere. If the two sides of the Taiwan Strait ever do become “two parts of one China,” such people are likely to be the first to call for the removal of anything to do with Chiang in a bid to gain favor with the “red” party-state.
The subordinates of the Nazi party did not have another party to offer them shelter, but the subordinates of the KMT party-state have a counterpart. This difference from Germany’s situation is a challenge for Taiwan.
Most importantly, Taiwanese should recognize that removing authoritarian symbols and structures is a step to becoming a normalized nation.
Taiwan has not chosen a path of vengeful struggle, but rather one of truth and reconciliation. Having made that choice, Taiwanese need to bring as much of the truth to light as possible.
Only when the subordinates of the former party-state face the sunlight and turn into democratic citizens will Taiwan’s reconciliation process speed up — only then will flowers bloom from the gashes left by history.
As for those who are still trying to damage, destroy, discard or conceal evidence, if they cannot be brought to justice, all that can be done is to make them disappear by subjecting them to one electoral defeat after another. Maybe their silence would be a third path to take, as an alternative to vengeful struggle or truth and reconciliation.
However, Taiwanese must also prevent their delusory dreams from being revived on the shoulders of a “red” party-state.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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