On Jan. 6, supporters of US President Donald Trump forced their way into the US Capitol. One of the invaders was shot dead by Capitol Police and others were arrested.
Mainstream US opinion and the majority of international figures have condemned the occupation, and many figures from Taiwan’s pan-blue camp have been keen to have their say.
Former premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) and others have used the occasion to criticize and satirize the 2014 Sunflower movement’s occupation of the Legislative Yuan.
Supporters of the Sunflower movement have not said much in response.
Consider the similarities and differences between the two incidents and whether they were lawful or unlawful, violent or nonviolent, rational or irrational.
Both involved protesters forcibly invading and occupying their respective legislatures, which is without doubt an unlawful act.
Furthermore, one of the principles of civil disobedience is that protesters must accept the consequences of their unlawful actions, and that it is a price to be paid to achieve a movement’s ideals and aims.
Media reported that some of those who invaded the Capitol attacked police officers with fire extinguishers, one of which was thrown and hit an officer on the head, leading to his death. Even if this was done by left-wing extremists who mingled with the crowd, as some people claim, the protesters must still bear responsibility for ineffective leadership.
In contrast, there were no violent attacks by protesters during the Sunflower movement, thus no loss of legitimacy.
The final aspect to consider is whether these actions were rational. This can be decided by whether the movements exhausted all available remedies within the system, and whether the unlawful acts helped achieve their aims.
This is the most important difference between what happened in Taiwan and what happened in the US.
In the Sunflower movement, when the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus, fronted by then-legislator Chang Ching-chung (張慶忠), tried to force through ratification of the cross-strait service trade agreement, it signaled that the possibility of opponents achieving their demands through representative politics was already remote, which provided justification for unlawful protests.
In the US, the Congress was still in the process of certifying the election results. Furthermore, it was known that numerous senators wanted to question the results in some swing states. This means that, with regard to the protesters who claimed that the election process was unfair, the remedies available to them within the system had not been exhausted, so there was no need to resort to unlawful protest.
The Sunflower movement brought about a stalemate that forced executive authorities to allow renewed deliberation on the articles of the trade deal. In contrast, the Trump supporters’ invasion of the congressional buildings while proceedings were under way, without any clear plan of action, could not possibly succeed. On the contrary, it allowed the anti-Trump bloc to take the moral high ground and gave them pretext to suppress Trump’s supporters. It also put senators who had planned to question the election results under political pressure, forcing them to withdraw their complaints.
The Trump supporters’ occupation of the Capitol was therefore irrational from moral and utilitarian points of view, which makes it very different from the Sunflower movement.
Chiu Yi-ting took part in the Sunflower movement and is now a doctoral candidate in public policy at George Mason University in Virginia.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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