Editorials

(Editorial Cartoon from the Taipei Times Tuesday August 17th 2010)

I like this editorial from the Taipei Times, this one from the Taiwan News on the KMT's lack of respect for Aborigines in Post-Morakot reconstruction and this one on the DPP's new vision on Taiwanese identity. Notable were these paragraphs:

... charges by KMT-friendly media that the DPP's admonition to its members not to view "postwar immigrants from mainland China" as "outsiders" as a sign that the DPP is "a Taiwan Nazi party" are overwrought.

After all, there are simply no historical examples of fascist parties which have publically advocated civic nationalism that are inclusive of new immigrants without regard to ethnic origins and which advocates human rights as firmly as the DPP has in its short history.

On the other hand, since regaining power in May 2008, Ma and other KMT leaders have repeated declared that "the people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to the Chinese race" and are "all children of the Yellow Emperor."

Ironically, while the DPP is reaffirming its embrace of Taiwan national identity based on civic nationalism, the KMT government is reviving a monistic racial nationalism, a common characteristic of fascist parties, which threatens to turn Taiwan's oceanic rainbow country into part of a monochrome "Chinese racial nation."

This letter to the Taipei Times is an excellent expose of how flexible the KMT's relationship to the law and constitution is - at once proclaiming a desire to be a government of the constitution and law whilst trampling over both at will ...