Quote of the Week: The Good 'Ol Days

Most generations look back on their childhoods as a time of innocence and purity and 'when the world made sense' and 'everything was in its place'.  That might be a tad of an exaggeration but you get the gist of it.  President Ma of Taiwan the Republic of China is no different in this respect except that for him the 1970's were a time to fondly remember. That's the 1970's in Taiwan. Under Martial Law. Under a dictatorship and a period known as the White Terror for the fact that suspected opponents to the regime were often harassed, beaten and politically detained if not murdered.  At the time, Ma was a rising star in the KMT inner circle and a close confidant of the dictator Chiang Ching-kuo.  He later became Minister of Justice and opposed democratisation.  That much is now known without debate.  Touring a museum yesterday, Ma made the following remark:

“I miss the good old years,” President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said as he looked at pictures of himself at the recently opened Presidential and Vice Presidential Artifacts Museum in Taipei.

The photographs had been taken in the 1970s, when Ma was a secretary and interpreter for then-president Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國), son of dictator Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石).

I think this really signals that Ma has always been far more inclined to support a 'benign' dictatorship than a democracy.  To look back at the 1970's and remark that they were good old years, no matter whether his judgement of them as 'good' was entirely from his personal experience, is a terrible and open slap in the face to those who suffered during that time and those who fought, and died, for the democracy that allowed Ma to become President.  It also exposes Ma's previous comments about KMT attrition for what was done to Taiwanese as false and disingenuous.  The KMT never changed. It just changed it's PR.

I reckon that if Ma begins his second term as President, and as Taiwan slips further into economic, judicial and political 'synchrony' with the PRC with all the attendant social and economic impacts that will have, many Taiwanese will become gradually aware how the good old days were really 1996 to 2008 when at least the people had Presidents who championed the country and its then independent people rather than cravenly pay tribute to Beijing to share the crumbs that fall off the Emperor's table.