TAIPEI TIMES, Monday, Aug 11, 2003, page 2
While the DPP is ready to commence its presidential campaign, veteran DPP member Chang Chun-hung (
The point being?
The Hualien by-election was in no sense a litmus test for the DPP and Chang wanting the party central to explain how they lost there is laughable. The KMT has always held sway in this area and the DPP was not expected to win. The sample voter size was tiny and skewed. There are other points, but competent analysts know them already.
“One country on each side.” What? This is not catchy enough for Chang? I don’t see anything productive coming out of this fellow.
He likes to talk turkey on democracy with a foreigner who cannot vote or run for office? I assume your ideas are good ones, Richard, but do you not think that you might be letting yourself be flattered into believing that somehow these people are going to actually make waves according to your instructions?
Given what I have now heard about this Chang character, I’d advise you to find someone more reasonably in tune with political reality.
By the way, I thought you were going to say, “They all admitted that my report and recommendations (sweeping as they are) are too highly detailed, too carefully documented, and too exhaustive, for anyone to bother reading.”
Brevity is the soul of wit…and a lot easier for people to digest.
Wolf’s comments are well taken. Not wanting to hurt anyone’s feelings, I can not say as I have ever had the endurance to finish reading anything you have ever written Richard, except for your posts here. That includes your opus Conflict in Harmony (tried four times when I first got here, couldn’t hack it beyond about page 30) and your pieces which I presume you still do for the aging China Post.
I think (some) of your ideas are sound, but you gotta get an editor with a big set of scissors. I don’t say that to be mean-spirited but simply as some free “writer to writer” advice.
again, not trying to be offensive to someone I know. I save my really offensive comments for the clowns with the fake names…well, and the locals.
take care,
Brian
Maybe you should start with the TSU party first. Show your proposal to the party and if you are lucky you may get Lee Deng Hui to give it his blessing. Once you have that and some publicity you may get to step into the ring with the DPP. I think stepping in with the DPP may be too forward at first. Just my thoughts.
What about the other DDP legislator Parris Chang who writes for the TT or is it the Liberty times. He seems like a sound legislator.
Dicta is legalese for the fine print a lawyer doesn’t read . The US State Dept lawyers are just the same for 7 FAM 1121.4-3 which is just one component of Richard’s work. 7 FAM 1120 is a DOS foriegn affairs manual. Don’t even ask about the legal incompetence of US Ambassador Richard Holbrooke as primary author of the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords.
Richard Hartzell’s work is grounded in research which actually probes deeper than what he has written. The problem is no one is competent to offer rebuttal. Not opinions, well-grounded rebuttal.
There is nothing written by scholars that has done this within the major and recent literature in the last 50 years. Most experts and scholars just skim over the surface of 2-28, SFPT, and they just make an authoritiative bibliography. Their competency in the subject matter is being challenged by Richard and the others. Probably these single-discipline experts are being faced with the multi-centric and multi-dimensional factors in the status research. If you even think Richard’s tome is difficult reading, then remember you are looking the tip of the iceberg. The ROC ship of state has sprung a leak and the rats are now looking to abandon ship.
I am in touch with former President Lee and the TSU. I gave Lee an earlier version of this opus in late May, and he called me on the telephone in June to say he likes it very much.
From my own observation however, there is one small problem. Many legislators, lawyers, and even international law researchers in Taiwan are actively promoting the campaigns to get Taiwan admitted to the United Nations. They do speaking tours and solicit monetary donations for this specific purpose. My research reveals the folly of such an approach, and hence these people don’t like it.
However, in the many court cases I have done over the years, I have always been up against well organized opposition, in addition to my many years of experience in running an English language school, so I feel that having some people come out with “negative comments” is normal.
“I Have a Dream”
I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest movement for freedom in the history of our nation.
Seven score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.
But 140 years later, now it is the Taiwanese who are not free. One hundred and forty years later, the international life of the Taiwanese is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred and forty years later, the Taiwanese now live on a lonely unrecognized island in the midst of a vast ocean of sovereign independent states. One hundred and forty years later, the Taiwanese today languish in the corners of American society and find themselves exiles in their own land. And so we are speaking up here today to dramatize a shameful condition.
In a sense we will need to urge our friends in Washington, D.C. to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men – yes, black men, yellow men, as well as white men – would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, due process, and the pursuit of happiness.
It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her nationals of Taiwan ancestry are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Taiwanese people a bad check, a check that has come back marked “insufficient funds.”
But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of the USA. And so we need to make our position clear, and to strive to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom, security, peace, and justice.
We want to remind all Americans of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of equality and justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of ignorance and discrimination to the solid rock of shared goals and brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.
It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment.
This sweltering summer of the Taiwanese’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Two thousand and three is not an end but a beginning. Those who hoped that the Taiwanese needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Taiwanese are granted their nationality rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.
— See my Chinese language treatise (version: 3.02) outlining the Taiwanese rights for US nationality at
earth.prohosting.com/hartzmmm/book.htm
(This is written in Chinese Microsoft Word, 262 pages, approx. 1.2 MB)
Do you have an English version as well?
Kennedy is dead on here. You have to be able to present your ideas well. I’ve always had a lot of trouble getting through the H Agenda, except for that one more than a year ago in which Hartzel said his son wasn’t allowed to eat chocolate in the house.
I am in touch with former President Lee and the TSU. I gave Lee an earlier version of this opus in late May, and he called me on the telephone in June to say he likes it very much.[/quote]
If you’re going to drop names, then I’ll add that Lee and I were puttting back a few cans of Asahi after a round of golf a while back and I asked him, as a personal favor to me, to call and tell you he read your stuff (I thought it’d keep your morale up).