The point of transitional justice is to acknowledge what happened and to educate people, the amount of ignorance around 228 and the following decades is astounding in Taiwan.
Compare these two scenarios:
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one man and his brothers kill another man and his brothers, with knives.
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one army shoots down tens of thousands of civilians, with dumdum bullets.
Can normal justice system deal with scenario 1? Can it deal with scenario 2?
Exactly, it wasnāt just a āriot of aggrieved peopleā. On both sides it was a lot bigger than that. And it wasnāt just for a couple of days and a few odd places.
It covered large parts of the country when local politicians and professionals took over local administration. They were negotiating with the nationalist government when murdered in cold blood.
VOT, when will you go back to China and return the land to Aboriginal people? And please stop calling yourself ānative Taiwaneseā. Unless you can document membership in any of the recognized Aboriginal tribes your are just another Hoklo Chauvinist who stole Aboriginal land. Start with yourself if you are so much in favor of justice and admit that you are occupying Aboriginal land and have no right to continue your colonial existence in Taiwan.
I think everyone knows how utterly unimportant 228 is and thatās why people rather take a trip to Tokyo Disneyland than listen to the phony sob stories of Communists and collaborators who licked Japanese butt.
I cannot fully agree with āeducationā as the point of transitional justice. The point of transitional justice should be justice, not acknowledgement or educaiton.
Hsinhai, where do they teach you to write in the standard butthurt Chinese style?
Where do you even learn terms like āHoklo Chauvinistā from anyway ?!?
You think justice can be meted out effectively when the perpetrators are almost all dead?
I donāt think so. But I think awareness and education of what REALLY happened are key now.
This includes an admission that this was planned and executed by the KMT.
āHoklo Chauvinistā is the proper term for a purported ānative Taiwaneseā whose ancestors are as Chinese as the Mainlanders who came with the KMT, yet spends the entire day whining about the evil ROC regime without ever mentioning how his own ancestors stole Aboriginal land by committing a genocide in the coastal plains.
You sure smell of typical Chinese butthurt to me.
The problem with transitional justice when it comes to historical events like 228 is that the perpetrators and victims are all long dead. Thereās no ājusticeā involved if current taxpayers have to foot the bill for righting historical wrongs they had nothing to do with. Nine times out of ten, transitional justice is a tool used by those in charge to punish their political enemies and consolidate their own power.
I do agree with Brian though that education about 228 is important, given the historical amnesia that was taught in Taiwanās schools for so many years.
(Dr. has expressed a similar view)
Naturally, that has been a major concern. While this view is based on the reality, it creates distraction. The institutes that had done the injustice are the real targets. For one, Chinese Nationalist Party was one of the criminals, still exists, and should be illegalized and disbanded.
List of criminal institutes that were involved in the 228 massacre, along with the effects left by them, should be cleansed. Just to name a few:
- Chinese Nationalist Party
- the ROC military
- the govenment veteran agency
- the judicial branch
- the police
along with the things they did
- the money looted,
- the property confisticated,
- the education materials imposed,
- the exams for civial servants
and so on
Look folks, transitional justice is hard. This difficulty is not specific to Taiwan; itās the case everywhere in the world where transitions have occurred and new regimes (in Taiwanās case, a democratically elected government) attempt to establish their legitimacy and also try to reckon with past abuses of state power: detentions, disappearances, extrajudicial killings, glorifying authoritarian figures, etc.
Attempting to prosecute the perpetrators of these past abuses is hard. Why? Even following a democratic transition, the judicial system/government bureaucracy is typically still full of members of the old guard, whose entire raison dāetre was to legitimize the dictatorship and its abuses. Even if you could imagine fair trials (hardly a given), the whole judicial system would likely collapse if it was asked to deal with all these perpetratorsāthere were simply far too many of them, and far too many crimes.
So what to do? This is in fact how the notion of transitional justice emerged: as a set of varied attempts to envision new ways forward. Sometimes this involved setting up truth commissions (with varying degrees of power). Sometimes this involved setting up new institutions for the nation: museums, monuments, new ways to remember the past and imagine our communities. Sometimes this involved apologies from the government and/or providing some form of compensation to victims and their families. It also involves rethinking education: the ways we tell stories about our nation, the ways we collectively understand our past.
None of this is easy, or definite, or settled, but the process still matters. Despite many reasons to feel frustrated, things are in fact happening in Taiwan, including a new law on Promoting Transitional Justice (passed in December 2017)āweāll see what this eventually accomplishes, or fails to accomplish. Already one of the prominent criticisms of this new law is the way it sidesteps Indigenous demands for recognition and land rights. As always, we can see how messy and complicated things are in Taiwan. But we can also see people airing different views, attempting to shift public discourse, and (one hopes) also working towards new ways of understanding our nationās past, and new ways of living together.
Peace to all,
Guy
In fairness though, the original thread is butthurt, which I think between the lines is Hsinhais point.
Call me old-fashioned, but I think transitional justice should happen at the ballot box. In other words, it already has. The KMT is now a shell of its former self. Any other form is just too ripe for abuse.
Itās clear that the KMT has undergone its own struggles, sometimes taking a hard line, sometimes backing off that hard line when they realize it has little electoral appeal at the national level (think of Hung Hsiu-chu being turfed at the last minute in favor of Eric Chu in the most recent presidential election).
But itās also important to note that transitional justice is not just a matter of elections. Itās also a matter of asking: OK, after the dictatorship, now what? Lock up, try, or execute all the perpetrators? There is a huge cost to attempting such a move, which was never attempted in Taiwan. Complete impunity for the perpetrators of all the detentions, disappearances, and killings? Well, thereās a cost if you go that direction too. Even though there has apparently been a democratic transition, thereās little sense that things have changed. People will feelārightly, in my viewāthat the system is not just.
Proponents of transitional justice attempt to work between these two positions, trying to envision and implement new ways to, well, manage the transition. Because if the new regime is incapable of doing so, or appearing to do so, it wonāt remain in place for long. It needs to establish its legitimacy and its ability or perceived ability to do the right thing. And yes there is and will be disagreement about what exactly this entails! Thatās the nature of any democratic polity, including our home Taiwan.
Guy
South Africa did a pretty good job with the truth commision. Might be something to take from that.
And once again, we come to the paradox of democracy.
Did the people not vote for a party that very prominently included transitional justice in its platform? At what point should a democratic decision be deemed undemocratic?
Which would be more democratic?
- The KMT submits to the will of the people as interpreted by the DPP.
- The KMT petitions the JY and CY to defy the LY.
- The DPP changes its mind and drops the whole TJ plan.
I donāt claim to have a solution, but Iām curious as to how option 3 would be more democratic than the other two.
Didnāt the people vote for a party that included closer integration with Mainland China in its platform in 2012? Yet if I remember correctly this forum was rife of people aligning themselves with students illegally occupying parliament, even going so far as to claim that sort of bejavior is a legitimate expression of democracy.
It is quite obvious that ātransitional justiceā is th DPPās revenge for what happened to Chen Shii-bian in 2008. The difference of course being that the judicial appeals of the KMT and other organizations against executive action in the name of ātransitionl justiceā will likely be succssful.
Furthermore, only addressing grievances against the KMT and entirely missing Japanese collaborators and Aboriginal rights is once more showing the true agenda of the DPP. The DPP and their supporters claim victim status yet cannot openly address their own historical wrongs. Introducing some aboriginal languages into the canon of official languages is nothing compared to the land theft and destruction of aboriginal way of life in Taiwan at the hands of so called āTaiwaneseā (actually Chinese/collaborator with Japan). Forget the āevil KMT,ā 228 was nothing against the aboriginal genocide long before any KMT member or ROC soldier ever set foot on Taiwan.
I canāt speak for anyone posting about anything in 2012 or the early part of 2014.
As for closer integration, would that not be integration with what you (and @rowland) call Communist bandits?
The paradox continuesā¦