Today I explored the darker legacies of Taiwan's still widely vaunted Nationalist rulers. As the party remains a powerful force in Taiwanese politics, historical memory is particularly contentious and has differed significantly across administrations. The desire of Kuomintang-led governments to enshrine the quasi-divine status of its party's founding figures is intuitive. However, I was disappointed to see that monuments established by their Democratic Progressive Party rivals, purportedly for the purposes of reconciliation and disinterring historical truths, were similarly coloured by partisanship.
I saved these sobering sites for the day of bleakest weather in what my GCSE English teacher would have readily described as a textbook example of pathetic fallacy. My most interesting visit was to the Jing-Mei White Terror Memorial Park. The converted prison details the political repression perpetrated by the Nationalists during the years of dictatorship. The list of charges is typical of those levelled against authoritarian regimes: torture, intimidation, extra-judicial killings, etc. Though the proximity of a subversive foe across the strait partially accounts for this heavy handedness, many of these actions were simply disproportionate and nefarious. The museum did a good job of conveying the hardships endured by prisoners, both during and after their sentences. In some cases, these were truly abhorrent. However, like my visit to Robben Island, I left feeling that the prevailing injustice was the act of political imprisonment rather than what this actually entailed. The invocation of post-war Germany and the concomitant platitudes of needing to learn from history so that one is not doomed to repeat it was predictable but no less disappointing — there were no basketball courts in Auschwitz.
Reading the litany of charges levelled against Chiang's Nationalists, I couldn't help but think of the devastation being inflicted on the communist-controlled mainland at this time. Though such an exercise of moral relativism is not without flaws, it provides a necessary sense of perspective that was lamentably absent from the displays. All of this was strongly suggestive of politicisation by a party that clearly stands to benefit from weaponising history to malign its rival and associate Taiwanese oppression with the overbearing rule of mainlanders. This was laid bare in the Ukraine exhibition, which made no attempt to even thinly veil its equation of the war with Taiwan's own menacing by a bellicose neighbour. Anyway, enough ranting. It's nearly 3am and I have an early flight to Seoul tomorrow. The task of righting the historical record can wait for another day.