Taiwan in the Downward Spiral called the United States

          I sit and watch the downward spiral called the United States in my safe Taiwanese home, but a radical at heart I remain and do what I can to educate wayward sheep busy flocking themselves with condemnations of the violence of revolt. There are no criminals in an uprising; downtrodden victims of capitalism. If anything good can come out of the botched response to COVID-19, it is this. My son was living on the streets of LA when it hit home but he wisely took my offer to transport him to his sister's homes near Pittsburgh where he will stay and get medical tests and credentials before going anywhere else.

          A friend from California wrote: “The cadet called MAGA boys to attack protesters at the WH. See what happens to night.” I was not being brazen to say I hoped, if there was a blood bath there was a blood bath outside the White House, most of it would be white supremacist or military police; there is no revolution without martyrs. The US protesters must go beyond the Yellow Vests of France, in size and shape, minorities, veterans, students, unionists, housewives. This will be the last chance to turn the US around.

There were reports of agent provocateur and police brutality during the mass uprising against the system brought on by the murder of another person by the police. The police are provoking the violence but the people can organize and fight back. Get in a car and run over some. Get on the roofs and drop Maltov cocktails on them. Follow them home and set their straw houses on fire. Don’t let the violence scare us. Organize clandestinely and fight back! There must be a civil war, as I discussed with another incredulous stateside friend no more than a month ago, to which she threatened to unfriend me; we snoozed each other. Guerilla tactics.

 I could see what they were doing with the COVID-19 unpreparedness and telling people to stay off the streets. They’ve got the guns but we’ve got the numbers. Doesn’t matter if the schmuck is calling ANTIFA a terrorist organization (it’s not an organization anyway) because we know the streets and alleyways of our towns. For all the privileged white cowards like Lorraine Green hiding behind black husbands and police officer step-children, there are many more white people that know the score and tried to burn down the CNN headquarters in Atlanta for their misinformation. We will be coming out of the woodwork and we will win to create an anarcho-syndicalist socialist state!

          The curfew in DC on June first was ten o’clock. There were thousands of beautiful young people on the streets surrounding the White House defying it. Trump was belligerent threatening to bring in troops; martial law loomed. Those brave young fellow workers were amazing! That night it looked like there was going to be the start of the revolution. There was going to be no more Republican-Democrat hegemony over American people. The Senate would be forced to resign or be hanged.

Trump was not resigning. Military police were firing teargas and I believe the protesters should have been more offensive; break through the line. But it is okay to retreat to find a location unprotected to fight back. The protesters backed off Lafayette Park, but when they were attacked every protester needed to have a weapon and protection. Telling well-apportioned police not to shoot is useless. They had noisy military helicopters hovering low over the people.

 I was watching two You-Tube feeds and felt like I was there. I would have run away, too, as I did many times in past demonstrations against the US government. I, too, would not get a stick and fight back. Before curfew at 10 pm, police started attacking peaceful and militant protesters without discrimination. The protesters then would not have been wrong to pick up metal barricades and rush at the brutal police firing teargas and rubber bullets at them, but they were backing off. But eight minutes until curfew, no one was following orders to get off the streets in DC, NYC, and elsewhere else in forty cities across the USA.

At midnight, the feed from Matt, who was sending the live, ended; he decided it was time to get into his car and go home; his parents were worrying about him. The protesters had backed away from the military police line and took their frustration out on commercial establishments going into the night seizing the time, and getting home safely to fight another day.

I was talking with my California friend for over an hour during the showdown outside the White House as I watched You-Tube feeds from D.C. He would like to think of himself as a radical; he is on the right side in this fight, but like many other liberal bourgeois WASPs in denial about their white Christian privilege, he comforts himself reminiscing how he was a Chicano amigo once. His wife, a Taiwanese born American, is out-of-touch as much as my friend about the big corruption of the DPP inviting the US military in further, buying expensive second –rate equipment, power-sharing with the KMT; the big international DPP corruption versus the little local  KMT corruption with Taiwan's mafia. My friend is not about to tell his wife anything to upset the apple cart, but at least he realizes they don't know what's really going on in Taiwan living as they do, isolated in Ventura. If she loved Taiwan as much as she said she did, they would come back here.

Seeing life in the States getting worse I ask myself: Did we escape the USA just in time? I retired early thanks to a buy-out to save the city money, marginalized in FDR's UFT and NYC GMB by the time I retired; there was nothing else for me to do but volunteer for Workers World and attend Anarchist Forums. But I never lost sight of the deterioration of justice and workers' rights in the States. I didn't jump ship, did I, but I didn't go down with it, either. The main difference between radical friends place in Brooklyn and mine is I have a choice of finding out how horrible it has become there, but he has to live in the muck. In his golden years, I wouldn't begrudge them a cabin near Walden Pond or something; unless they're in the underground; the only other way to go.

On Saturday, June 6, they had a recall vote for the KMT clown from Kaohsiung with the Donald Trump imitation; his big-mouth campaign didn’t work though and he lost to President Tsai Ying-Wen in December. He had been elected mayor for the reason that Tsai was not moving Taiwan forward, politically or economically, but instead of staying to help Kaohsiung, he immediately started a presidential campaign. Tsai had USA help and the media played up anti-China Hong Kong hysteria and neutralized her stalemate while countering her too much-too soon legalizing same-sex marriage to a conservative society. With any other pro-independence politician like Lai Ching-Da, the former independence supporting mayor from Tainan, off the table and out of the way, caved in with the rest of the DPP that has international policy to China, they chart a similar course to that of the KMT of martial law days; no discussion with the PRC, and no compromise in the US defended island, and still workers are overworked, endangered and underpaid without unions. At least the anger in the US over the brutal police murder of George Floyd is too much for Taiwan media to ignore and may make some people question why the DPP is supporting and mimicking a regime like that.

Congratulations to the people of Kaohsiung for showing the U.S. how to remove a scumbag from office, something the Democratic Party has no clue about handling. More people voted to remove him than voted to elect him. Leona and I celebrated and will make plans to visit Kaohsiung again, I hope.  

The proof I sent my California friend a few days ago supporting the Chinese claim to Taiwan, sailing to and occupying western Taiwan as early 1600, was contended by him when we chatted the morning the White House was under siege. Why he would challenge that China has a right to insist on Taiwan as part of their nation if he is as against the US government as he says, especially since the DPP has given up supporting independence and capitulated to old KMT ruse of communist slander and dependence on the US for surveillance and defense?

The U.S. sent two Navy ships through the Taiwan Strait today for the fourth time in recent months on the anniversary of the Tiananmen disaster, the anniversary when western subterfuge almost torpedoed Chinese socialism. I wondered why there were Taiwanese fighter jets in the sky that morning. How much more anti-worker, anti-people, racist action by the US government must be shown in Taiwan media before the Taiwanese people rise up and oust their own obstruction to nationhood?   

www.readingsandridings.jimdo.com

Copyright © 2020 by David Barry Temple. All rights reserved 

Taiwan Spitting in the face of Change

On Friday, TSMC announced plans to invest US$12 billion to build

 the 5 nanometer fab, saying that construction is scheduled to start next year.

          One hand washes the other but in this time of changing priorities, Taiwan is spitting in the face of changing priorities and distancing itself from China, its cultural cohort in everything but capitalism and exploitation. First it was FOXCONN making a deal to undercut American unions with a factory in Wisconsin, now it is TSMC ready to have union free workers exploited on American soil in Arizona.  In both cases, the workforce in Taiwan gets the short end of the deal with migrant silicon valley workers from India exploited even further and keeping Taiwanese workers underpaid and overworked. This is the reward the US gives Taiwan for distancing itself from China while the real gift of independence for Taiwan has been taken off the table by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) of Tsai Ying-Wen. How does the clandestine US presence in Taiwan  and English dependency work to make Taiwan America's eyes on China, blind to its own self-determination?  

          Formosan Association for Public affairs (FAPA), located in the US to lobby congressmen and senators to support Taiwan-related Bills posted this: The Taiwan Allies International Protection and Enhancement Initiative Act was signed into law by President Trump last week. The remaining Taiwan-related bills in the Congress include Senate's Taiwan Assurance Act (S.878), Senate's WHO bill (S.249), House's Taiwan Envoy Act (H.R.5535), House's Employment Fairness for Taiwan Act of 2020 (H.R.6014), and Taiwan Symbols of Sovereignty Act (S.3310 & H.R.6287).” They also want support to force China Airlines to change its name to reflect its Taiwan home base so they can skirt prejudice against “real” Chinese. Taiwan’s Minister for Transportation and Communications, Lin Chia-lung, said his ministry has an “open mind” to changing the carrier’s name, but notes that “because [the carrier] is a listed company, [we] need to respect the shareholders’ and public’s opinions”. Will they wear “We are NOT Japanese” type buttons as the Chinese did in the U.S. during internment of Japanese citizens during WW II? Asians of all nations are victims of vicious racist attacks in the U.S. And the DPP through FAPA sees the US as Taiwan’s friend?  

          Taiwan’s government is clearly betting on the wrong horse to the detriment of its working class. In passive-aggressive manor, Taiwan’s DPP threw insult at the WHO for not recognizing being left out; Taiwan is part of China and should defer to her; indeed, they mimicked her response without acknowledgment. By doing as well or better than China and Hong Kong in controlling the outbreak, Taiwan has a “we’ll show them” combative attitude.

          Some supporters of Tsai Ying-Wen’s campaign to smear the WHO for not dealing with Taiwan separately from China allegedly insulted the WHO personally and sent death threats. The WHO leader fought back. Taiwan led the way in suspicion and deriding China’s response to the outbreak in the beginning mentioning “Wuhan” a thousand times a day in the media “white-man” washing of the true nature of a pandemic; it belongs to all nations unprepared to care for their common people, not China alone, though it served Taiwanese well the precautions taken, but now the DPP is riding Trump’s racist coattails, against its social cohort.

          The UN agency has come under continued fire from Trump, who mirrors Tsai Ying-Wen’s accusation that the WHO is “very China-centric” and has ended funding.

          Speaking on Wednesday, Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus defended the WHO's work and called for an end to the politicization of COVID-19.

          The disease first emerged last December in the Chinese city of Wuhan, which has just ended an 11-week lock-down. An advisor to the WHO chief earlier said their close work with China had been "absolutely essential" in understanding the disease in its early stages.

         Trump's attacks on the WHO come in the context of criticism of his own administration's handling of the pandemic, especially early problems with US testing.

The WHO approved a corona-virus test in January - but the US decided against using it, developing its own test instead. However, in February, when the testing kits were dispatched, some of them did not work properly, and led to inconclusive results.

Public health experts say the delay enabled the virus to spread further within the US.

          Dr Tedros said he had been at the receiving end of racist comments for the past two to three months. "Giving me names, black or negro," he said. "I'm proud of being black, or proud of being Negro." He then said he had received death threats, adding: "I don't give a damn." The WHO chief said the abuse had originated from Taiwan, "and the foreign ministry didn't disassociate" itself from it.

          "For years, we have been excluded from international organizations, and we know better than anyone else what it feels like to be discriminated against and isolated," Reuters news agency quoted her as saying. "If Director-General Tedros could withstand pressure from China and come to Taiwan to see Taiwan's efforts to fight Covid-19 for himself, he would be able to see that the Taiwanese people are the true victims of unfair treatment."

          Taiwan foreign ministry spokeswoman Joanne Ou said the comments were "irresponsible" and the accusations "imaginary". The ministry said it was seeking an apology for "slander", AFP news agency reported.

          FAPA (Formosan Association of Public Affairs) is the Taiwanese-American lobby group that funnels millions of dollars to senators and congressmen to influence their stance towards Taiwan province’s de facto separation from the People's Republic of China. They originally were mostly middle-aged independence advocates with a smattering of easy-chair socialists but now they are elderly, with no new generation, and have given up their ideals to see Taiwan as a 51st State and Taiwan ties to the US stronger than with its cultural cohort 129 miles across the Strait. Instead of acknowledging the influence from China establishing policy that mirrored its quick and effective reaction to the virus outbreak in late January, FAPA and the ruling DPP want to ride Trump's coattails in blaming China for America's problem of unpreparedness and aiding the CIA in further distancing reunification, not for Taiwanese benefit alone. Too bad that the KMT used a populist approach supporting a clown that rivaled Trump for the presidency, and lost momentum of a populace reeling from a 20 year failing economy and underpaid work force; indeed losing workers to China that paid higher wages. Taiwan has become Asia's Florida; 1 out of 4 citizens over 65 and legally holding duel US passports. The lies the DPP is spreading (65,000 people died from COVID-19 in China, for example) and supporting the renaming of China Airlines (how about China Petroleum, China University Hospital, etc.) because it has given Taiwan a bad name is ludicrous.

          Using the WHO's refusal to address Taiwan's demand for consideration, embarrassing themselves at news conferences, and taking Trump's tract of blaming China, calling the WHO China's proxy, will not work as the proof is in the pudding; at least 20,000 confirmed US deaths (out of a quarter billion) to China's lock-downed Hubei Provence's 3,000 (saving the more than billion people outside Wuhan) is a figure that over a hundred nations in the WHO recognize as reality. Taiwan is riding the wrong horse into the future and I fear it will come to no good. How long can the American bubble in Taiwan last when the bubble-blowers in the White House and Senate is running out of soap. I don't fly China Airlines because the food sucks, the seats are tight, the cost is high, and the equipment is old, nor do I fly Air China with its poor handling and bureaucratic transfers. Changing the name of either airline will make no difference to me or most savvy travelers. 

           FAPA's renewed demand that China Airlines be renamed because 'China was giving it a bad name.' That bad name is the fault of racist Euro-Americans like Trump blaming instead of congratulating China for its fast and effective response to the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan. I wouldn't fly China Airlines or Air China if they were both renamed Trans Love Airways; both airlines suck. This red herring is FAPA's only recourse to admitting it's lobbying from a sinking ship.

          The lie the US and Taiwan are spreading about the WHO not telling the world of the danger. I wrote in an article Jan. 20: “Yesterday, the World Health Organization said the virus represents a risk outside of China as the United States reported its first case of person-to-person transmission.” They did indeed tell the US and the world to be prepared.

          The hilarity of Taiwan's DPP rejection of China while pandering to the US and feigning independence is too much. Tsai Ying-Wen has given up the fight for Taiwan independence

          Meanwhile, the English media in Taiwan is controlled by the US, the defense is supported and backed by the US, English is taught from primary school up, most government officials and ruling class hold US passports, US citizens have special visa privileges here, the Taiwan dollar exchange is according to the US. Most NGO's are from the US, the church is beholden to the US, street signs and weapon instructions, propaganda in line with US, MSN, Facebook and Google given free access to private date, Lockheed-Martin research tied to US CIA, shall I continue? Okay. The US helped rescue CKS and turned a blind eye to the 228 Massacre, US fast food chains, clothing, music, and culture of US origin... Taiwan is OWNED by the US CIA, surveillance, and it's not symbiotic; they will and have jerked Taiwan around for 70 years playing both sides KMT and DPP; every Taiwan president has secret briefings with the US before taking office (except maybe Lee Tung-Huai who told the US they weren't his father) and now most COVID-19 cases are FROM THE US, NOT CHINA as they let their guard down to US-European repatriation. American youth are here in droves paraprofessionals using Taiwan as a way-station to touring the world. You're not denying that Taiwan is a vassal of the U.S. more than any other land? Its Chinese cohort is stymied.

www.readingsandridings.jimdo.com

Copyright © 2020 by David Barry Temple. All rights reserved