Sunday, June 7, 2020

Taiwan in the Downward Spiral called the United States


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          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?   

Copyright © 2020 by David Barry Temple. All rights reserved 

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