Comedian and actor George Carlin once said, “The public sucks.” Perhaps he has a point.
Observing politics over the past four years can sometimes make Carlin’s sentiment seem understandable. Let’s face it, no one approves of corruption — unless they benefit from it directly. As Milton Friedman once wrote, we all want a fair system, but we want a system that is fairer for us than for others.
It seems that in the information age people have become particularly susceptible to short-term memory syndrome. We are constantly bombarded with information, some good and some very bad. The minute we take time to analyze arguments that have been presented can be the minute the argument changes. Sometimes arguments are turned on their heads before we even finish watching a YouTube video or reading a news article.
Over the past four years the Taiwanese public, just like the public in other countries, has fallen prey to this short-memory trap. While it is probably true that former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and those who worked under him did engage in graft, money laundering and other forms of corruption and that the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has led the way in denouncing Chen, his family and members of his administration, some pan-green activists have also been highly critical and probably rightly so. Even this writer was and remains disappointed in “the clean party’s” poor performance regarding corruption during the final years of Chen’s presidency.
However, here’s the problem — two to four years of corruption — even eight years of corruption — during the time the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was in power, pale when compared to the endemic corruption that took — and continues to take — place within the KMT, and I am not referring to KMT corruption only in Taiwan.
If the KMT takes a long, hard look at its own history, it will find that calling Chen and his associates “corrupt” is really quite amusing. “The pot calling the kettle black” does not even come close here, because pots and kettles are roughly the same size. This would be more like the sun calling the moon an object in outer space or a blue whale calling a single plankton a sea creature. There’s really no comparison.
What is worse, the extent of the corruption cannot really be known because the KMT was able to censor all information when in power. The same holds true now, as the KMT holds power in both the legislature and Executive Yuan. It appears former presidential candidate Frank Hsieh (謝長庭) was right to warn about returning to single-party rule during the 2008 presidential campaign.
Newspapers, individuals, and groups can try their best to expose corruption and the deliberate trampling of rights, but in reality, with little representation in the legislature and no voice in the Cabinet, nothing can really be done about it — at least not at present.
What is worse, the KMT appears to be doing an even worse job of cleaning itself up while in power than the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Even the CCP occasionally offers up some corrupt officials as sacrificial lambs to sate the public’s appetite for justice. The KMT? Not one word. Indeed, the cronyism of the KMT remains the most shocking aspect of its existence.
Ironically, the clearest display of the KMT’s nature was its ability to identify corrupt actions and officials within the DPP almost immediately. In other words, KMT officials knew exactly where to look for corruption based on their own experience of how, where and when to get away with such practices.
I suppose that’s why former criminals are often used to help solve crimes. They have first-hand knowledge of the criminal mindset and the loopholes and other weaknesses in the system.
Despite all of this uproar over how corrupt DPP officials were during their eight years in power, we need to remember why it was the DPP came to power in the first place. One of the major reasons was because the KMT was then — and still is today — so corrupt.
We have every right to be disappointed in Chen and his associates, but in being disappointed, we should also realize that before the DPP came to power, corruption was the rule, not the exception and there was no safe way for anyone to voice displeasure. That was a major reason why the KMT “lost” China and a contributory factor in their loss of the presidency.
Nathan Novak is a writer, researcher and student of China and the Asia-Pacific region, with particular focus on cross-strait relations.
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