228 Incident was a massacre
Kudos to Ketty Chen for her “Remembering Taiwan’s Tragic Past” piece, (Features, Feb. 28) and an extra round of applause for her consistently referring in the article to the “228 Massacre” instead of the “228 Incident.”
I recommend the Taipei Times and all of us adopt the same nomenclature when discussing this horrific episode in Taiwan’s history.
Why?
In early March 1770, British military presence in Boston led to a tense situation that came to a head when British soldiers fired into a crowd of US patriots.
Three US civilians were killed at the scene of the shooting. This “incident” in would go into history as “the Boston Massacre” and foreshadowed the outbreak of the US Revolutionary War also known as “The American War of Independence.”
In comparison, about 28,000 people were killed in Taiwan from Feb. 28, 1947 and during the subsequent White Terror era.
My point is: If we can refer to the March 1770 event in the US as a massacre, we can certainly refer to the 1947 happenings in Taiwan as a massacre.
We must not downplay this tragedy.
Coen Blaauw
Washington
Fracking not the answer
The article, “US ‘shale revolution’ a positive step”, (Feb 26, pg. 8) is just another overly optimistic and somewhat misinformed opinion about this latest purported panacea to solve the world’s energy crisis.
First, it completely ignores the environmental catastrophe that shale fracking represents.
In the process of releasing shale natural gas, a witch’s brew of more than 250 known carcinogens is released into the freshwater aquifers of the US, potentially polluting the entire US drinking water supply.
In 2005, amendments to the US Safe Drinking Water Act were passed at the behest of former US vice president Dick Cheney and his Halliburton minions, preventing the US Environmental Protection Agency from investigating the safety of this process, and a tsunami of corrupt, corporate cash prostitutes any rational discussion within individual states.
Second, the ability of these natural gas wells to sustain high levels of production is already shown to be ephemeral.
Older wells are already showing signs of collapse even though these are themselves relatively recent. The chance of restoring production in these is nil.
A natural gas glut is undermining prices in the US and starting to cause ripples in the investment community.
Continuing a public relations campaign to keep up the hoopla is a necessity to maintain a current financial bubble in the industry and your article may be an inadvertent spinoff of this effort.
However, no sane person would contemplate permitting the continuing environmental devastation that is being reeked by fracking. Not unless one has a black-hearted financial stake in allowing it to continue.
John Hanna
Taoyuan
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