The lies perpetuated by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) about the 228 Incident must be exposed and the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) innocence restored, deep-blue KMT supporters said yesterday.
The supporters set up an exhibition of historical data that it said would exonerate the KMT, while the Blue Sky Action Alliance is planning another event today to counter the DPP’s commemoration events.
The Incident refers to the killing of a cigarette vendor on Feb. 27, 1947, which led to an uprising that was violently suppressed by the KMT government. The resulting crackdown led to nearly four decades of martial law.
The Incident is a minor law-enforcement matter blown out of proportion by DPP propaganda, alliance convener Wu Chih-chang (武之璋) said, adding that the KMT’s silence has only encouraged such lies.
The party should fight back, as there is a plethora of historical data that could shed light on the “truth” of the Incident, Wu added.
The veracity of the claims that a massacre occurred on Feb. 28, 1947, should be doubted, former KMT Central Policy Committee director Alex Tsai (蔡正元) said.
No media — including the large numbers of foreign reporters present at the time — have been able to provide photographic evidence, Tsai said.
“Two hundred thousand is a lot of people to be killed, [and if they were deposited into mass graves], they should have been dug up by now,” he said, adding that the KMT should “man up” and call the DPP out on its lies.
In a book he is writing that he plans to name The History of Taiwan Island (台灣島史記), Tsai writes that Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) did nothing wrong and should be treated fairly.
Tsai dismissed claims made by Academia Historica director Wu Mi-cha (吳密察) in his new book International View of the 228 Incident (解密，國際檔案的二 二 八事件), that the KMT used exploding bullets to attack protesters.
Such equipment was relatively advanced at the time, and the KMT did not have the ability to make the bullets, Tsai said, claiming that they belonged to the Japanese, and only Taiwanese soldiers drafted to serve in the Japanese Imperial Army would have had access to them.
The KMT’s policy of not publicizing data on the event and simply apologizing cannot be condoned, Chunghwa Pan-Blue Alliance convener Lin Chung-shan (林忠山) said.
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