Taiwan: the 'Axis of Genocide' & Holocaust amnesia

 

Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te (R) and US Representative Michael McCaul (L) during a meeting in Taipei on May 27, 2024.

Taiwan sides with the Génocidaires

Taiwan is no better than its western counterparts. Among the attendees at the International Holocaust Remembrance Day event held in Taipei on 17 April 2024 were Chair of the Taiwan-Israel Friendship Group in Knesset Boaz Toporovsky, Israel’s top representative to Taiwan Maya Yaron, Germany’s top representative to Taiwan Jörg Polster, and the sitting president of the Legislative Yuan of Taiwan Han Kuo-yu. Intending to serve as a cover for imperialist crimes and national oppression, Yaron’s remembrance speech likened Hamas to the NSDAP [Nazi Party in Germany] and the anti-colonial Operation Al-Aqsa Flood to the Holocaust. This so-called Holocaust memory was instead Holocaust amnesia.

Israel, the attack dog of the United States, is a source of inspiration for the Taiwanese ruling establishment. After the Republic of China was booted out of the United Nations in 1971, the Kuomintang regime started to cozy up to Israel and then acquired the surface‐to‐surface Gabriel missiles from the Zionist state. The Gabriel was “equivalent to the Soviet‐ and Chinese‐made Styx, one of which sank an Israeli destroyer” in 1967. With the technical assistance of Tel Aviv, Taiwan subsequently modeled Hsiung Feng I, the island country’s subsonic anti-ship missiles, on the Gabriel in the late 1970s.

It is worth recalling that during the Cold War and afterward, both Taiwan and Israel insisted that the US- and UK-backed apartheid regime of South Africa had a right to exist and to oppress black people. Moreover, these three Cold War warriors had backed every war, aggression, and coup sanctioned by the United States. Taiwanese President Chiang Ching-kuo even awarded the Order of Propitious Clouds to Prime Minister of South Africa P. W. Botha in 1980 after the Soweto uprising.

The stance taken by Taiwan to boost its “international standing” has continued to this day with bipartisan support. The Taiwanese ruling elite rolls out the red carpet for US war criminals. Former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo were respectively granted the Order of Brilliant Star with Grand Cordon in 2011 and 2022.

The Taiwanese ruling class, in the long tradition of being a frontline state and client of the US, wants the island to play a greater part on the world stage, similar to Israel. That was why Israel’s former top representative to Taiwan Omer Caspi had an affinity for the Taiwanese political establishment and likened the island of imperialist flag-waving to a “home away from home” in July 2023. This also explains why Toporovsky praised Taiwan for being “a beacon of democratic and liberal values” and saw the similarity between Israel and Taiwan as “small but strong democracies in a harsh environment”. The actual similarity between them was and is that these ruling classes are not at peace unless they are at war.

It is little wonder that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Taiwan has just donated half a million US dollars to Tel Aviv in March 2024 to back Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and its annexation of the West Bank. Furthermore, the Ministry refused to suspend Taiwan’s exports of technologies with military applications to Israel. Indeed, the government stressed that such measures would have been taken only if they had been handed down by the United Nations Security Council, which, in the eyes of the international working class, is an instrument of imperialist domination. By proactively aligning its “democratic and liberal values” with the US-led Axis of Genocide, the ruling class of Taiwan will rid itself of the role of a spectator and then turn into an executioner.

Backing imperialist domination and bourgeois political reaction, the ruling circles of Taiwan had the audacity to pontificate about “democracy, freedom, equality, and peace”, namely, a euphemism for the capitalist world order that the bourgeois sections of “the international community” sought to safeguard. 

~ This essay was reprinted in part from one submitted to the WSWS by Shih-Yu Chou. Now based in Taipei, she acquired her doctorate in politics from Sheffield University.