Give Taiwan Back to the Taiwanese Aborigines

The other day I came across a Guardian piece that roiled me waters some, and I thought I'd share my boiling point with the reactionary reader, so faithful all these years. Well, two anyway. I saw a headline and froze like a deer in the lights of its beaming. I was a time bomb, filled with ticks, and not in the mood for gauche tomfooleries. Headline of a story by Brian Hioe:

Don't believe China's convenient historical tales. Taiwan belongs to the Taiwanese

First of all, don't tell me what to believe, and please don't tell me who I am. But also, why are you defending the Empire, Hioe? The "convenient" historical tales are a joke, right, hypocrite mon semble? Have you heard the one about Pax Americana? Also, if Taiwan belongs to the Taiwanese, then how come you don't mention the Ind'gens much? A little lefty bone's thrown to the PC element, then on to supporting the CIA-backed taboo regime playing on the shadow of the mainland's totem. Pole. Chiang Kai-shek. is not even mentioned. That's like talkin' 70s pop music without bringing Bill Withers and "Lean On Me" into the conversation even once. I'll be a flying monkey in a fall fashion swimwear shoot!

Here is a typical Guardian piece that fails the mission of journalism to some degree. It may even partially qualify as propaganda, as it defends against the notion that China has any territorial claims on Taiwan -- not entirely true or false, and maybe irrelevant. The biggest craw that sticks here is seeing China's interest in Taiwan as "expansionist." China has a Wall, a very big and long wall (more than 13,000 miles in length), a wall you don't just pack up like a tent and carry with you because you woke feeling expansionist that day. Had the Wall around East Berlin been that length it would have been a monster maze filled wit abstract minotauruses and Stasi types on shore leave. Checkpoint Charley antics? I don't think so.) Recall that before the Opium Wars that China wanted nothing from the West,really; the UK women wanted some of that fine bone dinner platery and got their menfolk all worked up for more China. Anyway, read the Guardian piece and consider that the following is left out:

- China doesn't own Taiwan -- but neither neither did the Nationalist Chinese, led by the mass-murdering White Terror authoritarian, Chiang Kai-shek, who ran there after the Mao Mao to escape becoming a Commie, and settled for benign fascism instead -- kind of like China today. Chiang made off, like Bernie Madoff, with the Chinese culture pelf and golden treasury loot, and the CIA didn't like him much. National security. Chiang purportedly told an audience of foaming rabied followers to wear their underwear on the outside, and also that "if they go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao / they won't make it with anyone anyhow." Swedish didn't go down well though. Silence!

- Taiwan used to be called Ilha Formosa -- Portuguese words meaning "beautiful island" and some besotted Lisbonian sailor coined it to a good bud, nice buns in the rigging, and it could have referred to a puke crop circle the seasick tar just laid down on the patient and ever-heaving sea. And then more crop circles, and more. Waking up passengers to con them into having a mystical experience. "Look!" The tar buds bustin' a gut at every exclaimed sleepy "Wow! I wish I had my camera obscura with me." Navy humor, right?

- China, too, is a name conferred on them by Westerners, more or less against their wills -- the Portuguese again -- it's not how they historically referred to themselves. If a power bee that holds your paycheck calls you a Dipshit, it doesn't mean you see yourself that way. But a paycheck's a paycheck. And as long as The Man doesn't hear what you say about him behind his back (donkeypump), those paychecks will keep coming until one day they bounce and revolution is in the air, and they're storming the Bastille, only to find that the Marquis de Sade (the dark heart and soul of Empire) had been transferred to another loony bin weeks ago. No further reports until Foucault came along with excavational information irelevantized by the Critical Feminist Theory revolution. O the frustration!

Have a look-see at this Oxford definition:

- The Portuguese gave colonizing in Formosa a go and said feck it it's not worth the trouble. The locals are animists -- out there with the fairies -- and the Portuguese missed the Polyrhythms set down by African slave traders. (Their loss, if you ask me.) It was the Portuguese who saved Robinson Crusoe's bacon as he made his escape as a slave from Africa, with young sidekick Xury.. (The "Portagees," as working whites in New Bedford referred to them, also gave us cinchona, a cure for malaria that allowed us to come at the world with the first Globalization with zest and zing and develop colonies built on ka-ching-a-ling-a-ding-dong-ding, also a Portuguese word.) Crusoe then sold Xury to the Portagees and then made his way to Brazil to farm tobacco he would send back to the Big Smoke, and then found he needed slaves for economic growth and a novel was born: a poor white lad on a dessert (sic, real sic) island who has to pace for 30 years, good rum in barrels, until Good Friday shows up to be his slave, having gone from the pan of cannibalism to the fire of Crusoe's desire -- "Put on this dress, would ya?" quoth RC. "Say what?" retorts a newly freed Crispus Attucks. And Polly's "I love you, Crusoe" ends in a sudden smoky divorce. He's got new love. That Mighty Whitey we call rugged individualism.)

- The Japanese took over and eventually drew similar conclusions. Meh. (They're anime-ists.)

- The Chinese then started vacationing there and colonized it -- sorta. There's an island off the coast of Western Australia, Rottnest -- an island tamed by the Dutch, who called it Rottnest because they thought the unique creatures there, called quokkas, were fuckin giant rats (rat nest, with an Aussie accent). Today, Rottnest is practically a thriving metropolis, with bottle shops, post office, a Starbucks (remember the thrill ride Moby Dick?!), taverns, a lighthouse, morons on Segways (Look out!), and an airport where the murdered bones of Aborigines lie lost in the false consciousness of the history wars we all pay for eventually. Some say the quokkas are the ghosts of those killed there (raises hand). Who needs acid when we have history, right?

Speaking of history, I did a review a while back about wacko history: An Atlas of Extinct Countries (2020) by Gideon Defoe. Great name, good read. Check out this entry about Formosa under section in the book called Puppets and Political Footballs:

The leader of the Chinese delegation tried to persuade Japan that it didn't really want it, arguing the island was riddled with malaria and opium addiction. Japan saw through this brilliant ploy and stuck to its guns. A date was set for handing the territory over. Predictably, a lot of the Formosans felt badly sold out by the motherland, and the local elites rebelled. The reluctant governor, T'ang, issued a declaration of independence: 'the literati and people of Formosa are determined to resist subjection by Japan. Hence they have declared themselves an independent island republic, at the same time recognising the suzerainty of the sacred Tsing [Qing] dynasty.' There was a misplaced hope that the British would step in to protect this plucky new nation against the Japanese invaders. Again, who knows where anyone got that idea, because this is not, very obviously, how the British tend to operate. [4]

China, Japan, America -- the Triad dialectic. Taiwan the last dumpling fought over. Bring your own soy sauce.

- The Taiwanese Aborigines, who the island is currently named after, have no real say in anything really - like Ind'gens in many other countries, including in the USA, who are so disenfranchised nobody mentions how many of their votes go missing every time a new aching blueballed Custer is up for election in the Big Smoke. Hell, even African-American disenfranchisees are awed by how easily you can lose a culture, if you put your mind to it. (Them: Hi-how-are-ya Us: Go feck yourself.)

- REALITY: give the island back to the aborigine Taiwanese. They're animists. I mean, look at the flag. More than a few screws loose. Nice people though. And they, too, can play some blues. Just shut up and listen while you are reading this.

- Let Taiwan Chinese (not the animists) move to Hong Kong, or Madcau, and/or move to America on an express citizenship thing. Jump the cue, like the Ukrainians, Afghans, Iraqis, Vietnamese, Marshall Islanders. "We" can give them whole sections of deserted, boarded up but still intact Detroit (let them use eBay as a catalogue; we'll pay) and they can revitalize the area by ramping up the assembly lines on nancied semiconductors and cheap computers, and they can hold dragon festivals (for all we care) and stuffy stuff. Invite the Filipinos, too, while we're at it. Little spark plugs, we called them. Slant 6 engines, we said. They can open throw-shoe factories. We'll be needing them -- what with the useless smirks and skid marks we elect to office.

Oy!

Here's a link to the full album of Taiwanese aborigines singing.