For your reading list

I know I haven’t posted in a while, but this week has been fairly boring. Last week, too. It’ll get better on Thursday, when I’ll be back in full force.

In the meantime, I’ve been watching more news and feeling more overwhelmed by the world. Feeling overwhelmed by modern society has been happening to people for ages, and it’s why we started studying history (to make sure that we don’t let it repeat itself too many times).

I see people make a lot of contrived analogies between America, with its new that guy at the helm, and however many other fascist societies of the recent past. Donald Trump is the new Hitler, the new Francisco Franco, Mussolini, anything in there.

But I think that there’s a clear analogy to be made here with a bunch of reading material available for the learning that people aren’t making — and it’s probably a more useful analogy, too.

If you’re reading this and you’ve never read Formosa Betrayed by George Kerr, you totally should. The book is $6 on Kindle and about $45 paperback, so it’s kind of expensive, but Donald Trump is the new Chiang Kai-shek, so if you want to know what the future could hold, it’s in there.

The more you pour through the pages, the more you’ll know what I mean.

I was talking to a friend the other day about Trump and his ability to dominate the news headlines and the TV (I mean, being TV famous is his “thing”) and when I asked how much of this he thought we had left, he said, “well, you know, he could always declare martial law and just sit in the Oval Office until he dies”, to which I let out a little too much of an enthusiastic, terribly depressed laugh.

The US legal system is several hundred years old, has seen more than enough of governments rising and falling worldwide, and somehow that’s still a provision that’s allowed. I’ll have to look more into that (?).

Anyway, if you’re a bored and sad anti-fascist, this is one of those good history books. And it’s written really well. If you want more where that came from, you can also read Peng Ming-min’s memoir, A Taste of Freedom, which takes place a few decades after Formosa Betrayed, but is written and formatted similarly to the other one (I would assume that might be because George Kerr was one of the editors).

I’d like to tune out the news and live my life — and I’m pretty sure I can do that if I put enough mental effort in — but before I go, I wanted to mention the quote that one of the people in Formosa Betrayed — I think his name was Mr. Chou (Zhou) — mentioned about overbearing political organizations.

There’s always an element of good. Chiang and Chiang Jr. were trained by the Russians, sure, but there were some other people in the KMT that had good intention, and through all the disorder and corruption, those people would occasionally come to power. The solution for fixing things isn’t to run — I say get in there and become active.

I mean, in the US, I still don’t think it’s nearly as bad as in mid 20th-century Taiwan, so maybe if you live here you can just let your local officials know how you feel or vote out the bad ones. It’ll start working after a while. Maybe even occasionally vote some lower, trustworthy-looking officials from the other party into office to let them prove themselves.

You might end up liking them and voting them for mayor or something even more important. You need to reward the good in the political system, rather than just hating on the bad (the bad will always be there).

Or, just turn off the news, brew a coffee, and read some books about interesting history. Then, when you’re done, throw them to your friends, too.

I’ll be back soon, and maybe even with some pictures to show for all this talk about the Ilha Formosa!

See you then.

Thumbnail image credit: Foxy1219, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons