A President’s Gaffe
By Steven J. Grisafi, PhD.
If the title of this blog post is familiar to you then you recognize America’s hypocrisy. The determination of Chiang Kia-Shek and the Kuomintang to reclaim mainland China was a long standing joke of American politicians in Washington, D.C. Nobody in America desires to see war erupt across the Taiwan Strait. It seems apparent to me that the feeling is mutual in China. In order for there to be peace all parties involved must negotiate honestly with one another in good faith.
The mere desire to maintain the status quo of any conflict or situation is insufficient cause for justice. Justice demands corrections. Corrections require investigation into the root causes of the conflict or situation. Americans pay no attention to the “Century of Shame” upon which the Chinese People dwell. America’s distaste for socialism caused them to ignore the will of the majority in the Chinese Civil War. Our distaste for communism caused us to grant legitimacy to a separatist movement that we ourselves would quell if it occurred within our nation. We enabled Chiang Kai-Shek and the Kuomintang to present themselves as the legitimate China. This they are not, if one truly accepts democracy. Democracy is majority rule, nothing more. If the majority choose communism that is their prerogative. We are obliged to accept their choice. We refused to do so in the case of China despite the fact that Chiang Kai-Shek and the Kuomintang sold the weapons and military equipment that we gave them to our enemy, the enemy of the Chinese People, the Japanese, during World War II.
Either the people of Taiwan must submit themselves peacefully to the government in Beijing. Or they must declare their civil war as a revolutionary war with the subsequent abandonment of the Chinese Identity. The thirteen British colonies did not declare themselves to be British. They quit claim of that identity to become Americans. Chiang Kai-Shek and the Kuomintang refused to quit claim to China. For decades after the civil war they kept the determination to reclaim the mainland. That has caused America to interfere in the internal affairs of the People’s Republic China. In doing so we violated international law. We, the United States of America, were, and are, at fault for this situation across the Taiwan Strait.
There is also a very similar pattern of this failure for our foreign policy in Palestine. The “Promised Land” was not the place of origin for the Ancient Hebrews. The Romans ruled Palestine (and gave it its name) for more than one thousand years. The Ottomans ruled Palestine the second longest of all peoples, after the Romans, for about five hundred years. The indigenous people of Palestine were the Phoenicians. They were Arabs. America ignores this history.
Despite the strenuous, but fruitless, efforts of the British, after they had acquired the territories forfeited upon collapse of the Ottoman Empire, to persuade the Palestinian People to accept life amongst the Jews in a Jewish state, President Trump’s son-in-law repeated the same failed arguments the British gave in the aftermath of World War I. The Palestinians wanted their own nation. The United Nations agreed. Frustration led to desperation and the Palestinians embarked upon a campaign of terrorism against the people of Israel. Of this is all that the American people are aware. They see only the horrific images on their televisions of death and destruction caused by Palestinian terrorism. Undoubtedly, the Palestinians are aware that each act of terrorism diminishes the chances of achieving the goal of their own nation. But they are also well aware of the Power of the Status Quo.