Germany had long been divided, by a physical wall. It was opened, on November 9, 1989, and I’ll never forget seeing East Germans literally whooping with joy to finally pass through those gates. Political reunification then took less than a year — because people on both sides wanted it.
Chinese talk with irredentist obsessiveness about “reunification” with Taiwan. I put it in quotes because there’s nothing in common with the German reunification. Taiwan was never truly “unified” with China in the first place. Long held by Japan, it was part of China only briefly in 1945-49. When Mao’s Communists conquered the country by force of arms, they were stopped at Taiwan.
But in any case, the key fact is that “reunification” would elicit no joyful Taiwanese whooping. Instead the islanders, enjoying prosperity, freedom and democracy, know those would be crushed by Chinese rule, and totally oppose it.
Yet their wishes enter not at all into China’s fevered “reunification” dream. As though it’s all about some barren uninhabited island. A bizarrely inhuman mind bug.
For a while, the Chinese imagined sweet-talking Taiwan into an anschluss. The putative model being Hong Kong, run by Great Britain until 1997, when China reabsorbed it with the “one country two systems” line. Promising preservation of Hong Kong’s democratic and rule-of-law culture — for fifty years at least. A pledge China spectacularly broke in less than half that time, unleashing brutal repression. So now we no longer hear “one country two systems” regarding Taiwan. No more pretense of amicable “reunification.”
Instead China unapologetically insists upon a right to seize Taiwan by military force. And by what right? A cooked up theory of historic ties, to clothe conquest in moralistic garb. In which the human element doesn’t even factor. A deranged moralism.
A rational China might say, why not have two countries, us and Taiwan? We can be good buddies. Better for both. Somehow that happy thought never occurs to them.
This story parallels Russia’s Ukraine invasion. Which Putin tries to justify similarly, by invoking some historic cultural ties or shared destiny between the two nations (and lies about fighting Nazis). To this messianic narrative, the actual human beings inhabiting Ukraine are irrelevant.
In fact it’s even worse than that. Ukrainians’ resistance to Putin’s fantasy is not just disregarded, it’s punished. With untold human suffering, a holocaust of pain at the altar of the idea of Ukraine-Russian cultural solidarity!
And the great irony is that the two countries did have strong historical cultural affinities — could have been good buddies — until that was throughly smashed by Russia’s cruel crimes. So that today, Ukrainians, including indeed most of its many Russian speakers, have acquired a justifiably intense hatred toward Russia.
In a spirit of whataboutism I’ll acknowledge America’s own record is stained, as with our “Manifest Destiny” treatment of indigenous peoples. But that was in an earlier time when such things were standard behavior everywhere. I had hoped humanity had progressed beyond such crude might-makes-right (im)morality. In many ways we actually have, but bad ideas are sadly persistent. As indeed are (a small minority of) bad people.
We see a similar syndrome among today’s Republicans. Many of them believing they have some sort of moralistic entitlement to rule regardless of the wishes of the people they seeks to rule over. The “stolen election” lie is only a veneer; what they really think is that elections are anyway illegitimate if they don’t win. They should rule regardless. God said so.
I believe people have a right to decide their own destinies. God or no god.
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