We can all understand, without justifying it, episodes of corruption. But it is the blatant capsizing of reality that bewilders the world in face of the non-justice inflicted on Tai Ji Men for almost thirty years.
by Marco Respinti*
*Conclusions of the webinar “After the August 2 Taichung Decision on the Tai Ji Men Case: Can the Law Become a Tool of Violence?” co-organized by CESNUR and Human Rights Without Frontiers on August 22, 2024, United Nations International Day Commemorating the Victims of Acts of Violence Based on Religion or Belief.
In 1914–1915, Franz Kafka (1883–1924) wrote a quite famous novel entitled, in German, “Der Process” (spelled “Prozess” in the first edition). In fact, Kafka, who was born in Bohemia, which at that time was part of the Habsburg empire, wrote in German. In that novel—titled “The Trial” in English and published posthumously in 1925 though unfinished— that talented and visionary writer tells the imaginary tale of an imaginary person, “Josef K.” His character is hopelessly obliged to confront an imaginary obscure, powerful, and obtuse authority. One sad day, Josef K. is arrested and soon goes on trial—more precisely, he passes through several puzzling trials. Rapidly, he descends along a slippery slope that brings him from one embarrassing situation to another mortifying circumstance, where no one, not even his lawyer, is reliable and trustful. But this is just the beginning.
This sequence of humiliating and disconcerting episodes, that revolve on themselves like a spiral overburdening Josef K. with absurdities, culminates in an even more senseless homicide, when two men assault the protagonist almost one year after the beginning of his nightmare and stab him to death.
As tragically ridiculous and illogic as all this is, this is not the point yet. In fact, the core of the novel is that neither the reader nor Josef K. know the crime the protagonist is accused of and tried for. They will never know it.
Of course, the novel is a metaphor of power and how much it may be blinded by its own omnipotence. The novel has even generated a neologism: after “The Trial,” people have started using the adjective “Kafkaesque” to refer to unreasonable and persecutory events in which innocent people found themselves involved, not even knowing how and why.
Today, we may speculate that, had Kafka known of the Tai Ji Men case, he might have written a sequel to “The Trial” centered on a group of innocent people condemned to punishment for a crime that did not exist.
Totalitarian regimes and despotic powers are masters in the art of condemning people for things they haven’t done. Fabricated charges and false accusations are the daily bread of the fake justice systems that those tyrannical authorities impose on their citizens. But this is not the way democratic countries pledge to follow.
Justice is a pillar of democracy, and independent courts of law are the trademark feature of a free society. All nations wishing to distinguish themselves from undemocratic regimes guarantee the separation of powers and keep the executive power neatly apart from the legislative power and the judiciary.
One of the key features of an independent judiciary is the rule of law as opposed to arbitrary decisions, and one of the key features of the rule of law is the sharp distinction between innocence and guilt.
In a part of the world where democracy, justice, and the rule of law do not really abound, ROC emerges as a country that want to value goodness and castigate evil—yet it apparently, and garishly, fails to do so.
In a vicious cycle of neo-Kafkaesque flavor, from 1996 ROC has been mismanaging an obvious case of corruption and double standard that has involved and seriously affected a pacific, law-abiding, and patriotic group of citizens, that is to say Tai Ji Men Shifu, or Grand Master, and dizi, or disciples, sending some of them to detention, seizing their property, and preventing them from enjoying their fundamental rights, starting from the right to freedom of religion or belief.
The really Kafkaesque aspect of the Tai Ji Men case is that Tai Ji Men has been repeatedly proved innocent by several courts of law and all levels of the Taiwanese justice, yet, for some reason as obscure as the unnamed tyrannical and idiotic power in Kafka’s “The Trial,” the National Taxation Bureau followed the ruling of the Supreme Court of its country for the year 1991, the year 1993, the year 1994, the year 1995 and the year 1996, but not for the year 1992. The National Taxation Bureau still imposed an illegal tax bill for the year 1992. Why? Behind the tiny veil of a legal technicality (that a decision rendered by the Supreme Administrative Court in 2006 about 1992 is final and no different disposition is possible), whose repetition throughout the years is not enough to convert it from a pretext to an argument, the answer may lay in the documents issued by the unnamed and blind power of Kafka’s novel. These are documents that no one has ever seen, most probably not even that unnamed and blind power that blindly wrote them in a dark room with invisible ink that no one will ever be able to read.
But let’s leave literature to literature. No reasonable person could really think that the situation in Kafka’s “The Trial” may happen in real life. We reasonable readers take that as a metaphor for illuminating history. But if history is darker than literature, human problems become staggering.
In fact, if absurdity may easily happen in literature to serve as cautionary tale, there is only one reason why the same condition may happen in reality. Some officials in the Taiwanese government broke and break the law, ruling by themselves instead of listening to the Supreme Court. The conclusion is easy, but the problem isn’t solved. It is even more serious.
We can understand, without accepting it, that some bureaucrats broke and break the law. We condemn it, we call for a solution, but if this situation continues for so many years, a dangerous crack is opened in ROC’s democracy.
Why, in fact, the new president and the new government in Taipei haven’t seized the occasion of a new beginning to solve this Kafkaesque, unbelievable injustice called the Tai Ji Men case? And why the Taichung High Administrative Court didn’t seize the moment as well to solve the case, when on August 2, 2024, it ruled after a lawsuit filed by Tai Ji Men for refund of the fabricated 1992 tax bill?
Frankly, I am afraid of the answer. The world, which is looking at Taiwan as a bastion of democracy against rogue states, is afraid of the answer. In front of this enduring negligence by the government of ROC we all fear what may come of a country which vilify and bully, threatens and intimidate its own citizens. As a sincere admirer and friend of Taiwan I feel it is my duty, in my capacity as a public person, to warn the world.
