His brain has not only been washed, as they say... It has been dry cleaned.
- actor Khigh Dhiegh, playing the role of Dr. Yen Lo in the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate

In KMT-world, black is still white
Yet again, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has lost a big election by a small margin, and their immediate response of their Kaohsiung mayoral candidate Huang Chun-ying (黃俊英) was to demand that the election be invalidated. Let me just say for the record that it's exactly the response I expected to see from a party I've referred to as "sore losers" and "crybabies" so many times in the 3-1/2 years or so that I've been blogging.

Another unsurprising thing was that when confronted with evidence of KMT vote-buying, party chairman Ma Ying-jeou, currently entangled in allegations of pocketing loads of dough from his "special allowance," would cry "自導自演" (loose translation: "It was staged."), even though that tactic is a standard pan-blue trick.

Got colic?
The poow wittow kwybabies! For most of their existence, they controlled 100% of the media, and they still control a large portion of it. For this reason, whatever they said "became" the truth, since anyone who said otherwise was drowned out by a vast ocean of KMT voices.

Enter the 'Net
These days, they don't have the kind of total control that is necessary to get away completely with such things, but old habits die hard, and they're still reflexively using the same tactics, despite the ability of anybody with access to a computer and an Internet connection to use free services such as Blogger and YouTube to outflank the KMT's rigorous control of the flow of information.

By the time Huang lost the mayoral election in Kaohsiung this past Saturday by 1,114 votes, the KMT propaganda machine was already spinning in high gear and making obnoxious noises, but Huang and Ma weren't the only ones making such noises.

He's stupid and ugly, and nobody likes him
Tell me if this isn't obnoxious. The director of the KMT's Kaohsiung headquarters during the recent campaign, Hsu Fu-ming (許福明), let loose this unfortunate choice of words in response to his party's slim loss to DPP candidate Chen Chu.

[My transcript:]
高雄市教育水準比較偏低的。這些選民尤其是在很多媒體特別是地下電台長期以來這個本土意識的這個... 這個... 洗腦。

[My translation:]
The standard of education in Kaohsiung is rather low. These voters have been, er, brainwashed by many media outlets for a long time with ideas about local identity, especially by underground radio stations.

The video of that statement was rebroadcast by FTV on the show "頭家來開講" ("Boss Talk") and subsequently uploaded to TaiwanUS.net where it can now be seen world-round. (Click the button for video #2 below the embedded player. Hsu is the fourth person to speak.) In all fairness, Mr. Obnoxious did step down to "take responsibility" for the election loss (only to be immediately replaced by an exact replica?).

Here, there be pirates!
It's quite simple to explain the existence of "underground" radio stations in Taiwan. Because the KMT controlled all of the media for several decades, and people naturally fight against unjust oppression, it was the most mobile, most easily-hidden, cheapest, and most effective method of counter-propaganda, and was thus the one that flourished.

Although many of the stations have subsequently become legally authorized broadcasters, some still exist in the deep-blue ocean that is Taiwan's media environment because it is also an attempt to maintain local-language programming (such as the sound effects and dialog from traditional Taiwanese puppet-show theater or music in the Hakka language) in a place where people with "star status" brashly say that speaking Taiwanese is "low class" and where political shows like the ones hosted by Taiwanese activist Wang Ben-hu are taken off the air because they were "too local" (as opposed to what -- "suitably Chinese"?).

Who's brainwashing whom?
As promised in the title, here are more than 10 examples of where you can see the KMT's brainwashing tactics still in force, without any sort of interdiction from the unconstitutional, pan-blue dominated National Communications Commission (NCC). These are the kinds of media spigots whose language policies are visible by their use of words like "大陸"
("mainland") or "內地" ("inland China") instead of just saying "中國" (China), which promote kids who blindly imitate their elders, which have "entertainers" like the one ("小馬") pretending to check his watch while imitating the "thumbs down" gesture of the anti-Chen movement, and who have hosts on multiple shows who make shit up out of thin air like "a bullet can't make a hole like that in a window" or "somebody called me and told me Chen Shui-bian staged his own shooting, but I can't tell you who they are":

* 東風電視 ("Dong Feng" AKA Azio TV)
Taiwan? How do we "love" thee? We give thee and thine an entire TV station with the same name as one kind of Chinese missile. I say they can stick that Dong Feng right up their Azio!

* 2100 全民開講 ("Speaking Your Mind at [9 PM]") (TVBS)
General manager Lee Tao (李濤) does his worst Larry King impression while saying that two right out of ten is good enough for him. Is he talking to people with "high standards"?

* 新聞夜總會 ("News Night Club") (TVBS)
Lee's wife, Lee Yen-chiu (李豔秋), attempts to convince viewers that the DPP's resistance to authoritarian rule is worse than the KMT's resistance to democracy and performs other bescarfed acts of ill-logic.

* 搞董新聞 ("Explaining the News") (TVBS)
So-called analysts "enter-splain" [my neologism of the day] the news while mostly spinning and rumormongering. I wouldn't buy a used scooter from any of these people.

* 新聞龍鳳配 ("Dragon and Phoenix") (ETTV)
Mouthpieces mouth off until their faces look like they'll crack at any moment. If you've seen the movie "They Live," you'll know what I see when I look at these people, even without the special sunglasses.

* 周末談政治 ("Weekend Political Chat") (ETTV)
Jaw Shaw-kong (趙少康), whining ever since his loss to Chen Shui-bian in the 1994 Taipei mayoral election, lets the BS flow. Read about the jabber-Jaw and his gangster brother on pp. 9 - 12 of this PDF file (~435 KB).

* 全民大悶鍋 ("Pressure Cooker") (CTiTV)
"Making fun" of both sides, while pushing the memes of only one. (Can you guess which?)

* 文茜小妹大 ("Sisy Chen, Gangster Gal") (CTiTV and terrestrial station CTV)
Sisy Chen (陳文茜) and Emile Sheng (盛智仁), together like peas in a pod -- except for the fact that they're both totally red!

* 文茜的世界周報 (Sisy's World News) (CTiTV)
Sisy Chen, again, tells ethnic Chinese in Taiwan (Wait -- I thought they thought Taiwan was part of China!) the "news they mustn't miss" about China (and that other "outland" called international-something-or-other).

* 火線雙嬌 ("Two Women Under Fire") (Videoland)
Brings together 2 hosts with such "varied" backgrounds as China Times, Era News, TVBS, CTi, and ETTV. Oh, wait! Those are practically all the same thing.

* 超級新聞駭客 ("Super News Hacker") (Star TV Mandarin)
Yet another piece of super-crap from super-hack Jaw Shaw-kong.

This one's been dry cleaned
With so may flavors to choose from, it's no wonder KMT legislator Ho Tsai-feng (侯彩鳳) has drunk boatloads too much of her own party's Kool-Aid. A report in ETToday tells us that on Tuesday Ho said that the 冤魂 ("the ghost of a person who was wrongly put to death or murdered") of Chen Yi-hsiung (陳義雄) (the guy who all evidence points to as having shot Chen Shui-bian on March 19, 2004) came to her in a dream and told her that he didn't want the "key man" accused in a case of buying votes on behalf of mayoral candidate Huang Chun-ying to end up like him. By the way, the person who is suspected of actually putting the money into voters' hands and telling them to vote for Huang has already admitted to doing so.

To me, Ho's "dream" could mean any or all of the following: 1) She needs psychiatric help. (Most people have weird dreams from time to time, but only a very small number willingly put them in the news and use them to try to influence the public's perception of their political opponents.); 2) The KMT is planning to have the guy offed, and she's prepping the public for the blame to be placed upon the DPP; 3) The problem of uneducated and easily-brainwashed people is not with Kaohsiung's voters, but rather some of the KMT politicians in that area.

Pre-completion update
It seems that another suspect in the Kaohsiung vote-buying case turned himself in to police early Thursday morning while yet another fled to Hong Kong, and a connection to Huang Chun-ying seems to exist. I'll add those details as I find them. [See UPDATE below.]

Bonus examples
I've written previously about the perpetuation of this kind of brainwashing here and here. Go back and view those pages again, even if you think you remember them well. You may see them in a different light this time around.

UPDATE: Here are some of Friday's articles related to the above.

* Taipei Times - Suspect in vote-buying scheme turns himself in
Key point: Ku Hsin-ming (古鋅酩) turns himself in, says he worked independently and just wanted to do something good, but then implicates 43-year-old suspect surnamed Yang. Excerpt: "A profile of Ku showed that he had received a 16-year sentence for a murder committed in 1989 but that he was released during an amnesty in 1994." Quote: "The prosecutors must look deeply into the case and find out who he contacted during the past four days. They must also find out why he chose to give an exclusive interview [to the Liberty Times]," [KMT chairman] Ma [Ying-jeou] said. Comments: Judging from Ma's response, I'd say Ku probably went to the Liberty Times so as to deflect blame off of the KMT. A murderer who "admired Huang and hoped he would be elected as Kaohsiung mayor"? Wow!

* Liberty Times - 檢出示同鄉會傳真 古供出實情 [Translation: Investigator shows fax from Partner Township Association, Ku confesses what really happened]
Key point: After investigators confront Ku with faxes and records of phone calls between the Kaohsiung City/Yunlin County Partner Township Association, Yang Ching-teh (楊慶德), and himself, he admits that he worked in coordination with the others. Additional info: The image below is just above this article in the print edition. Observation: Friday night's FTV News showed video of Su Wan-chi (ph) (蘇萬其) onstage during a campaign rally right up front and next to KMT candidate Huang Chun-ying. Comment: Yowzer! The plot thickens, eh? Question: What evidence will Ma Ying-jeou reveal with his next spin attempt?


* Taiwan News - Vote-buying suspect turns himself in
Key point: When suspects disappear and their stories change, suspicions are naturally aroused. Quote: "Yang reportedly left the country on a 7:45 flight headed for Hong Kong on Wednesday night." Comment: Since 1997, that means the same thing as "fled to China."

* Taipei Times - Hau picks two key players for team
Key point: Taipei mayor-elect Hau Lung-bin (KMT) chooses "special assistant to the chairman of the Chinese-language China Times" Yang Hsiao-tung (羊曉東) "as director of the city government's information department." Comment: How 1984!

* Taipei Times - Pirate radio station operators protest outside NCC
Key point: An unconstitutional body ironically works hardest at enforcing unjust laws. Quote: "The threshold that the NCC has set for licensed stations is NT$50 million [US$1.5 million] in assets and capital, which puts licensing totally out of reach of independent operators," said Tsai Chi-feng (蔡吉豐), a pirate radio station owner. Comment: You might ask yourself, haven't they ever heard of blogs?" The answer might be that many of their listeners haven't.

* China Post - Groups protest radio crackdown
First line: "The independent National Communications Commission (NCC) promised yesterday to continue cracking down on the rampant underground radio stations in Taiwan." Comments: "[I]ndependent"?! 屁! "[R]ampant"?! That would describe pan-blue brainwashing.

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Agents and reagents: Taiwan, 台灣, media, 媒體, propaganda, 宣傳, brainwashing, 洗腦, Democratic Progressive Party, 民主進步黨, DPP, 民進黨, Kuomintang, 中國國民黨, KMT, 國民黨, Ma Ying-jeou, 馬英九, special allowance fund, 特支費, Huang Chun-ying, 黃俊英, Ho Tsai-feng, 侯彩鳳, elections, 選舉, YouTube

Cross-posted at Taiwan Matters!