This, I was not expecting.

One of my friends organized a petition asking John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight to do a piece on Taiwan. A lot of people (friends and foes alike, Taiwanese and foreigners) signed on.  I didn’t because I didn’t expect it to work. Now I regret not signing it.  6_6

The item mentions Chthonic’s singer Freddy Lim.  He’s not just a member of the New Power Party (NPP), he was previously the head of Amnesty International in Taiwan from 2010 to 2014.  Here are two of the band’s songs, “Millennia’s Faith Undone” and “Supreme Pain for the Tyrant”.  They play Power Metal and Black Metal.  Bass player Doris Yeh and Lim are married.  She started the Taiwan Rock Alliance, a business to organize festivals, also with a political message.

One of the things China desperately wants to get its hands on (not mentioned in the video) is the National Palace Museum.  Here’s the official government website.  When the “cultural revolution” happened (1966 to 1976) the communists “purged” and destroyed the country’s history and identity, burning documents and artefacts.  They also destroyed their own language, mutilating Mandarin with “simplified” characters, while Taiwan still writes with Traditional Mandarin.  (The difference in language makes it easy to identify propaganda trolls operating out of the PRC.)

Cultural demolition was more like it.  Items in the museum range from hundreds to thousands of years old, and the CCP wants them to lend themselves legitimacy.  But unlike Egyptian history sitting in European museums, these items weren’t stolen, they were protected.