The "Danger Within"
On doomscrolling, depression, and democratic resilience during these dark times.
Dear readers, dear friends,
Like many of you, we’ve felt unmoored by the political chaos of the past couple of weeks. Deportations, detentions, firings of veterans and park rangers (and more), cuts to free lunches for low-income kids, defunding of scientific research, anti-trans laws, the gutting of the Department of Education, countless needless deaths from the cuts to USAID—we lie awake at night, sinking into depression. The absolute nadir for us was seeing the repulsive, professional Twitter-troll JD Vance—fresh after lecturing the Munich Security Council about Europe not dealing with the “danger within”—wag his finger at Volodymyr Zelensky, berating him for not being “grateful” enough to the United States. We were sickened by the sight of a sovereign nation's president, invaded by an aggressor, forced to grovel and beg for his country's survival. Most disgustingly, President Trump later remarked, “This is going to be great television,” as if deaths in a country at war are just chips for him to gin up his ratings. Garry Kasparov summed up our feelings in this tweet:
Here in Taiwan, people are worried. It’s widely understood that if America abandons all sense of mutual responsibility, Russia and China will feel emboldened to assert their power unchecked, treating the world as theirs for the taking. But still, the Taiwanese remain characteristically themselves—steely in the face of shifting winds. (Michelle, bleary-eyed from doom-scrolling the night before, to her colleague at work: “Taiwan’s in trouble.” The reply: “Taiwan’s always in trouble. As long as China is next to us, Taiwan won’t stop being in trouble. Please, stop reading the news and get some sleep.”)
Within Taiwan, the shameful behavior of the White House instantly emboldened pro-China voices that have for years sought to sow the seeds of “American skepticism”—further strengthening their argument that the US is not a reliable partner.
Meanwhile, multiple commenters wondered out loud: can you imagine our President, William Lai, sitting in Zelensky’s chair? How will he handle a similar situation? Is this the type of humiliation we’re going to be subjected to in the future—groveling and debasing ourselves just to remain a U.S. partner in the region?
As a small country that has depended on American power for its survival—yet one that has also contributed and sacrificed significantly—we’ve always known America’s defense of Taiwan is driven more by arms deals than lofty talk of human rights and democracy. But something feels uniquely awful about seeing American power so crassly, nakedly displayed.
Talk of the “danger within” has also come to Taiwan. The big news in Taiwan came this Thursday, when President Lai convened a high-level national security meeting. In his address, President Lai opened by detailing a series of assaults by Chinese agents on Taiwan’s democratic institutions. He described a range of methods and techniques to infiltrate Taiwanese society, among them grey zone attacks, disinformation, bribery of military forces, undersea cable-cutting, violation of aerial zones, and buying off Taiwanese influencers. He formally designated the People’s Republic of China a “hostile foreign force.” President Lai continued, “China has been taking advantage of democratic Taiwan’s freedom, diversity, and openness to recruit gangs, the media, commentators, political parties, and even active-duty and retired members of the armed forces and police to carry out actions to divide, destroy, and subvert us from within.”
President Lai announced a host of “anti-infiltration” tactics, the most controversial of which was the resurrection of a peacetime military court system that would take the charge in prosecuting “military crimes,” such as “sedition, aiding the enemy, leaking confidential information, dereliction of duty, or disobedience.” President Lai’s rhetoric of “enemies within” that have infiltrated all areas of society and need to be rooted out has disturbing Cold War, martial law-era overtones.
The proposals still need to be approved by the legislature. But this is undoubtedly a troubling moment to see the Democratic Progressive Party, so long a critic of martial law and authoritarianism, revive a key tool used by the authoritarian KMT to prop up martial law. We understand the DPP’s argument: the war with China is already here; civilian courts are slow; we need to have more tools to fight Chinese agents in Taiwan undermining national security in Taiwan. But we can’t help but ask—is a military court the right tool here? Even sidestepping the specific important legal questions—evidentiary standards, due process, civilian oversight—military courts have an image problem: in Taiwan’s history, whenever you hear military courts, you immediately think of tools of overreach used to suppress dissent and bypass constitutional protections for individuals. The abolition of these courts in 2014 was the result of massive public protest against the death of Hung Chung-chiu, who was abused during military detention. The dismantling of the system was seen as a major moment in Taiwan’s modern democratic history.
We’re not experts on military courts, and we recognize that many dedicated legal scholars and activists within the DPP government are working to establish checks on the new system. But from the outside, it seems that turning to military courts resurrects an old, blunt, and discredited tool to fight a war that is far more pervasive, nimble, and multifaceted. It also feels like we’re prescribing the wrong medicine. If the fundamental problem to be solved is democratic resilience in the face of an authoritarian threat, why are we relying on military courts—at heart an authoritarian tool—to solve them? Let’s hope we’re just hand-wringing, but we can’t help but feel worried by this turn in events.
More than anything, the past couple of weeks we’ve felt a profound sense of sadness. There’s little we can add beyond what already proliferates the Internet. We have no hot takes, no grand analysis strategy here, no historical analogies. We’re just as confused as you are. As we wrote last year in the wake of the Trump election, both of us were shaped by the soaring rhetoric of American idealism and are inspired by the histories of brave Civil Rights activists who sought to forge an open society grounded in solidarity across difference. To see those ideals openly rejected and mocked has been deeply unsettling.
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How do we even respond to this moment? Last week we talked about Hisham Matar’s novel My Friends in our book club. The mood was grim, and our turn to an even grimmer book—the story of Libya teaches us that it could always get worse, guys!—for solace. One person, an exile from Burma, said the cosmos had brought him to read this book. It left him emotional, once again reflecting on the one thing he wanted—the ability to contribute to his country. “Burmese [exiles] get together and cry and talk about how we want to go back,” he said. As another member, Gina, told us, the temptation is to disconnect. Choosing connection, even when we feel powerless, is still within our control.
For us teaching is still that moment of connection.
We find what Robin says to be true. Despite all the hand-wringing over AI and student learning, young people want to grapple with hard questions. They yearn to understand and connect. Albert’s teaching a course on the history of radical thought this year, where he’s assigning hard texts that grapple with the big questions. What is the origin of inequality? (For Rousseau, it’s private property.) Students are asked to read the English versions of classic texts—sometimes their second or third language. But students—engaged, alert, attentive—continue to give us hope that the new generation is looking at the world with eyes wide open.
Meanwhile, Michelle’s teaching two courses this spring, one at a women’s juvenile detention center in Taipei and another at NCCU. At NCCU, students have been reading Violaine Schwartz’s Papers (Fern Books, tr. Christine Gutman), a prose-poem reconstruction of migrant journeys translated from French, and a remarkable memoir Tears of Salt (Norton, tr. Chenxin Jiang), translated from Italian. (If you missed them, here’s an older newsletter about Papers and another about teaching at the juvenile detention center.)
In Tears of Salt, an Italian doctor, Pietro Bartolo, writes about treating refugees and migrants on the island of Lampedusa. One unforgettable and painful story he shares is that of a father from Syria, whose family he meets at the shore. When this man’s boat overturned in the Mediterranean, he spent hours treading water in the sea. With one hand, he held his wife’s; with the other, his three-year-old son’s. At his breast, he carried their baby. Facing the impossible, not knowing if they would all drown, he made a choice—to let go of his son’s hand to save the others. He watched as his son disappeared into the water. As Bartolo writes, “The man was tormented by the fact that, only a few moments later, the helicopters arrived. ‘If I had held out just a little bit longer, my son would be here with us. I will never forgive myself.’”
Michelle juxtaposes these stories with routine legal denials of asylum; these she randomly pulls from the website of the Ninth Circuit appeals court, right in front of the students. “These are not special cases,” she says. “They will never be taught in law school. Their case names won’t be memorized. I don’t show them to you because they’re well-written or clever. I show them to you because they’re routine, they happen every single day.” Reading these legal documents, students instantly recognize the vast gulf between the language of the law (deny, deny, deny; rationalize the denial) and the particular stories of everyday life and survival.
Last week, Michelle added a new text, a film recommended by a French-Senegalese student in the course. Io Capitano tells the story of two sixteen-year-olds, cousins from a small Senegalese village who like to make up songs together and dream of going to Europe. They make the journey from Senegal to Italy—through the Sahara Desert in Niger, to the terror of a Libyan prison, and finally across the sea in which thousands have drowned. Captivated by the film, students poured out their responses, using post-it notes to respond to two prompts: describe (1) moments of beauty in the film, and (2) encounters with the law.
One thing the legal form—and the news—often fails to capture is the beauty each person carries. Despite the film’s unsentimental eye, you see what sustains Seydou, the hero of the story: his knowledge that his mother loves him; the warm memory of where he comes from (dancing, music, gatherings); his brotherly devotion to his cousin; and the friendship with an older cellmate in a Libyan prison, who ultimately saves his life. These moments remind us that misery is not the only story—there is also love, kindness, and the memory of loved ones who cherish us. For a moment, every person in the room felt connected to Seydou, and that is an unqualified good.
Some Links
The historian John Connelly’s piece on the shameful behavior towards Zelensky—titled “Worse than Chamberlain”—is worth the read. It draws out a historical analogy with 1939. He writes:
Today’s Ukrainian fighters live in trenches. They spend weeks in puddles of cold water, unable to rest properly, subsisting on terrible food. Like the men of D-Day or those who accompanied Washington to fight in wintry Princeton, they face not only death but discomforts that are difficult to imagine and usually forgotten in history books. Soldiers then and now have suffered these things so that their fellow citizens can say what they want in public, so that journalists can report without fear of retribution from civil authorities, so that teachers can speak freely in their classrooms without having to worry about being reported for indoctrinating their students with “Western ideology.” Growing threats to civil liberties under the Trump regime are of a piece with his admiration for Putin and with Vance’s meeting with neo-fascists in Munich. We are letting our freedoms slip away, and it’s not clear why.
Check out this lovely piece in The Japan Times on Taiwanese comics on the global stage. Written by translator and novelist Mike Fu, it highlights the sheer creativity, imagination, and diversity of Taiwanese manga and graphic novels. Michelle is quoted in the article, noting how publishers in countries in places such as Ukraine, South Korea, and Thailand find Taiwanese comics particularly resonant due to the political and historical parallels with their own countries.
The action for migrant workers in Taiwan has been moved to Sunday, March 30th at the Taipei Main Station. There will be speeches from people across sectors, a flash mob with Indonesian and Filipino workers, and opportunities for action.
Book Club: Hisham Matar’s The Return
Thanks to our wonderful book club members—we’re always so grateful for these friendships across the world. After reading My Friends, we wanted to stay with Hisham Matar a little longer. For our next book club, we’ll be reading The Return, where he recounts his journey to Libya in search of his father, who disappeared when he was a teenager. With daylight savings in effect, our next meeting will be on Friday, April 25 7 PM (EST) / Saturday, April 26 at 7 AM Taiwan time (sorry for the early hour!). Reply to this email for the zoom link.
Yes. Really feeling the weight of things too. ❤️🩹
thank you as always for context and for vulnerability