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| By: israelinsider staff |
| Published: March 14, 2007 |
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A group of Taiwanese college students have created a Nazi movement, the National Socialism Association, supporting national strength and unity and decreasing the numbers of immigrant workers.
Chao Lahn, 24, a co-founder of the association, denies that it's at all anti-Semitic, saying rather that the group wishes to encourage greater nationalism in Taiwan.
"My main goal is to develop Taiwan's strength and to foster national unity," Chao said in an Associated Press report. "I think we have to work hard to restore traditional Chinese values like Confucianism."
The Simon Wiesenthal Center, an international Jewish human rights organization based in Los Angeles, California, has already denounced the National Socialism Association for its glorification of Hitler.
"In the global interconnected world we live in, it is unacceptable anywhere to seek to promote the policies and images of Hitler and Nazi Germany as worthy of emulation," Associate Dean Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center said in a statement.
Rafi Gamzou, Israeli representative to Taiwan, expressed his disappointment in the matter.
The National Socialism Association "is a reflection of ignorance and an emotional void as well as (a) psychological and social sickness [...] It's also particularly sad that in Taiwan, where people have managed to achieve democracy and human rights, there is this kind of nostalgia for monsters as role model."
According to the Associated Press, "While [Taiwanese] high school and university courses do cover the European experience during World War II, relatively few Taiwanese understand the revulsion - and the reasons for it - that Nazism conjures up in the West."
Hitler iconology has been present in the Taiwanese media before, being used in political campaigns. Nazism was also a theme of a no longer functioning Taiwanese restaurant.
According Taipei official Emile Sheng, "People here don't really understand what Nazism is. They're not really racist or anti-Jewish. They don't even know what it means." |
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