🌬️ The Wind Rises: When the Judiciary Becomes a Knife and the Media Becomes a Mouthpiece—Beware the Shadows of Democratic Twilight
The wind has risen. This is a wind that started at some unknown time, noiseless, yet gradually carrying a chill.
A democratic society should be a bustling marketplace of voices, where opinions are as varied as many goods on display for anyone to choose from. But sometimes, this market quietly changes; vendors disappear one by one, leaving only a single voice echoing. This change doesn’t happen overnight, just as history tells us—the arrival of totalitarianism is always lurking in the cracks of daily life before people perceive it.
⚖️ In the Name of Justice: A Common Tactic of the Nazis
The rise of the Nazi Party in Germany was no accident. They were skilled in using a seemingly legitimate method: not public execution, but slowly strangling opponents with law and public opinion. On the streets of Berlin in 1933, the Nazi military and police did not necessarily open fire at any time, but the doors of the courts were always wide open to the opposition. Executing political liquidation in the name of the judiciary was a common tactic of the Nazis. What people feared was not the spray of machine guns, but the knock on the door at midnight and the carefully orchestrated headline in the newspaper the next day.
This familiar narrative seems to be quietly being remade in Taiwan.
In the political arena in recent years, the opposition has been investigated, searched, and prosecuted one after another. Those political figures who were once high-spirited have entered the lenses of investigation agencies one by one. Briefcases, handcuffed wrists, bowing figures… the images loop in the news like a well-designed play. Except, this script is no longer fresh.
🗣️ Public Opinion Modulation: Creating an Enemy Who “Deserves to Die”
The brilliance of the Nazi Party lay not only in how to eliminate political rivals but also in how to make the public believe that political rivals deserved to be eliminated. They were in no hurry to deal a fatal blow but dismantled the opposition forces step by step—first smearing and stigmatizing them, and then using the hand of the judiciary to “justly” send them to the trial stand. Would the public believe it? Of course, because public opinion had already been modulated to the right temperature, allowing fear and hatred to slowly seep into the blood, eventually forming a kind of unspeakable tacit understanding: “They deserve to die.”
Now, is such a play being staged again?
The media landscape in Taiwan has long since become a kind of political ecosystem. What the news stations broadcast in rotation is not information, but emotion. Before an opposition politician has even been prosecuted, the media has already overwhelmed thousands of households with his charges; an investigation is not yet conclusive, but it has already been packaged as “ironclad evidence.” Isn’t this a modern version of the famous quote by the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels?—“A lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.”
Then, cracks in society appear.
🔪 The Chilling Effect and the Creep of Totalitarianism
People start to stop discussing policy and instead discuss who is the “enemy of the state.” Those who do not support the ruling party are “collaborators of the CCP”; this label is simply and crudely attached, allowing for no explanation. The Nazi Party did the same back then, labeling Jews and Communists as “the cancer of Germany,” so the anger and fear in every street and alley were transformed into silent support for dissenters.
There is no Gestapo on the streets of Taiwan, but when the judiciary begins to act selectively, and when the media and the government work together seamlessly to construct the image of the “enemy,” are we really that far from the shadows of history?
Totalitarianism does not arrive overnight. It takes shape slowly as society no longer doubts the “legitimacy” of suppression. Today, an opposition legislator is searched, tomorrow a media outlet that is not “patriotic” enough is shut down, and the day after? Perhaps it will be the turn of a writer or scholar who speaks at an inopportune time, or even just a common citizen who says the wrong thing.
We should not wait for the midnight knock on the door to suddenly realize that freedom is gone.
The trajectory of history is right there, clearly telling us that when:
- The judiciary is no longer a fair scale but becomes the knife of the regime;
- The media is no longer the eye of supervision but becomes the mouthpiece of the ruler;
- Political rivals are no longer political rivals, but prey—
Then, the twilight of democracy has quietly arrived.
The wind is still blowing. This is a wind we can all feel. Only in this chill, how many people are still willing to believe that the warm dawn is not for granted? And is it still in time for us to choose not to become a reprint of this historical tragedy?
The answer depends on every person who has not yet remained silent.