PJ Vogt

reigning local nationalist, Governor General Chen Yi on the radio, telling the people he's declaring martial law, in his words, entirely to protect them.

This clip is a recreation, but those were his words.

What happened next is that on March 8th, nationalist troops landed on the island.

They began an indiscriminate campaign of violence against citizens.

Soldiers fired into crowds.

There were street executions.

People were pulled from their homes, tied together by wire to others, and thrown into Keelung Harbor to drown.

We'll never know the actual death toll.

According to scholars, it's somewhere between 10,000 and 28,000 people.

Because it's just like an intensely, intensely sort of nationally, socially traumatic event.

After that, everything is just different.

This is the part of the story where it goes from something tragic, colonial violence, to something very, very absurd.

A plot twist transpires that does not resemble the history of any other country I've learned about.

So the nationalists who'd been ruling Taiwan from mainland China, the first thing that happens is that in 1949, the nationalists suffer a huge defeat at the hands of the communist army.

Oh, because this is where they have to go because they're being forced off the mainland.

no longer the conquering young military leader, now a more tragic figure, the so-called leader of the Republic of China, exiled to a nearby island, claiming that any day now his nationalist armies will return to the mainland, sweep through, vanquish the communists.

He's talking shit.

I had never known this.

It's one of the things I learned from Dr. Rigger.

While I had actually known that Taiwan had often been ruled by a party called the Nationalists, what I'd assumed, of course, was that the nation in Nationalists meant Taiwan.