Who Gets to Imitate the Nazis？ The German Institute Taipei's Jaw-Dropping Double Standards
By Fan Tan-tung, The Storm Media Opinion, August 5, 2025
If you recall this past May, Chairman Eric Chu of the Kuomintang (KMT) inadvertently touched a raw nerve at the German Institute Taipei. Simply by likening those in power to a Nazi regime and comparing the opposition’s plight to the twilight of the Weimar Republic, he was met with a public, scathing rebuke. The German Institute sternly reminded Taiwanese that they must “never compare themselves to the Nazis,” invoking historical trauma and political morality with heavy-handed admonitions. At the time, many believed the German Institute was defending a historical red line and safeguarding global democratic values.
Reality has since delivered a stinging slap in the face
When it emerged that Min-Nan Wolf’s former partner—recall-leader “Ba Jiong”—had privately “studied how the Nazis manipulated public emotions,” “invented gestures,” called for “inciting revolution,” and even used visual motifs for the April 19 recall rally “inspired by the Nazi eagle,” the public was shocked. Thousands of netizens flooded the German Institute’s Facebook page, urging them to speak up, act consistently, and hold the same standards.
And what happened? This once long-winded, steel-spined institution, when caught in its own double standard, offered only a single “brief statement” on Facebook—without condemnation, without a clear stance, without a soul. It was the diplomatic equivalent of pretending to speak while saying nothing, hoping the storm would pass and the public would forget—a “textbook performance” in selective diplomatic amnesia.
From “lashing Chu” to “letting Ba Jiong go,” this inconsistency begs the question: Is the German Institute defending the historical bottom line, or taking sides? Is condemning Chairman Chu for even mentioning Nazis while turning a deaf ear to someone actually studying Nazi crowd-control tactics a sign of fear—fear of alienating a mass movement favored by the ruling party? Or is it that, as long as you’re not from the opposition, Nazi techniques can be recast as “creative politics”?
Has “Nazi” ceased to be a historical taboo in German eyes, reduced instead to a tool of diplomatic flexibility? The Holocaust, totalitarian rallies, and mass emotional mobilization—historical warnings once thought inviolable—are now, in Taiwan, apparently subject to processing based on the speaker’s political alignment. If this is not a double standard, what is? If this is not hypocrisy, what deserves the name?
Worse still, this is not merely a lapse by Germany’s mission in Taiwan—it is a trampling of historical memory itself. What Ba Jiong studied was not history as a lesson, but Nazi operational methods: transplanting the psychological manipulation model of Nazi crowds into the laboratory of Taiwan’s street politics. Faced with this “reenactment of history,” the German Institute chose not to speak, but to be selectively mute.
We acknowledge Germany’s long-standing commitment to historical introspection. But if that commitment has devolved into a formula of “whoever says ‘Nazi’ gets condemned,” then their supposed respect for history is nothing more than a political ledger. If Chairman Chu had been the one to say he was “studying Nazi emotional mobilization” instead of Ba Jiong, would the German Institute have reacted with the same unhurried, gentlemanly brevity? It appears the issue is not “never mention the Nazis,” but “stand on the right side first.”
In international relations, foreign missions are expected to be cautious and consistent in principle. The German Institute’s performance here is the opposite—a case study in double standards. It has proven that if your politics are “correct,” you may even study Nazi methods without criticism; but if you are the “wrong person” speaking, even a metaphor is treated as a desecration of history.
Such “selective moral export” and “instrumentalizing the historical alarm bell” strip the German Institute of any moral authority in Taiwan’s public discourse unless it addresses this incident directly and takes a clear position. Otherwise, persisting in this posture of bowing to ideology and the ruling party will give the Taiwanese public every right to stop seeing it as any kind of moral compass.
History should never be used solely to target specific individuals. If the German Institute truly cares about historical memory, the democratic firewall, and the values of Taiwan’s society, then it should apply the same standards to all who invoke Nazi imagery or tactics—say “no” to them all. Otherwise, its double-standard response will only allow the true ghost of Nazism to linger ever more menacingly.