[Taipei Times] Legislature holds public Assembly & Parade law hearing

While those attending a public hearing yesterday on the Assembly and Parade Law (集會遊行法) agreed that reforms were necessary, government officials, legal activists, academics and lawmakers still held different views on whether clauses on restricted areas, the police’s power to disband demonstrations and the penalties on people who violate the law should be removed.

“It’s necessary to mark some areas as off limits for demonstrations to maintain the security of government offices,” National Chengchi University law professor Su Yung-chin (蘇永欽) told the public hearing held by the Legislative Yuan’s Internal Administration Committee.(more)

"Named must your fear be before banish it you can."--Democracy in Danger: No Military on campus.

“Named must your fear be before banish it you can.”
As Master Yoda said:
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2008/11/28/2003429730 (correct link)

While people finally demonstrate against the parade and assembly law (years to late), they should recognize military instructors in schools and universities as a much bigger danger for democracy.

I visited a number of Schools and universities in my life. None of them needed any military instructors to guarantee safety on campus. I did not even know that safety in a school or University is something to worry about.

Actually in the countries I went to school and University a military instructor would be considered to be a mayor security risk and a danger for freedom and democracy.

Why a military instructor has any qualifications in counselling seems to be a hidden secrete. Usually people would hire a PhD in Psychology for such a difficult job.

So why are this guys needed? What purpose do they full fill and who controls them? Who controls the army in general?

There can only one constitution and one law in a country and its army must be under this system and not beside or above.

The first principle in a modern army in a democratic country must be to safe and honour this democracy.

Drill and discipline is necessary to make an army able to operate, but someone should not understand it as a training just to blindly follow commands (that would be fascism), but as a training to make responsible decisions under pressure, responsible in the light of ethics and constitution.

Military instructors are the opposite of what is needed. They make the society a part of the army.
In a democracy the army must be part of the society. So civil instructors would be needed in the army to teach soldiers and especially young officers the fundaments of a democratic society and the ethics they need to make decisions in a responsible way. These instructors should be independent of political influence, for example a priest or a monk or a professor of law or history or politics, …

To abolish military instructors immediately is a conditio sine qua non for a country that is even thinking about to use the word democracy to describe its political system.

As there are rumours that military instructors work as spies for the government to collect information’s about students active in the protests, it might be the time for a counter strike and photograph and identify the military instructors, as they are one of the main enemies of democracy.

They must be named to be banished.