In his famous 1882 lecture “What is a Nation?” the French historian and philosopher Ernest Renan emphasized the role of collective memory and even fictitious or selective historical narratives in the creation and maintenance of national identity, writing “Forgetting, I would even say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation.”

What Renan was arguing is that nations are built not only on shared history but also on the myths and selective memories that bind people together. This selective forgetting often involves downplaying or erasing divisive events or highlighting certain aspects of a past to create a sense of unity and continuity. Even if that narrative isn’t entirely historically accurate, that isn’t the point. This selective memory allows a state or nation to foster a sense of unity and purpose among its citizens.

This past Thursday Taiwan’s President, Lai Ching-te, gave a highly anticipated speech on the occasion of Taiwan’s “National Day” celebrations—and Renan could hardly have been more impressed.

As one might expect of such a speech, Lai’s first on this occasion since taking office, it was full of paeans to the greatness of the state and its people, as well as the kind of dubious historical assertions, the nationalist myths, that everywhere buttress state power.

For example, Lai connected the current government on Taiwan to those presumably brave heroes who over a century ago “rose in revolt and overthrew the imperial regime,” with the intent to “establish a democratic republic of the people, to be governed by the people and for the people.” Naturally, Lai neglected to mention that the actors in question were a combination of ambivalent bureaucrats, ambitious warlords, opportunistic gangsters, and disaffected intellectuals who quickly fell to usurping and warring with one another.

Lai did not trouble himself with burdensome explanations of how after that glorious revolution the “dream of democracy was engulfed in the raging flames of war.” Rather, he skipped over how the eventual authoritarian government of the Kuomintang (KMT) was so corrupt, inefficient, and generally evil that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) looked preferable by comparison. Instead, he jumped to solemn remembrances of the last battles as the KMT were driven off the mainland and to the island of Taiwan, and how “though we arrived on this land at different times and belonged to different communities, we defended Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, and Matsu. We defended the Republic of China.”

One notes here the subtle conflation between the regime’s flight for self-preservation and defense of those on the island who very definitely did not want them to come and bring war to their shores. Lai’s speech made no acknowledgment of the abuse of the native population that preceded the arrival of the fleeing KMT to the island, including literal massacres, nor any mention of the general repression that followed.

No matter—all such abuses by what would become one of the most vicious police states in the world is glossed over with a single nod to those victims of the regime’s 1979 crackdown.

As for democratization itself, which received numerous laudatory mentions, this author has already written elsewhere how this was itself a tool of regime survival.

But the value of this exercise in propaganda was all to set the table for the much more unsettling (to any American paying attention) bits of the speech.

While there were innumerable other statist revisions of history, these all served to set the stage for Lai’s clear rejection of any possible dialogue over reunification with the mainland:

“I want to thank generation after generation of fellow citizens for coming together and staying together through thick and thin. The Republic of China has already put down roots in Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, and Matsu. And the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China are not subordinate to each other. On this land, democracy and freedom are growing and thriving. The People’s Republic of China has no right to represent Taiwan. The 23 million people of Taiwan, now more than ever, must reach out our branches to embrace the future.”

Coupled with a clear agenda for strengthening the island’s deterrent capabilities and international partnerships (cough…cough… Washington), as well as a state education program for fostering ever greater unity and cohesion around an identity separate from that of the mainland, Lai’s remarks should disconcert anyone familiar with the history between mainland and island regimes or the terms of Washington and Beijing’s normalization of relations.

Perhaps, as the historian Sulmaan Wasif Kahn has noted, had Chiang and his cronies immediately done what Lai is now attempting, Taiwan as an independent state would not have been a problem. Mao, for instance, did not originally include the island in his original vision of a liberated Chinese state.

But this was not to be; for decades Chiang and his cronies claimed to be the sole, legitimate government of China and tried to convince Washington to back an invasion of the mainland by the island.

It was at that point Taiwan became the issue it remains to this day.

Henry Kissinger and other members of the national security establishment thus saw the need to throw Chiang and Taipei overboard as part of the deal to normalize relations with Beijing. They were prevented by a combination of the most myopic Cold Warriors in Congress and the press, like Barry Goldwater and Henry Luce, and those working directly on behalf of the China lobby, such as Alfred Kohlberg, William Knowland, and Patrick Hurley. Together, their domestic political pressure prevented the successful severing of relations with the island anticipated as part and parcel of the plan of recognizing Beijing.

But these and such other inconvenient facts have been shoved into the dustbin of history by the court intellectuals in favor of the black and white, good and evil narrative favored by the state and its clients.

The consequences may prove dire. In the words of Orwell, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

The day before Lai’s speech a poll by Taiwan’s top military think tank showed 61% of those Taiwanese polled believe a mainland invasion of the island in the next five years is either “unlikely or very unlikely.”

While all things being equal it is in Beijing’s interest to play the waiting game; Washington’s relative power in the region is in steady decline, and Taiwan’s real security rests on the possibility that Washington might intervene using both military and economic weapons. But things are not standing still, and Taiwan’s porcupine strategy, to eventually be too costly to conquer, might just provoke the kind of military solution it is purportedly meant to deter.

For its part, Beijing immediately issued a statement condemning the speech, and as of this writing was beginning a snap round of joint air and naval exercises around the island. Hopefully, exercises are all they will ever be. Given the increasing lack of restraint on all sides, that seems tragically unlikely.