If You Don't Know Mao By Now
"Opposition and struggle between ideas of different kinds constantly occur within the Party; this is a reflection within the Party of contradictions between classes and between the new and the old in society. If there were no contradictions in the Party and no ideological struggles to resolve them, the Party's life would come to an end." ~ Mao Zedong, 1937.
" "You are dictatorial." My dear sirs, you are right, that is just what we are. All the experience the Chinese people have accumulated through several decades teaches us to enforce the people's democratic dictatorship, that is to deprive the reactionaries of the right to speak and let the people alone have that rights." ~ Mao Zedong, 1949
It is relatively recently that I have been haemorrhaging confidence that the general public, likely including Chinese nationals, know the essentials about Mao Zedong, and probably to a lesser extent Joseph Stalin.
I read Jung Chang's 'Wild Swans' in the 90s, a book I suspect not many of my contemporary teenagers are likely to have picked up. Hollywood's depictions of the Communist Party of China kind of stop after 1997, a year that packed Seven Years In Tibet, Kundun and Red Corner. It could be entirely constrained by my availability heuristic, that films like 'The Last Emperor' and 'Farewell My Concubine' dry up after 1997, it could be a passive bi-product of the success of 'Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon' driving Hollywood audiences tastes and preferences towards China's mythical past rather than the history of its current one-party incarnation. Richard Gere, star of Red Corner offers some corroboration of my impression:
Testifying before the United States Senate Committee on Finance, Subcommittee on International Trade, Customs, and Global Competitiveness on "censorship as a non-tariff barrier" in 2020, Gere stated that economic interest compel studios to avoid social and political issues Hollywood once addressed, "Imagine Marty Scorsese's Kundun, about the life of the Dalai Lama, or my own film Red Corner, which is highly critical of the Chinese legal system. Imagine them being made today. It wouldn't happen."[18][19][20]
So, it's hard to know where to begin with Mao. His wikipedia page is probably decent enough, where I found the below quotation:
"Had Mao died in 1956, his achievements would have been immortal. Had he died in 1966, he would still have been a great man but flawed. But he died in 1976. Alas, what can one say? ~ Chen Yun, a leading Communist Party official under Mao and Deng Xiaoping[269]
Thus it might be good to just recap some of his greatest hits:
- The Cultural Revolution
- The Great Leap Forward
- Campaign to Suppress Counter-Revolutionaries
- The Hundred Flowers Campaign and subsequent Anti-Rightist Campaign
This post was in large part inspired by a statement by journalist Megan Day in this interview that caught my attention:
"...whether or not the burden of proof is on socialists to describe what a socialist future should look like...I feel like the burden of proof is often shifted on socialists to explain first of all to atone for the sins of societies that look extremely extremely different from the United States in 2018 and carried out very different forms of experiments than the ones people are even advocating and two why isn't the burden of proof on capitalists to explain why (hapless ideologues that is, not people who own capital, capital assets) ... to explain why this [capitalism] is the best humanity has to offer." ~ transcribed by me.
The whole discussion is actually a really great and interesting one. Burden of proof, with some hubris, I feel can be clarified easily - whoever is making a claim holds the burden of proof. Such that in the above example, if you are claiming a socialist future is the answer, I would say you absolutely need to define what that future looks like and defend it. If conversely if you are claiming that capitalism is the best humanity has to offer, you absolutely need to define and prove that claim.
Noah Smith poses great questions that expose the vagueries of socialism, with one problem being that both capitalism and socialism, in my experience tending to be poorly defined. Such that it is easy to point to Russia, China, Cambodia, Viet Nam, Venezuela or whatever and define socialism as 'not that' the rhetorical trick of stalwart Communists of 'true Communism has never really been tried/Marx's vision has never really been implemented.'
A rhetorical trick that is inevitably not valid for the converse side of whatever argument 'well the problems you identify with capitalism are because it isn't true capitalism/the markets aren't truly free.' Megan Day makes this point later in the discussion, that if market failures under capitalism don't disqualify capitalism, the failures of the USSR shouldn't disqualify socialism.
I would leave that discussion behind though, it's a good discussion but it isn't definitive. Because to equivocate the USSR or Maoist China with Socialism is to miss the point of knowing Mao. I'm not anti-socialist, my concern is with the totalitarianism. One can read for yourself on Mao's wikipedia, that this collaborative non-capitalist project contains the nuance and complexity of Mao and his legacy ~ there are comparisons to figures like Andrew Jackson that are interesting, and there is factoring the annexation of Manchukuo by the Japanese and horrors like the Nanjing Massacre that would fulfill Mark Twain's personal heuristic of sympathy:
“I am said to be a revolutionist in my sympathies, by birth, by breeding and by principle. I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute.”
Which I suspect might capture the sentiments and sympathies of contemporary radicals and would be revolutionaries. The trouble is it's proneness to confirmation bias. Twain was remarking presumably mostly looking to the French Revolution, and probably being American, the American War of Independence.
“When I finished Carlyle’s French Revolution in 1871, I was a Girondin [a moderate]; every time I have read it since, I have read it differently — being influenced and changed, little by little, by life and environment … and now I lay the book down once more, and recognize that I am a Sansculotte! And not a pale, characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat.”
In December 2019, Tumblr posts Cabello reblogged between 2012 and 2013 surfaced on Twitter, containing racial slurs and derogatory language including the N-word, and mocking of Chris Brown assaulting Rihanna in 2009. Her Tumblr account was deactivated soon after and Cabello issued an apology stating she was "uneducated and ignorant" when younger, and that she was deeply embarrassed she ever used "horrible and hurtful" language. In her statement, she added that "those mistakes don't represent" her and that she "only [stands] and [has] ever stood for love and inclusivity".[129][130] In March 2021, Cabello said she reached out to the racial equity group National Compadres Network and partook in weekly racial healing sessions, where “you get corrected, you have homework, and you learn ... Now I know better so I can do better."[131]
She as of writing is currently 24 years old, meaning 8-9 years ago she was 15-16 years old. And this example is neither here nor there. We have camps though, and I probably fall into the camp of 'A teenage girl said a bunch of crude hurtful shit, a) has she stopped? yes. b) I don't care then. Recognition of time served.' versus an extreme fringe camp perhaps reflected in the following article (source number 130 cited above):
"Disappointingly, Cabello’s approach to the controversy reflects a greater trend. She is one of many of celebrities who, after being confronted with indisputable receipts, have “apologized” for past incidents of racism without actually holding themselves accountable."
And:
"The “sorry something I said offended you” approach to apologizing is a tried-and-true Hollywood PR tactic to place blame on the victims of language that is, at best, ignorant and at worst, hateful. Though Camila Cabello’s apology feels more heartfelt than these other examples (or, at least it is intended to be read that way), it is disheartening that it was forced out of her at the risk of jeopardizing her career. Ultimately, her refusal to explicitly label her actions as racism is just another, slightly more tactful way of saying “sorry, not sorry” and alleviating herself of responsibility."
So that article is published December 2019, and one can note above that it was only in March 2021 that Camila reported attending National Compadres Network's weekly racial healing sessions. Also keeping in mind, this is purely my inference but we can imagine a group that feels one can use past behavior (substantiated) to draw conclusions about present mind states (mind-reading) and that these should be disqualifying or require restitution - eg. Camila's continued career be contingent on participating in a program of education, 'racial healing' etc.
Now that camp may wish for legal reforms, or there may be a sub-camp so confident in its conclusions that it is happy with a paralegal process. Also, again my inference from "it is disheartening that it was forced out of her at the risk of jeopardizing her career." that their may be a camp that also does not believe that such treatment be restricted to celebrities/public figures on the grounds that they are role models, but that a failing of society is that there are perhaps tens of thousands of women not held to account for shit they said when they were teenage girls, because they aren't large enough targets to hit with a public shaming campaign.
My presumption is that for the most part, members of such camps are ignorant of Mao's cultural revolution, (but also the suppress the counter-revolutionaries campaign early on in Mao's reign) and specifically the struggle sessions run by the Red Guards:
The process of struggle sessions served multiple purposes. First, it demonstrated to the masses that the party was determined to subdue any opposition (generally labeled “class enemies”), by violence if necessary. Second, potential rivals were crushed. Third, those who attacked the targeted foes became complicit in the violence and hence invested in the state. All three served to consolidate the party's control, which was deemed necessary because party members constituted a small minority of China's population.
Then I offer your consideration excerpts from Jung Chang's Wild Swans, who certainly has an axe to grind, but given what facts and information are available, I see no reason to discount her memoirs and not Eli Wiesel's:
But Mao's theory might just be the extension of his personality. He was, it seemed to me, really a restless fight promoter by nature, and good at it. He understood ugly human instincts such as envy and resentment, and knew how to mobilize them for his ends. He ruled by getting people to hate each other. In doing so, he got ordinary Chinese to carry out many of the tasks undertaken in other dictatorships by professional elites. Mao had managed to turn the people into the ultimate weapon of dictatorship.
That was why under him there was no real equivalent of the KGB in China. There was no need. In bringing out and nourishing the worst in people, Mao had created a moral wasteland and a land of hatred. But how much individual responsibility ordinary people should share, I could not decide.
And:
Once I read an article by a Westerner who came to China to see some old friends, university professors, who told him cheerfully how they had enjoyed being denounced and sent to the back end of beyond, and how much they had relished being reformed. The author concluded that Mao had indeed made the Chinese into 'new people' who would regard what was misery to a Westerner as pleasure.
I was aghast. Did he not know that repression was at its worst when there was no complaint? A hundred times more so when the victim actually presented a smiling face? Could he not see to what a pathetic condition these professors had been reduced, and what horror must have been involved to degrade them so? I did not realize that the acting that the Chinese were putting on was something to which Westerners were unaccustomed, and which they could not always decode.
Now since it's been a while, let's hear from Mao:
As for members of the reactionary classes and individuals so long as they do not rebel, sabotage or create trouble after their political power has been overthrown, land and work will be given to them as well in order to allow them to live and remould themselves through labour into new people. If they are not willing to work, the people's state will compel them to work. Propaganda and educational work will be done among them too and will be done, moreover, with as much care and thoroughness as among the captured army officers in the past. ~ "On the People's Democratic Dictatorship" (1949)
How compassionate.
The people's state protects the people. Only when the people have such a state can they educate and remould themselves by democratic methods on a country-wide scale, with everyone taking part, and shake off the influence of domestic and foreign reactionaries...rid themselves of the bad habits and ideas acquired in the old society, not allow themselves to be led astray by the reactionaries, and continue to advance- to advance towards a socialist and communist society. ~ "On the People's Democratic Dictatorship" (1949)
Democracy is practiced within the ranks of the people, who enjoy the rights of freedom of speech, assembly, association and so on. The right to vote belongs only to the people, not to the reactionaries. The combination of these two aspects, democracy for the people and dictatorship over the reactionaries, is the people's democratic dictatorship. ~ "On the People's Democratic Dictatorship" (1949)
Mao is an intellectual, his writings like Hitler's are translated from a language I don't understand, so I don't know if they lose a certain beauty, however, my own cultural prejudices are such that I do not regard Mandarin and German as particularly beautiful languages, easy on the ear and what not. Regardless, Mao's writings don't scream mediocrity like Hitler's do insofar as I have sampled them.
Where Hitler in my opinion asserts things baselessly and has a 'here's what I reckon' tone, Mao's writings are intellectual only in the sense that circular logic and undefined terms is more sophisticated than baseless assertions. A member of the Red Guard is less likely to spot the incoherence in their enthusiasm.
So just like it is important to be able to spot a Nazi without having a swastika armband give them away, same-same with disastrous Maoist policies and ideas without depending on portraits of Mao and little red books.
In my own personal shorthand, one abstraction is 'the Freedom to Agree' where discourse is essentially dishonest, would be interlocutors have all the answers and dissent, pushback, even questions or criticisms aren't welcome and are perceived as threatening, violent acts. So that the Hundred Flowers campaign might manifest as calls to 'join a conversation', simple word substitutions like 'reactionary' for 'fragility' and 'advancement' for 'progress'.
It's at this point that I really lose interest in Communism, Fascism and whatever specific economic policies or structures take place, because it is totalitarianism I am concerned with. By Jung Chang's account, one of Mao's achievements is his ability to resemble Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia without an SS or KGB.
Left wing totalitarianism provides us with an uncomfortable fact that creating free societies is a lot harder than just being anti-fascist. Somewhere (the 29 minute mark) in the discussion between conservative thinker Douglas Murray and Jordan Peterson they discuss this very problem, of how there's a consensus as to what point right wing politics becomes a problem - racism - but where is the line for left wing politics ...it's much more ambiguous, but would be really good to define to avoid having to take a slippery slope approach to left wing reform.
And both these thinkers I personally characterize as advocates of a theory that the collapse of religiousity is to blame for so many of societies current woes. This for me is another point towards the power and necessity of abstraction rather than getting bogged down in particulars, because the Inquisition resembles Witch Trials resembles Show trials resembles Struggle Sessions resembles McCarthyism resembles Non-Crime Hate Incidents resembles Diversity Training. John McWhorter and Glenn Loury use a substitution test of 'Witch' for 'Racist' in critiquing Antiracism methods.
At the abstract level of totalitarianism there's principles you can see a left-wing workers movement like Chinese Communism and right-wing Nationalist movements like German National Socialism are virtually indistinguishable.
Really basic things like censorship, inability to take criticism, unwillingness to answer critics, purges, cognitive distortions like always being right, social harmony, an absence of due process, guilt by association, denouncements, 'for the good of the people', double standards, blaming etc.
I feel the ignorance surrounding left-wing totalitarianism is probably a massive failing of our education. In my own speculation, for the right wing I have a notion of racism that would explain how common psychology allows it to spontaneously arise, thus you don't need a figure like Hitler to invent it and then an unbroken chain of meme-transmission for it to survive. I personally am confident we could eradicate all the racists in the world, and racism would crop up again in no time.
Just so, my notion as to why a) Mao's ideas could find traction with the students of the Red Guard and b) why people can spontaneously recreate Maoist like policy whether it be tearing down statues like Mao's 'Four Olds' needn't have germination in some Marxist trained Intellectual (though there seems to be evidence that this phenomena exists). It is simply ordinary psychology we are prone to, the dunning-kruger effect in combination with a desire for efficiency, or an absence of friction in the pursuit of our goals.
For an example of this ordinary human psychology, imagine you are going to take an international flight that departs at 8am. The Airline instructs you to allow 3 hours to clear security. Novel viruses aside, you know with certainty that you are not a suicide bomber or plane hijacker. You've packed your own bags. Why do you have to arrive at the Airport at 5am to go through an arduous, boring process to prove to strangers what you already know? Wouldn't it be better to arrive at 7am? Get that extra sleep without the multiple redundant questions, having to take shoes, jacket on and off, empty pockets, have things sent back through the X-ray and then be told to empty your bottle of water or drink it, or throw away your nail scissors, have a gunpowder swab and worse, get through security and immigration with 2 hours to spare, before your informed your flight is delayed...
I think the exact same psychology that finds the administrative bureaucracy of airports frustrating is the same that finds political opposition frustrating, combine that with a confidence that you actually know the solution to one of societies long intractable problems and faced with the dissonance that your views are actually just not popular enough and suddenly freedom becomes undesirable. Cognitive distortions like mind reading also are likely culprits as to why people might want to get rid of friction like 'due process' and 'presumption of innocence' in favor of just harassing someone to confess what you already know.
My own desire for an efficiency gain would be if the public were aware that Mao already tried a bunch of ideas that people or communities feel worth trying. I agree, it is perplexing that anyone alive looks at the Third Reich and says 'let's try that again' because it is reasonable to assume people have heard about it, are aware of its reputation etc. In this regard it's more understandable when people want to try Maoism again, because we can probably safely assume that even Chinese Nationals are not aware that Mao already tried that shit at the cost of lost decades, lost generations and somewhere north of 40 million lives.
The rest of the post is my speculating as to why people are not aware of Mao. Short possibilities are a) racism, Westerners generally feel somewhere between apathy and antipathy for the Chinese, so the crimes of Mao against his own people pale in comparison to the crimes of Hitler against the Jews, as do the crims of Imperial Japan against China, Korea, Phillipines etc. b) The Chinese Communist Party has not to date disavowed Mao's policies officially, his descendants represent some of China's richest business people and military generals and Document Number Nine specifically forbids 'historical nihilism'.
Then we can get into China's 'soft power' or 'economic vasselization' in the aforementioned loss of appetite for producing books and movies that cannot be sold in China, or even professional sports where players might criticize China's human rights transgressions.
I can remember, better than I can remember the year, 2006~07 or something discussing with a Canadian in a Hostel in Nurnberg, just what it was China brought to the global economic table. The flavor of the 2000s I would characterize as 'The Stonecutter Problem' Where China was posting double digit economic growth as it rapidly caught up to the Anglosphere in industrialization. The analogy fails though because countries, or at least, our countries' media showed less sense than Lenny, and were actually jealous of economic growth that was being achieved largely because of the leadership of Chairman Mao, leaving one of the Earth's largest markets sitting on it's hands for most of the 20th century going fucking nowhere if not backwards. My tentative conclusion was China provided a supply of cheap labor, a lack of environmental regulation and demand for... basically landfill.
That though is modern China, not Maoist China, but it is relevant insofar as offering a potential explanation as to why people can get ideas already proved brutally stupid by Mao. Mao's portrait still hangs over the forbidden city, overlooking Tiananmen square where I had the unenviable honor of informing school buddies from mainland China about the massacre that went down there. I've also been face to face with the cognitive dissonance of Mainland Chinese friends' understanding of Taiwan's independence, which they believe to be part of China, you know, a part of your home country that you require a passport to visit and has a special separate Olympic team like Tasmania, Alaska or the Isle of Wight. Again, that massacre is post-Mao, but I cannot imagine an analogous experience for an Australian citizen.
Sure, Australians might be ignorant of an Aboriginal genocide, or, as our questionably competent Prime Minister recently discovered, any history of slavery in Australia. With each new unveiling of an Australian historical atrocity, speaking only for myself; none of it is surprising, nor runs contrary to the characterization of Australia's colonial history I learned in school. It is a relatively easy and ongoing process to update my beliefs about Australia's history.
Then like with German National Socialism, education probably lets us down, and since China became Australias major export market, I suspect it has only gotten worse. My schooling had us read Animal Farm, by George Orwell, maybe in other years other students study1984 by George Orwell as a mandatory text, anyway we'd get a rough overview... an impression really that Communism is bad, but little more than an analogy of how Communism worked out in the 20th century. Furthermore Orwell seems focused more on the soviet model of Communism - Napoleon is Stalin, Snowball is Trotsky, Old Major is Marx-Lennin...
We even watched the Disney animation of Animal farm which really dumbed things down and possibly betrays the authors intent. Then as far as I recall, our teacher shared some anecdotes about the heights of centrally planned economic stupidity, like quotas for nails that were by weight, so factories produced useless nails that were 5 feet long or glass panels that were a meter thick etc.
I feel education fails us on teaching Hitler and German National Socialism, because it isn't taught to the point where fascism becomes an abstractly recognizable philosophy. Feeling that way, it certainly fails on the Maoist and Stalinist front, perhaps the last part, because Communism/Socialism is taught mostly as economic theory which is non mandatory and also not my big problem with Mao and Stalin. (Yes they did starve unforgiveable numbers of people to death, that's economic and political mismanagement).
It's the totalitarianism. Monopoly powers.
What was wrong with this years protestors storming Capital Hill? I would say most universally odious was that they see their opposition as illegitimate. What's wrong with the GOP campaign of voter suppression? I would say most universally odious is that they see their opposition as illegitimate. What's wrong with Hitler? same as above. What's wrong with Mao? Same as above. Stalin? As above.
Such is the power of abstraction, and how I would answer the 'falling off point' for both right and left of the political spectrum, even before right wing politics gets racist, I would draw a line where you get to the point of 'we cannot tolerate the other wing.'
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