Comment by perl4ever
5 years ago
>The greatest problem with the Cultural Revolution, its defining characteristic in most people's minds, was all the mass murder.
I'm not sure that's true. Stipulating that it was "the greatest problem", how could it be the defining characteristic considering all the other historical instances of mass murder?
Was my meaning actually unclear to you? There have been plenty of times of censorship and social strife in history. Choosing one that involved the murder of tens of thousands of people makes for an especially poor analogy to what's happening today.
The Cultural Revolution is a poor analog in other ways as well (I mean, upon examination the comparison to our current moment doesn't hold up at all and it's boring to discuss) but the large number of dead people seems like an especially important indicator that perhaps what's happening today is not as serious as all that, and that the author is engaging in some pretty extreme hyperbole. (which is their right of course, blah blah)
> There have been plenty of times of censorship and social strife in history.
Sure, but the notions of "re-education", "self-criticism" and the struggle-session as a form of public humiliation where someone is forced to admit their "crimes" before the "people" are a distinctive part of leftist social strife and oppression. And it seems quite relevant to point out that these social practices have led to mass murder in at least one instance that we know about, where they were promoted in an extensive "grassroots" campaign and thereby became widespread. We're not talking about willful and intentional physical purges of intellectuals ala Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, where your contention that mass murder is the defining element of it all would be far more on point.
Forced recantations and blacklisting are not new things or something that require strained analogies to Chinese history. In my view shouting "hey, look over there! A slippery slope! We'd better watch out!" takes away from a more serious message about how we are currently repeating our own, very serious, mistakes of the past. (although to be sure, there are some genuinely new aspects of how things are playing out in social media)
You should be sure.
Violence and extreme social distress, public humiliation sessions, public beatings were meted out rather liberally. A specifically pernicious aspect of Mao's strategam was turning generation against generation. These are the defining characteristics of Chinese Communist Party's Cultural Revolution.
I was practicing understatement. I think my general level of ignorance of the cultural revolution is pretty average (I'm going to read some books on it) and I didn't think of it being defined by "mass murder", but rather the things you list and italicize. Even if you had disagreed, I was characterizing popular mostly ignorant opinion based on my own, not the true nature of the period.
The public humiliation sessions are what I think most people that didn't study it think of, combined with the violence. They're what I vaguely think of; they're what you mention, and I'm confident they're what most people think of. The concept of such sessions is something that found its way into Western fiction (e.g. 80s SF) clearly inspired by the historical period. I don't recall a specific example, but this is something I always assumed was part of popular culture at some level.
While we're on that topic (popular impressions of Chinese history), a lot of people died during the "Great Leap Forward" too, but again, I don't think the average uninformed opinion of what defines it is "mass murder". When I think of that, I think of peasants trying to make steel and other social disruption.
All historical instances of mass murder were wrong. It's a key delineation. BLM is a response to mass incarceration and disproportionate killings by the legal system. Notably, they don't seem interested in crossing the line into mass killings; they want less killings. Thus, the jump to Maoism from Marxism is overwrought.