Thomas_More
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“Frank Dikötter is a historian who has written about the atrocities of Mao Zedong and the Communist Party of China. His work includes Mao’s Great Famine, which documents the famine that killed millions of people during the Great Leap Forward. Dikötter’s other books include The Tragedy of Liberation and The Cultural Revolution.
Mao’s Great Famine
Estimates that at least 45 million people died from starvation, overwork, and violence during the Great Leap Forward
Documents how the party knew it was starving its people, but did nothing
Shows how local communist cadres withheld food from people they disapproved of
Accuses top party leaders of doing nothing to help
Shows how the country exported food, economic aid, and loans while the famine raged
Combines the experiences of ordinary people with the actions of those in power
The Tragedy of Liberation
Documents the impact of the Communist Revolution on the lives of ordinary people from 1945–1957.”The famines were manufactured by Mao, and the CPC confiscated food on a massive scale, leaving millions to starve. Kang Sheng, Mao’s hatchet man, also presided over kill quotas each year for each province. The people were regularly culled, and local officials had to satisfy the quotas and make their reports.
With leprosy rampant, lepers were rounded up and burned alive.
AI Google:
Mao and homosexuality:
” Homosexual people were largely invisible and persecuted during the Mao era in China (1949-1976).
Persecution
Homosexuals were considered “disgraceful” and “undesirable”
They were subjected to electric shock therapy and other attempts to change their sexual orientation
They were arrested, imprisoned, and some lost their jobs for life
They were subjected to varying forms of moral and often extra-legal sanctions
Government policy
The official media rarely discussed homosexuality from the 1950s to the 1970s
It was believed that the only legitimate sexual intercourse was between a man and a woman within government-sanctioned marriage
Mao Zedong reportedly believed in the sexual castration of “sexual deviants” ”This too was Mao’s T’aip’ing legacy. The T’aip’ings were the only pre-Mao regime in China to kill and victimise homosexuals.
“Fascist” is a favourite epithet of leftists. The same as bringing the Nazis into any slanging match.
The Holy Communist 🥭 mango.😝
” One dentist from Fulin, Dr. Han Guangdi, saw the mango and said it was nothing special and looked just like sweet potato. He was put on trial for malicious slander, found guilty, paraded publicly throughout the town, and then executed with one shot to the head.”
Maoists again:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08c3vrx
On BBC 4 tonight.
There was the American one too: “Workers Democratic Party” or some such anti-worker and anti-democratic cult.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Workers_Party
Maoism tends to produce cults. The Khmer Rouge are the most extreme example in recent decades. The 19th century T’aip’ings had similar characteristics, and Mao idolised them.
I am not denying it. But feudalism existed prior to Imperial consolidation in the third century B.C.E.
Feudalism existed before Ch’in Shih Huang, when “China” was just a collection of petty kingdoms in the north. Confucius was feudalism’s spokesman. He was later adopted as symbol of social order after the brief rule of the Ch’in, when he, Confucius, was posthumously raised to honour.
The Maoists declared against Confucius and for the tyrannical Ch’in.
https://www.britannica.com/place/China/The-Zhou-feudal-system
From what I remember from reading Mao’s writings, they are almost completely about peasant guerrilla strategy.
The myth of Chinese “feudalism” was made gospel by the Maoists, and I believed it myself.
Mao knew very little about Chinese history. He was the heir of the peasant T’aip’ing movement of the 1850s, which he was exhilarated by, with all its savagery, intolerance and fratricide.
Having no real grasp of history beyond that, he merely adopted for China the European trajectory of social stages presented by Marx, and assumed Imperial China to be “feudal.” He also created a scenario in which chattel slavery, as in ancient Europe, preceded the first Emperor (Mao’s hero) who was supposed to have toppled it and “set up” feudalism.
In fact, Chinese feudalism died out by the time of the first Emperor, and Chinese society never had chattel slavery as its basis, but only in a minor way, like the Celts.
At every working class demonstration and protest, anywhere in the world, you will see them carrying the flag of the nation.
This is harder to break than anything else; harder even than calling for the abolition of money (which everyone laughs at anyway).Their identification with “the nation” has a greater hold on them than anything else. They are so brainwashed with it that it is far worse than any religion. Indeed, it is everyone’s religion, and national flags are their holy ikons. Dare to tell anyone among them that the “nation” needs to be chucked, even the most “radical”, the most leftist, and you become hateful to them.
Trollope said the more deprived and wretched the poor are, the more they fawn and snivel before the wealthy.
The most reactionary and nationalistic people I’ve met have also been of the lumpenproletariat.
My two lifelong friends were made through correspondence. Handwritten correspondence, by its nature, encourages the cultivation of real relationships and the lengthy expression of thought and feeling. One can return to a letter and one has leisure in its composition.
Digital communication tends, on the contrary, toward speed and brevity; relations are more numerous and accordingly void of depth. It encourages, by its nature, impetuosity and literacy becomes unimportant.
I also like calligraphy, especially the medieval illuminated book. But I also think the ink bottle with stilus ought to be used unselfconsciously to write ordinarily, and not just for calligraphy.
Which is why capitalism likes to say, with Henry Ford, that “history is bunk.”
And history is increasingly dumped from education and devalued. Meanwhile conspiralunatic “history” programmes are given mainstream air space on television and in book catalogues.
And the workers concur, because history holds no interest for them.
Nationalism, faced with real knowledge of history, cannot stand.
