NPR- Interviews author, Newly Released Documents Detail Traumas Of China's Cultural Revolution

[livingdeadmoose]

I'm not saying it is or isn't real communism.

I'm saying Stalin and Mao were enormous pricks and would have brought suffering to their people regardless of the political or economic system in place.

Yea but communism is a much easier means to grab power. It gives a lot more power to the government.

 

[Denter]

Pretty sure that's not what communism revolves around, that's just what it devolved to in history.

Pretty sure also, it's not the only instance in history in which a extreme character rose to power.

You are right, and theoretically, the dictatorship of the proletariat through the vanguard party was a creation of Lenin, and not a part of Orthodox Marxism. People like Plekhanov (who taught Lenin) were opposed to democratic centralism and thought that if you brought about a left wing armed coup (which is what the October Revolution was) the result would not be socialism, but a kind of third world nasty dictatorship, which is exactly what happened. Communism itself was simply an end goal, and the way to get there was totally undefined by Marx- it was something that would simply happen eventually, as a result of the dialectic. Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, etc were all just filling in the blank with how they thought they could arrive there the fastest.

 

[Rational Poster]

Yea but communism is a much easier means to grab power. It gives a lot more power to the government.

I think military juntas tend to grab power a bit easier.

 

[robotsonic]

Communism is just the latest in a long line of social movements that cynical, power hungry types in the middle class use to overthrow the ruling class, and on it goes. Orwell once said of these middle class communist types that they didn't love the poor, they just hated the rich. The poor are just the tool used to facilitate this change, more often than not in a communist society it's the poor people who suffer the most in the end.

American democracy traditionally was a great counter balance to this, as unlike European democracy there were not already established elites and social mobility in the US was so high that within two generations the Kennedy's went from being poor immigrants to the White House. Therefore there was no real 'ruling class' to rail against, you could become part of it, that's the American dream and is always why America resisted socialism in a way Europe didn't. Even Western European democracies are much more socialist than we are.

 

[unimackpass]

This isnt even a problem with communism. Its problem with strong man dictator, in a country, and culture of the Chinese. Mao was one of if not the worst strong man dictator in history, and China the worst possible place to have someone like him.

This topic hits close to my heart. My parents were small children, or maybe preteens in China when all this happened. I always knew something was off about them, and of course I figure it must stem from their time growing up in that atmosphere.

All that happened though, is the fault of the chinese mentality. They are very stubborn, set in their ways, me me me attitude. Mao knew how to manipulate that. It comes with the territory of being the most dominant power in their region of the world for many millenia I guess.

When the Euro imperialist powers came, it was a real shocker to the chinese. They went through like a century and a half of strife. Now though they seem to be coming out of it, but they really still want to regain that old glory of theirs, while keeping that same superiority complex.

I can't imagine growing up during that time. This vid goes into the methods Mao used, he does a excellent job and you can tell it's not just clinical information to him but actually difficult to discuss.

He calls it a strategy of the stick and carrot. Some of the promises were what reasonable people desire.
Land
Improved working conditions
Freedom and opportunity for entrepreneurs
Freedom for intellectuals

It was just a carrot to change things then he used the stick to enforce the real agenda.

Rally the majority.
Isolate a minority.
Take out the enemies one by one.

Class label. (Good class, bad class)

Re-education- new orthodoxy, become a totally different person.

 

[Trotsky]

But communism walks hand in hand with dictatorship. So yes, the problem is communism.

Worker ownership of their workplaces does not walk hand in hand with dictatorship. Stalinism, Maoism, and perhaps Leninism walk hand-in-hand with dictatorship.

Anyways, I'm not even going to address the posts of Devout Pessimist and Farmer Brown, as they are morons, but I will be back later to point out some of the spuriousness of the OP and why that book is generally regarded as a substandard and flawed insight into the topic, which is unsurprising given its writer.

Tombstone by Yang Jisheng is imo a better offering.

 

[unimackpass]

This is a excellent interview of the author and what drives him.

What drives Frank Dikötter, chronicler of China’s insanity?
Hong Kong scholar leaves few horrors untold in his books on modern China, the latest of which, covering the Cultural Revolution, has just been published. He talks to Fionnuala McHugh about empathy, torture-porn and how history repeats itself
http://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-.../what-drives-frank-dikotter-chronicler-chinas

DIKÖTTER, 54, IS CHAIR PROFESSOR of humanities at the University of Hong Kong, which is where we meet one recent afternoon. His 10th-floor office in the new Centennial Campus has stunning views north, across the harbour. There’s a wall of bookcases devoted to China and some framed Great Leap Forward propaganda posters sit on the floor. A Penguin paperback of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism is splayed, mid-read, on the arm of a chair....

....The second time we’d met was by chance, in 2012, in an office building in Mody Road, Tsim Sha Tsui, where Dikötter – now garlanded with international accolades and lined up to speak at the Jaipur Literature Festival – had gone to get his Indian visa....

....
For the first few minutes of this interview, however, he talks about another book – a slim volume in French, Douceur de l’aube (“softness of dawn”), by a man called Hervé Denès, who attended a recent Dikötter talk in Paris and gave it to him afterwards. In 1964, Denès was a teacher in Nanjing, where he’d met a young Chinese woman. They weren’t allowed to marry and he’d had to leave at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. It took him a decade and a half to find out that the woman he loved, accused of having “foreign ties”, had jumped out of a building a year later.

“I felt gutted, gutted,” says Dikötter, who speaks with engaging passion. “It’s horrible. On page 89, the very last page, he finds out what happened to the love of his life. I almost cried.”

The story is one droplet in a tragic sea. As Dikötter says, he’s using it to make two points.

“The first is that history isn’t about numbers. It’s not about a theory, an approach – it’s about human beings and you must really bring it to life. And the second is that it’s real. It’s not just on paper. This Parisian guy has been living with this horrible feeling until now.”

But didn’t that urge to weep occur frequently?

“If you want to know the experience of being in the head of Frank Dikötter, here’s an example,” he says. “I remember one moment, in an archive in Hunan, within months of starting on Mao’s Great Famine. There’s a cadre, Xiong Dechang. He’s basically the local bully. He forces a man to bury his son alive for stealing a handful of grain. That turned my stomach. I read this. What do I do with it?”

His dilemma had nothing to do with covering up state-sanctioned excess; it was about deciding the level of horror he should present in a serious book. So he was concerned about torture-porn?

Dikötter hesitates for a second then says, “Yes. A term historians use is sensationalism or emotionalism. It’s used by men about women – for example, Cecil Woodham-Smith.”

Despite her first name, Woodham-Smith was female. In 1962 (as it happens), she wrote The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845-1849, a classic work about the Irish famine.

“She was criticised by historians for being too emotional. They said she should have buried that, she should have killed these people twice. It’s what Elie Wiesel [the writer and Nobel Peace Prize winner] says, ‘The executioner always kills twice, the second time through silence.’ I don’t want to be complicit.”

However, for the Cultural Revolution book, he says he has “a slightly lighter touch – I don’t want readers to think it’s Mao’s famine all over again”.

 

[lifelessheap]

@Trotsky

That sounds like paradise, right? That is what you want for us?

 

[Trotsky]

@Trotsky

That sounds like paradise, right? That is what you want for us?

I'm pretty open about how I think Mao was an incompetent boob and that Maoism is an inherently flawed ideology.

However, as I stated before, the rhetoric over his destruction is incredibly exaggerated in the West and ignores many spurious variables. At no point during the Great Leap Forward or Cultural Revolution were Chinese death rates unusual for their region, which was experiencing incredible famine.

 

[lifelessheap]

I'm pretty open about how I think Mao was an incompetent boob and that Maoism is an inherently flawed ideology.

However, as I stated before, the rhetoric over his destruction is incredibly exaggerated in the West and ignores many spurious variables. At no point during the Great Leap Forward or Cultural Revolution were Chinese death rates unusual for their region, which was experiencing incredible famine.

Oh, so it wasn't 'real' communism. Oh, and the famine had nothing to do with the government confiscating everyone's land, tools and treating them likes slaves. Oh. I see.

 

[Trotsky]

Oh, so it wasn't 'real' communism. Oh, and the famine had nothing to do with the government confiscating everyone's land, tools and treating them likes slaves. Oh. I see.

Do you want to have a real discussion, or just put your head in the sand and keep lobbing quips?

 

[MadSquabbles500]

But communism walks hand in hand with dictatorship. So yes, the problem is communism.

I wouldnt go as far as say walks hand in hand because there have been plenty of dictatorships that were no communist. Mussolini was a fascist Dictator. Augustin Pinochet wasnt a communist.

 

[Farmer Br0wn]

(if you want to use "sophistry" @Farmer Br0wn this is a good use)

I'm perfectly satisfied with my usage of the word sophist. It was an utterly appropriate usage.

The idea of "that's not true communism" is a tired argument of yesteryear, and I'm glad it's been disproven so thoroughly. It's been disproven so thoroughly, that any neutral Observer will know that the person making this argument (The "not true communism" argument) is simply trying to make the worse seem the better cause. That's practically the definition of sophistry.

 

[Farmer Br0wn]

I like Jordan Peterson, but the hero worship that surrounds him because he has taken ONE high profile public stance against the Canadian government (albeit a good stance, in my opinion) is tiresome.

He is a very smart guy. His podcast has some really good episodes. In reality, though, about 80% of his material is a reiteration/ elaboration of Joseph Campbell. Not a bad thing at all, but I think a lot of viewers are overly impressed with him because he is their first exposure to certain ideas, and so they think he invented the psychological-reading-of-mythology wheel. He didn't.

Thank you for that... statement.

Are you able to refute the arguments put forward by Professor Peterson in the video I posted?

In case you missed it:


I also stand by my argument that Jordan Peterson will leave a fairly significant impact on the intellectual history of humanity.

On the other hand @Rational Poster will have absolutely no impact on the intellectual history of humanity.

I'm extremely confident in this prediction.

 

[Rational Poster]

Thank you for that... statement.

Are you able to refute the arguments put forward by Professor Peterson in the video I posted?

In case you missed it:


I also stand by my argument that Jordan Peterson will leave a fairly significant impact on the intellectual history of humanity.

On the other hand @Rational Poster will have absolutely no impact on the intellectual history of humanity.

I'm extremely confident in this prediction.

I'd be confident in a prediction that can't be confirmed or denied in our lifetime, too.

Just admit you have no substance and you want to go around posting youtube clips to make your arguments.

 

[Rational Poster]

I'm perfectly satisfied with my usage of the word sophist. It was an utterly appropriate usage.

The idea of "that's not true communism" is a tired argument of yesteryear, and I'm glad it's been disproven so thoroughly. It's been disproven so thoroughly, that any neutral Observer will know that the person making this argument (The "not true communism" argument) is simply trying to make the worse seem the better cause. That's practically the definition of sophistry.

No one is making that argument here.

You're bringing it up just to post your Peterson clips and try to act smart, but I'm not falling for it.

 

[luckyshot]

Thank you for that... statement.

Are you able to refute the arguments put forward by Professor Peterson in the video I posted?

In case you missed it:


I also stand by my argument that Jordan Peterson will leave a fairly significant impact on the intellectual history of humanity.

On the other hand @Rational Poster will have absolutely no impact on the intellectual history of humanity.

I'm extremely confident in this prediction.

Lol. Why would I refute the arguments when I agree with them? Did you even read my post?

If Jordan Peterson leaves a footnote on intellectual history, it will be as a pioneer of putting classroom content on an online platform. He's a popularizer of ideas, and a very good lecturer, but he's not a thinker of the type that "leaves a fairly significant impact on the intellectual history of humanity."

The ideas he's putting forth have existed for decades... in other people's books. He also puts way too much stock in just a few source materials. I literally cannot count the number of times I've heard him reference The Gulag Archipelago. This one source seems to compromise 95% of his "expertise" on Stalinist Russia.

 

[Farmer Br0wn]

No one is making that argument here.

Here are your own words (again):

Pretty sure that's not what communism revolves around, that's just what it devolved to in history.

Pretty sure also, it's not the only instance in history in which a extreme character rose to power.

This is just "not true communism" in more words.

Also, this quote from the first page of this thread, one of the first 5 posts actually:

This isnt even a problem with communism. Its problem with strong man dictator, in a country, and culture of the Chinese.

You're bringing it up just to post your Peterson clips and try to act smart, but I'm not falling for it.

Do you ever get tired of me proving you wrong time and time again?

I will accept your concession via your post of laughing woman gif any time. I'm looking forward to your concession that you lack the brain power to actually refute anything I've said.

 

[livingdeadmoose]

I wouldnt go as far as say walks hand in hand because there have been plenty of dictatorships that were no communist. Mussolini was a fascist Dictator. Augustin Pinochet wasnt a communist.

As I’ve said before, not lol dictatorships have been communist, but all communists countries have always been dictatorships.

 

[InternetHero]

He has a degree in psychology, not history, economics, or politics.

This thinking kind of skirts the line of an "Appeal to Authority."

If he is right, he is right.

Reputation and field does not make for facts and arguments. (I have no idea and just heard of the fellow.)