Posted on 05/31/2016 6:49:13 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History 1962-1976. By Frank Dikötter. Bloomsbury; 382 pages; $32 and £25.
The Cowshed. By Ji Xianlin. Introduction by Zha Jianying. New York Review of Books; 188 pages; $24.95 and £14.99.
FIFTY years ago the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, as it was officially known, plunged China into Maoist madness. It left well over 1m people dead and wrecked the lives of many millions of others. It was Mao Zedong, then 72, who launched the “red terror”, as young participants proudly called it, partly to purge the party of officials who were sceptical about his radical policies. He feared that such waverers might expose him to the kind of posthumous condemnation that was heaped upon Josef Stalin after the Soviet leader’s death. Another of Mao’s motives was a Utopian one. He appeared to believe that people power, no matter how bloody, could turn China into a socialist paradise.
The Communist Party does not like to dwell on what happened. In 1981 it issued a formal pronouncement on the late chairman’s rule. It called him a “great” and “outstanding” leader, but said the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 until his death in 1976, had been a “catastrophe”, initiated and led by him. That, the party hoped, would be the end of the discussion. It did not want Chinese people to examine evidence that the Cultural Revolution was not just an aberration of Mao’s—the act of a man sadly misguided by his fanatical wife, Jiang Qing, and other members of the “Gang of Four”—but an event that had his imprint all over it, and one that revealed a profound flaw in Communist rule itself....
(Excerpt) Read more at economist.com ...
*** his fanatical wife, Jiang Qing, and other members of the “Gang of Four”***
Didn’t SHE begin to disappear from some official “photos” as certain people near Stalin began to disappear in photos?
I remember seeing a photo of the Long March, and a few years later the same photo in which she disappeared.
A tyrant mad man? Who would have guessed it?
And this is why socialism never works.
Socialists are human beings with all of our faults, vices and fears.
Yes, and socialism ALWAYS results in total dictatorships with zero freedom, and financial destitution.......
Just what everyone really wants......./sarc off
Mao’s tactics are common among all leftists/collectivists/radicals.
Indeed, I see some used by Obama - particularly focusing on broad, meaningless social justice themes, and support/organization of street agitation. It all works to confuse and confound a population when pushing radical political policies, and keeps opposition off balance.
Yep... Misdirection. Get the focused on Social Justice while destroying the rule of law
Now people in China, who had the luxury of not having to live during Mao’s rule, would say that, as bad as Mao may have been, he was necessary to ultimately turn China into a Superpower.
It’s the same with Stalin in Russia.
Check all potential candidates for mental illness
Democrats would be disqualified by default of course from running!
The last one we have is a real doozy!
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