Posted on 04/16/2016 12:13:03 PM PDT by MtnClimber
The People’s Republic of China is run by people who like to celebrate anniversaries. The marking of the centenary of the foundation of the Communist Party in 2021–despite not happening for another five years–in some senses has already started, enshrined in the centennial goals that Xi Jinping and his colleagues have been heralding for the last year or so. Anniversaries for the start of reform (40 years in 2018), the 40th anniversary of the death of Mao Zedong (September this year), and a dozen other large and small things litter the calendar of leaders, taking up a surprising amount of their time through attendance at commemorative events.
This proclivity to hold a large event to mark important occasions means the likely universal silence in China around the moment in mid-May when most agree the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was formally launched half a century ago is all the more striking. The largest of all the mass campaigns inspired by Mao Zedong, it was, in his own words, his greatest achievement after leading the Communists to victory against the Japanese and the KMT. Mao even suggested close to his death that Cultural Revolutions needed to occur continuously, and be repeated every few decades or so. How can China’s leaders say, as they often do, that they regard Mao as a great leader, and yet not acknowledge an event he himself saw as a core part of his historic legacy?
Many of 0bama’s cabinet seem to love Mao.
All factions professed to be serving Mao -- it was a years-long bloodletting to satisfy Mao's sociopathy. One battle in the Chinese interior was larger than anything since WWII, and the *losing* side alone lost 50K. I guess the bright side is, we didn't wind up having to kill them or the kids they never got to have.
Americans should not be too smug about this. We are having our own low-grade cultural revolution now. Who knows how far it will go?
Mao used Top-down control, of grass-roots, organized Leftist political street agitation, using oft-repeated, ill-defined, broad cliches and slogans, which represent the political phrases of power, used to keep opponents off balance, replace traditionalists and opponents in government, and through media, to force change on a pliant populace that only wants to get along. Sound familiar?
Mao did not engage in the dirty work himself, but through his direct political cronies and the organs of state power, his Red Guards attacked his opposition and weakened or destroyed those institutions who would stand in the way of his extreme leftist ideology.
Let’s say you are a President, and wanted more control over the nation’s thousands of independent police departments — one of the most clear and obvious, traditionalist expressions of diffuse government, which are promoted from the bottom up. You certainly can’t fire 3000 local police chiefs in a direct assault on State and local rights. No one would accept that.
But you could, under the pretext of the killing of a petty street thug, start a media campaign painting the man as a victim of institutionalized local police racism. You would have your Red Guards converge on the place, or several places. On one hand, promote over-reaction and the appearance of chaos. Air all grievances, real or imagined. On the other, chant for “justice” for the oppressed group, tell the nation “their lives matter.” Of course, accuse those 3000 police chiefs of the ultimate sin of “racism” (ie. counter-revolution) - and propose a reasonable check on their racist power. Who can argue with that? Have your Red Guards meet regularly at your Department of Justice for legal guidance and counseling. In this atmosphere, have your Department of Justice impose sundry “civil rights” rules and regulations to which they must comply, or the local bureaucrats will face public humiliation. Before long, you have control through the tethers of words, slogans, public shaming, and random penalization
and he murdered 150 million people ... coming soon under the Burn.
The Cultural Revolution was unleashed by Mao in 1966 and didn’t end until he croaked ten years later.
China as we sorta know it today began in 1979.
Horst Wessel was a petty street thug and the Nazis did a song against him. I adapted my own song to celebrate the Horst Wesselation of what is now a sick and evil culture:Trayvon Martin Lied
Let a thousand flowers bloom.
Well.....that was “let a hundred flowers bloom” which Mao announced in 1956 to entice opponents of the ChiCom regime to criticize it openly. Dissidents were rounded up & sent to labor camps by the thousands.
This was followed by the catastrophic backyard industrialization drive “Great Leap Forward” in 1958.
Mao was a mass murdering monster. Widely admired on our nation’s campuses.
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