rats deserting the sinking ship of the communists?
--
sent from samsung galaxy note, so please excuse brevity
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: sri venkat
Date: Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 6:10 AM
Subject: The Miracles of Mao - A bizarre anthology of devotional literature
To:
THE MIRACLES OF MAO
- A bizarre anthology of devotional literature
Politics and play - Ramachandra Guha
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1130406/jsp/opinion/story_16738501.jsp#.UWA2nVd6Rfw
Marxism claims to offer a materialist approach to history, where class
relations and the forces of technology are given more importance than
the doings of individuals. In practice, however, political regimes
based on professedly Marxist principles have indulged in an
unprecedented worship of their leaders. Communist parties the world
over brook no criticism of the Holy Trinity of Marx, Engels, and
Lenin. No prime minister or president of a bourgeois democracy has
ever experienced the slavish adulation enjoyed by Josef Stalin in the
Soviet Union of the 1930s and 1940s.
In modern times, the 'personality cult' of Stalin in Russia has been
equalled or exceeded only by two leaders and countries — the North
Korea of Kim Il-Sung, and the China of Mao Zedong. I recall, in the
early 1990s, walking past the embassy of the People's Republic of
North Korea in India (located in the upmarket locality of Sunder
Nagar), and laughing out loud at a display board on its walls speaking
of how the Beloved Leader had single-handedly brought his people out
of darkness into light.
More laughs came my way recently, when, on a London pavement, I picked
up a book entitled The Miracles of Chairman Mao, published in 1971,
and containing translated excerpts from the Chinese press and radio
bulletins from the years, 1966 to 1970. Edited by an anti-Communist
journalist named G.R. Urban, the book carried the sarcastic yet
accurate sub-title, "A compendium of devotional literature".
The stories this compendium contains are so wonderfully bizarre that I
must share a selection. Thus, a girl who had been deaf and dumb for
years suddenly burst into song under the inspiration of Chairman Mao.
In another case, a patient with a tumour weighing 45 kilograms inside
him was attended by doctors who had devotedly read their Great
Leader's Little Red Book. The operation they conducted was inspired by
Mao's statement, "Attack dispersed, isolated enemy forces first;
attack concentrated, strong enemy forces later." Accordingly, the
surgeons first removed the tissues surrounding the tumour before
tackling the tumour itself. At hand to help them were the hospital
staff, who carried portraits of Mao even as they offered blood to the
patient. As for the patient herself, when she regained consciousness,
she felt her tummy to find the tumour had disappeared. The first words
she now uttered were, "Long live Chairman Mao! Chairman Mao has saved
me!"
Move now from the realm of healthcare to the field of sport. After a
Chinese table-tennis team won the world championships in 1959, one
player revealed the secret of their success. Apparently, they had
implemented, on the ping-pong table, the tactics and the principles of
Mao's articles, "On Contradiction" and "On Practice". "Chairman Mao's
teachings," said another team member, "have enabled us to understand
that we must set our own path to reach the top of the world. Looking
back, it is now clear that for the past 10 years and more, we have
followed a road of giving prominence to proletarian politics and Mao
Tse-Tung's thought." After the Chinese won the 1965 world
championship, the same player said that in their game they had "placed
the study and application of Chairman Mao's works in the forefront and
put revolutionary dialectics into practice". The table-tennis bat, he
added, was "under the command of his [Mao's] thought".
Another incident reported in the book featured a worker helping dig a
tunnel through a rocky mountain. Rendered unconscious by the effort,
he eventually came to his senses. As he did, the worker recalled Mao's
teachings, "What is work? Work is struggle. A good comrade is one who
is more eager to go where the difficulties are greater." Thus
invigorated, he immediately went back into the tunnel, and dug his way
successfully out onto the other side.
In a case more curious still, party cadre in northeast China sought to
inculcate the principles of Mao's thought in the minds of small-town
barbers. The cadre faced a challenge from the "handful of capitalist
roaders" who peddled slogans such as 'profits first', 'material
incentives' and other revisionist nonsense of the arch scab, Liu
Shao-chi." In the end, the revolutionary ideology was victorious, but
not without a struggle. An account broadcast over Peking Radio in
April 1969 explained the anguish and agonies of one particular barber:
"One evening a barber named Chih Sung-ta went out as usual to a
residential district to give people haircuts while publicizing the
excellent situation of the great proletarian cultural revolution. He
returned home late at night. He stayed awake and tossed in his bed as
he assessed the day's work in the light of Chairman Mao's teachings.
Chih Sung-ta felt uneasy because, when he was cutting the hair of a
paralysed man, he noticed that his blanket was soiled and he had not
washed it for the sick man. He had failed to work wholly and
'entirely' in the people's interests, as taught by Chairman Mao. Early
the next morning he went to the home of the man and took the blanket
to wash it for him."
In the China of Chairman Mao, class solidarity had (in theory)
necessarily to override family obligations. When a lady was knocked
down and killed by a lorry, her loving husband was, at first, full of
vengeful feelings against the lorry driver. Then he recalled Chairman
Mao's teaching. "Our point of departure is to proceed in all cases
from the self-interests of the people and not from one's
self-interest." Thus comforted, he sought out the driver and said he
forgave him his mistake. However, he urged the driver to go study
Mao's thought, which "is as essential to a revolutionary as a steering
wheel is to a driver". The driver was overcome with emotion; he hugged
the bereaved man, and told him, "I'm grateful to Chairman Mao,
grateful to him for bringing up a noble man like you. I'll always
remember the lesson I've learnt from this tragic accident, and
creatively study and apply Chairman Mao's works. I'll fight
self-interest and repudiate revisionism and try to be a model in
grasping revolution and promoting production."
In a famous speech to the Constituent Assembly of India, B.R. Ambedkar
warned of the dangers of hero-worship in politics. The warning was
disregarded, as witness the deification by some Tamils of
Jayalalithaa, some Gujaratis of Narendra Modi, some Maharashtrians of
Bal Thackeray, and all Congressmen of Indira, Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi.
Ambedkar himself has been accorded quasi-divine status by his
followers. Even so, one wonders what he would have made of this
editorial which appeared in the Liberation Army Daily on August 13,
1967: "Chairman Mao is the most outstanding, greatest genius in the
world, and his thought is the summing up of the experience of the
proletarian struggles in China and abroad and is the unbreakable
truth. In implementing Chairman Mao's directives, we must completely
disregard the fact whether we understand them or not. The experience
of revolutionary struggles tells us that we do not understand many
directives of Chairman Mao thoroughly or partly at the beginning, but
gradually understand them in the course of implementation, after
implementation, or after several years. Therefore, we should implement
resolutely Chairman Mao's directives which we understand, as well as
those which we temporarily do not understand."
I suppose this is what is called blind faith. At any rate, the
miracles attributed to Mao in the China of the 1960s make a Hindu
godman seem pedestrian indeed.
ramachandraguha@yahoo.in
From: sri venkat
Date: Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 6:10 AM
Subject: The Miracles of Mao - A bizarre anthology of devotional literature
To:
THE MIRACLES OF MAO
- A bizarre anthology of devotional literature
Politics and play - Ramachandra Guha
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1130406/jsp/opinion/story_16738501.jsp#.UWA2nVd6Rfw
Marxism claims to offer a materialist approach to history, where class
relations and the forces of technology are given more importance than
the doings of individuals. In practice, however, political regimes
based on professedly Marxist principles have indulged in an
unprecedented worship of their leaders. Communist parties the world
over brook no criticism of the Holy Trinity of Marx, Engels, and
Lenin. No prime minister or president of a bourgeois democracy has
ever experienced the slavish adulation enjoyed by Josef Stalin in the
Soviet Union of the 1930s and 1940s.
In modern times, the 'personality cult' of Stalin in Russia has been
equalled or exceeded only by two leaders and countries — the North
Korea of Kim Il-Sung, and the China of Mao Zedong. I recall, in the
early 1990s, walking past the embassy of the People's Republic of
North Korea in India (located in the upmarket locality of Sunder
Nagar), and laughing out loud at a display board on its walls speaking
of how the Beloved Leader had single-handedly brought his people out
of darkness into light.
More laughs came my way recently, when, on a London pavement, I picked
up a book entitled The Miracles of Chairman Mao, published in 1971,
and containing translated excerpts from the Chinese press and radio
bulletins from the years, 1966 to 1970. Edited by an anti-Communist
journalist named G.R. Urban, the book carried the sarcastic yet
accurate sub-title, "A compendium of devotional literature".
The stories this compendium contains are so wonderfully bizarre that I
must share a selection. Thus, a girl who had been deaf and dumb for
years suddenly burst into song under the inspiration of Chairman Mao.
In another case, a patient with a tumour weighing 45 kilograms inside
him was attended by doctors who had devotedly read their Great
Leader's Little Red Book. The operation they conducted was inspired by
Mao's statement, "Attack dispersed, isolated enemy forces first;
attack concentrated, strong enemy forces later." Accordingly, the
surgeons first removed the tissues surrounding the tumour before
tackling the tumour itself. At hand to help them were the hospital
staff, who carried portraits of Mao even as they offered blood to the
patient. As for the patient herself, when she regained consciousness,
she felt her tummy to find the tumour had disappeared. The first words
she now uttered were, "Long live Chairman Mao! Chairman Mao has saved
me!"
Move now from the realm of healthcare to the field of sport. After a
Chinese table-tennis team won the world championships in 1959, one
player revealed the secret of their success. Apparently, they had
implemented, on the ping-pong table, the tactics and the principles of
Mao's articles, "On Contradiction" and "On Practice". "Chairman Mao's
teachings," said another team member, "have enabled us to understand
that we must set our own path to reach the top of the world. Looking
back, it is now clear that for the past 10 years and more, we have
followed a road of giving prominence to proletarian politics and Mao
Tse-Tung's thought." After the Chinese won the 1965 world
championship, the same player said that in their game they had "placed
the study and application of Chairman Mao's works in the forefront and
put revolutionary dialectics into practice". The table-tennis bat, he
added, was "under the command of his [Mao's] thought".
Another incident reported in the book featured a worker helping dig a
tunnel through a rocky mountain. Rendered unconscious by the effort,
he eventually came to his senses. As he did, the worker recalled Mao's
teachings, "What is work? Work is struggle. A good comrade is one who
is more eager to go where the difficulties are greater." Thus
invigorated, he immediately went back into the tunnel, and dug his way
successfully out onto the other side.
In a case more curious still, party cadre in northeast China sought to
inculcate the principles of Mao's thought in the minds of small-town
barbers. The cadre faced a challenge from the "handful of capitalist
roaders" who peddled slogans such as 'profits first', 'material
incentives' and other revisionist nonsense of the arch scab, Liu
Shao-chi." In the end, the revolutionary ideology was victorious, but
not without a struggle. An account broadcast over Peking Radio in
April 1969 explained the anguish and agonies of one particular barber:
"One evening a barber named Chih Sung-ta went out as usual to a
residential district to give people haircuts while publicizing the
excellent situation of the great proletarian cultural revolution. He
returned home late at night. He stayed awake and tossed in his bed as
he assessed the day's work in the light of Chairman Mao's teachings.
Chih Sung-ta felt uneasy because, when he was cutting the hair of a
paralysed man, he noticed that his blanket was soiled and he had not
washed it for the sick man. He had failed to work wholly and
'entirely' in the people's interests, as taught by Chairman Mao. Early
the next morning he went to the home of the man and took the blanket
to wash it for him."
In the China of Chairman Mao, class solidarity had (in theory)
necessarily to override family obligations. When a lady was knocked
down and killed by a lorry, her loving husband was, at first, full of
vengeful feelings against the lorry driver. Then he recalled Chairman
Mao's teaching. "Our point of departure is to proceed in all cases
from the self-interests of the people and not from one's
self-interest." Thus comforted, he sought out the driver and said he
forgave him his mistake. However, he urged the driver to go study
Mao's thought, which "is as essential to a revolutionary as a steering
wheel is to a driver". The driver was overcome with emotion; he hugged
the bereaved man, and told him, "I'm grateful to Chairman Mao,
grateful to him for bringing up a noble man like you. I'll always
remember the lesson I've learnt from this tragic accident, and
creatively study and apply Chairman Mao's works. I'll fight
self-interest and repudiate revisionism and try to be a model in
grasping revolution and promoting production."
In a famous speech to the Constituent Assembly of India, B.R. Ambedkar
warned of the dangers of hero-worship in politics. The warning was
disregarded, as witness the deification by some Tamils of
Jayalalithaa, some Gujaratis of Narendra Modi, some Maharashtrians of
Bal Thackeray, and all Congressmen of Indira, Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi.
Ambedkar himself has been accorded quasi-divine status by his
followers. Even so, one wonders what he would have made of this
editorial which appeared in the Liberation Army Daily on August 13,
1967: "Chairman Mao is the most outstanding, greatest genius in the
world, and his thought is the summing up of the experience of the
proletarian struggles in China and abroad and is the unbreakable
truth. In implementing Chairman Mao's directives, we must completely
disregard the fact whether we understand them or not. The experience
of revolutionary struggles tells us that we do not understand many
directives of Chairman Mao thoroughly or partly at the beginning, but
gradually understand them in the course of implementation, after
implementation, or after several years. Therefore, we should implement
resolutely Chairman Mao's directives which we understand, as well as
those which we temporarily do not understand."
I suppose this is what is called blind faith. At any rate, the
miracles attributed to Mao in the China of the 1960s make a Hindu
godman seem pedestrian indeed.
ramachandraguha@yahoo.in
sent from samsung galaxy note, so please excuse brevity
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