Son of the Revolution
It's about Liang Hengs experiences growing up during the Cultural Revolution, led by Chairman Mao Ze Dong, after upending Chaing Kaisheks totalitarian regime.
Amazing the parallels at times to religious cults. Everyone here knows how much the WT has in common with the Fictitious Oceania in Orwells 1984. This is the REAL 1984, in a political/governmental setting. I knew of China, but not like this. We've had this book around for ages since my Mom studied History of China in College. I just picked it up last week and cannot recommend it highly enough to every person. All those things such as newspeak, thoughtcrime, family members trained to tattle on one another, everything happened under Mao in China.
I learned there's really not much to complain about, and appreciated even more deeply how much freedom we enjoy, and perhaps even take for granted, not having experienced what it's like to not have Liberty.
Wasn't communism supposed to equal out everyone? It certainly has moved further and futher away and as of today there is a massive gap between the wealthy of China and the peasants and workers of China. Almost like instead of Marxist/Leninist/Maoist "Utopia" they have something more akin to the caste system of India.
I was so touched in so many places. As a result of the "Revolution" and under all Mao's policies, Liang grew up separated from his Mother who was labelled a "Rightist." Here's just a snippet from the book that sets up a recurring theme in Liangs life, being bullied, harassed, marginalized, criticized his entire upbringing as a consequence of his families "black thoughts," which weren't really even there.
p. 8
"Meanwhile, whenever I went home to Waipo's, I hoped Mother would be there, for I loved her very much despite our limited time together. But when I was about four, I began to sense there was something wrong. She would come home looking worried and she never played with me, just talked on and on with Uncle Yan in a hushed Liuyang County dialect which I couldn't understand. Finally, one Saturday afternoon it was Nai Nai who came to get me, and I was told Mother had gone away and I shouldn't go to Waipo's house anymore.
Only years later was I old enough to understand what had happened and more than twenty years passed before anyone, including Mother herself, go t the full picture. In early 1957 the "Hundred Flowers Movement" had been launched. Its official purpose was to give the Party a chance to correct its shortcomings by listening to the masses' criticisms. Father was away in the countryside reporting on something, but in the Changsha Public Security Bureau, meetings were held and everyone was urged to express his or her opinions freely.
Mother didn't know what to do. She really loved the Party and didn't have any criticisms to make; the Party had given her a job and saved her from the most abject poverty. Still, her leaders said that everyone should participate actively in the movement, especially those who hoped someday to join the Party. Mother was already in favor; she had been given the important job of validating arrest warrants for the whole city. So, regarding it her duty to come up with something, she finally thought of three poings she could make. She said that her Section Head sometimes used crude language and like to criticize people, that he should give his housekeeper a bed to sleep on instead of making her sleep oin the floor, and that sometimes when it came time to give raises, the leaders didn't listen to the masses' opinions.
But then, with utterly confusing rapidity, the "Hundred Flowers Movement" changed into the "Anti-Rightist Movement." Perhaps the Party was caught off guard by the amount of opposition and felt compelled to crack down. Or maybe, as I've heard said, the "Hundred Flowers Movement" had been a trap designed from the beginning to uncover Rightist elements. Anyway, every unit was given a quota of Rightists, and Mother's name was among those at the Public Security Bureau.
It was diastrous. When she was allowed to see her file in 1978, she found out that she had been given a Rightist's "cap" solely because of those three criticisms she had made. Perhaps her Section Head was angry at her; perhaps her unit was having trouble filling its quota. At the time she had no idea what the verdict was based on, she only knew that a terrible wrong had been done. But ther was no court of appeal. Mother was sent away to the suburb of Yuan Jia Ling for labor reform. She lost her cadre's rank and her salary was cut from fifty-five to fifteen yuan a month. ( A yuan is one hundred Chinese cents) My naive and trusting mother went to work as a peasant.
Just as his wife was being declared an enemy of the Party, Father was actively participating in the Anti-Rightist Movement in his own unit. Father believed in the Party with his whole heart, believed that the Party could never make a mistake or hand down a wrong verdict. It was a torturuous dilemma; Father's traditional Confucian sense of family obligation told him to support Mother while his political allegiance told him to condemn her. In the end, his commitment to the Party won out, and he denounced her. He believed that was the only course that could save the family from ruin.
I still remember the first time Mother came home for a visit. It was a rainy Suncay in late autumn, and Father and Nai Nai were both out. There were footsteps on the stairs and in the corridor, but it was almost a minute before the knock came, timidly. Liang Fang opened the door.
Mother was almost unrecognizable. She was in patched blue peasant clothing, muddy up to the knees. The skin on her kind round face looked thick, leathery, and not too clean, and someone had chopped her hair off short and uneven. There was something both broader and thinner about her. "Mama!" cried Liang Fang.
Liang Wei-ping and I ran up to her too, and she was hugging us all at once, weeping, forgetting to put tdown her oilpaper umbrella. Then as my sisters rushed to pour tea and bring a basin of hot water for her to wash her face, she sat on the bed and held me tightly for a long time. After she had rested, she busied herself with all the housework Nai Nai couldn't do alone, sweeping dusting and sharpening our pencils for us, scrubbing our clothes, and cleaning the windows. She wouldn't speak of where she'd been, just asked us about our schoolwork, our health, Father's health. We were so happy. We thought Mother had come home."
Please borrow this book or buy it if you can. It's incredibly moving and informative.
A MUST READ::: a book that I've not seen mentioned
by smellsgood 4 Replies latest jw friends
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smellsgood
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smellsgood
I should mention the Authors :)
Liang Heng & Judith Shapiro -
nvrgnbk
I think you'd like Propaganda by Jacques Ellul, smellsgood.
Excerpted from Jacques Ellul. Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes. New York: Vintage Books, 1973
In addition to a certain living standard, another condition must be met: if man is to be successfully propagandized, he needs at least a minimum of culture. Propaganda cannot succeed where people have no trace of Western culture. We are not speaking here of intelligence; some primitive tribes are surely intelligent, but have an intelligence foreign to our concepts and customs. A base is needed — for example, education; a man who cannot read will escape most propaganda, as will a man who is not interested in reading. People used to think that learning to read evidenced human progress; they still celebrate the decline of illiteracy as a great victory; they condemn countries with a large proportion of illiterates; they think that reading is a road to freedom. All this is debatable, for the important thing is not to be able to read, but to understand what one reads, to reflect on and judge what one reads. Outside of that, reading has no meaning (and even destroys certain automatic qualities of memory and observation). But to talk about critical faculties and discernment is to talk about something far above primary education and to consider a very small minority. The vast majority of people, perhaps 90% percent, know how to read, but do not exercise their intelligence beyond this. They attribute authority and eminent value to the printed word, or, conversely, reject it altogether. As these people do not possess enough knowledge to reflect and discern, they believe — or disbelieve — in toto what they read. And as such people, moreover, will select the easiest, not the hardest, reading matter, they are precisely on the level at which the printed word can seize and convince them without opposition. They are perfectly adapted to propaganda.
Let us not say: "If one gave them good things to read... If these people received a better education…" Such an argument has no validity because things just are not that way. Let us not say, either: "This is only the first stage; soon their education will be better; one must begin somewhere." First of all, it takes a very long time to pass from the first to the second stage; in France, the first stage was reached half a century ago, and we still are very far from attaining the second. There is more, unfortunately. This first stage has placed man at the disposal of propaganda. Before he can pass to the second stage, he will find himself in a universe of propaganda. He will be already formed, adapted, integrated. This is why the development of culture in the U.S.S.R. can take place without danger. One can reach a higher level of culture without ceasing to be a propagandee as long as one was a propagandee before acquiring critical faculties, and as long as that culture itself is integrated into a universe of propaganda. Actually, the most obvious result of primary education in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was to make the individual susceptible to superpropaganda. 1 There is no chance of raising the intellectual level of Western populations sufficiently and rapidly enough to compensate for the progress of propaganda. Propaganda techniques have advanced so much faster than the reasoning capacity of the average man that to close this gap and shape this man intellectually outside the framework of propaganda is almost impossible. In fact, what happens and what we see all around us is the claim that propaganda itself is our culture and what the masses ought to learn. Only in and through propaganda have the masses access to political economy, politics, art, or literature. Primary education makes it possible to enter the realm of propaganda, in which people then receive their intellectual and cultural environment.
The uncultured man cannot be reached by propaganda. Experience and research done by the Germans between 1933 and 1938 showed that in remote areas, where people hardly knew how to read, propaganda had no effect The same holds true for the enormous effort in the Communist world to teach people how to read. In Korea, the local script was terribly difficult and complicated; so, in North Korea, the Communists created an entirely new alphabet and a simple script in order to teach all the people how to read. In China, Mao simplified the script in his battle with illiteracy, and in some places in China new alphabets are being created. This would have no particular significance except that the texts used to teach the adult students how to read — and which are the only texts to which they have access — are exclusively propaganda texts; they are political tracts, poems to the glory of the Communist regime, extracts of classical Marxism. Among the Tibetans, the Mongols, the Ouighbours, the Manchus, the only texts in the new script are Mao’s works. Thus, we see here a wonderful shaping tool: The illiterates are taught to read only the new script; nothing is published in that script except propaganda texts; therefore, the illiterates cannot possibly read — or know — anything else.
Also, one of the most effective propaganda methods in Asia was to establish "teachers" to teach reading and indoctrinate people at the same time. The prestige of the intellectual — "marked with God’s finger" — allowed political assertions to appear as Truth, while the prestige of the printed word one learned to decipher confirmed the validity of what the teachers said. These facts leave no doubt that the development of primary education is a fundamental condition for the organization of propaganda, even though such a conclusion may run counter to many prejudices, best expressed by Paul Rivet’s pointed but completely unrealistic words: "A person who cannot read a newspaper is not free."
This need of a certain cultural level to make people susceptible to propaganda
2 is best understood if one looks at one of propaganda’s most important devices, the manipulation of symbols. The more an individual participates in the society in which he lives, the more he will cling to stereotyped symbols expressing collective notions about the past and the future of his group. The more stereotypes in a culture, the easier it is to form public opinion, and the more an individual participates in that culture, the more susceptible he becomes to the manipulation of these symbols. The number of propaganda campaigns in the West which have first taken hold in cultured settings is remarkable. This is not only true for doctrinaire propaganda, which is based on exact facts and acts on the level of the most highly developed people who have a sense of values and know a good deal about political realities, such as, for example, the propaganda on the injustice of capitalism, on economic crises, or on colonialism; it is only normal that the most educated people (intellectuals) are the first to be reached by such propaganda… All this runs counter to pat notions that only the public swallows propaganda. Naturally, the educated man does not believe in propaganda; he shrugs and is convinced that propaganda has no effect on him. This is, in fact, one of his great weaknesses, and propagandists are well aware that in order to reach someone, one must first convince him that propaganda is ineffectual and not very clever. Because he is convinced of his own superiority, the intellectual is much more vulnerable than anybody else to this maneuver…1 Because he considered the newspaper the principal instrument of propaganda, Lenin insisted on the necessity of teaching reading. It was even more the catchword of the New Economic Policy: the school became the place to prepare students to receive propaganda.
2 We also must consider the fact that in a society in which propaganda — whether direct or indirect, conscious or unconscious — absorbs all the means of communication or education (as in practically all societies in 1960), propaganda forms culture and in a certain sense is culture. When film and novel, newspaper and television are instruments either of political propaganda in the restricted sense or in that of human relations (social propaganda), culture is perfectly integrated into propaganda; as a consequence, the more cultivated a man is, the more he is propagandized. Here one can also see the idealist illusion of those who hope that the mass media of communication will create a mass culture. This "culture" is merely a way of destroying a personality.
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AWAKE&WATCHING
You are making me think, ouch, I've been involved with a cult for 30 years.
Thinking hurts my head, no,it feels good, no,it hurts, no,it feels good.
Seriously, both of those books sound very interesting.
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erandir
a&w, your post reminds me of that hilarious and recent emoticon-only thread.