The Shotgun Blog
« Auditing Global Warming | Main | The Truth Hurts »
Monday, April 25, 2005
A Canadian history lesson
Here’s a little late night reading I’m posting for no other reason than today I finally--finally!--found a copy of this book. The excerpt below is from Two Innocents in Red China by Jacques Hebert and Pierre Elliott Trudeau, 1961, translation 1968, Oxford University Press. The narration below picks up after Trudeau and Hebert manage to avoid being dragged by their hosts to two very long war films, which our authors call "patriotic turkeys." Despite avoiding what they believe is crap art, the authors still somehow manage to justify it and much more.
Tuesday, October 11, [1960]
...Swarms of theatrical companies and film-projection teams traverse China in all directions to carry 'people's art' into the most remote villages: a scarcely artistic art', as Savignac would say, centred on the themes of official propaganda. The State cannot take the risk of dispensing with this vast effort at persuasion. The enemies of the New China assert that it is by the machine guns and bayonets that the Chinese are made to work so hard. In fact a better way has been found: plays and films, which lead the masses to think along the regimes lines, and to accept the effort demanded of them.
Obviously there are all the other methods of persuasion; the regime neglects none of them. A Chinese is besieged: in the factory he is served up party slogans by means of posters, banners, and loudspeakers; he will read the same slogans in the newspapers, hear them a hundred, a thousand times on radio and television, and find them in exhibitions of painting, and even in the temples and churches if he still goes to them.
But the most effective (and least costly) method of persuasion is the district meeting. Here the whole family is indoctrinated. Fanatics carry the hesitant along with them, father convinces son, son persuades father, wives who have 'won their freedom' give the coup de grace. Lastly, well-trained propagandists go from one meeting to another to stimulate the local leaders.
Is it obligatory to go to the district meeting? Neither more nor less obligatory than it is for our own Catholics to go to mass. Some go to the meeting with the enthusiasm and zeal of true believers. Others go to it, as some go to mass, to avoid committing a social error. As a result almost all Chinese attend the weekly indoctrination meeting. What religion has been preached so effectively, and by so many means?
There is much talk in our newspapers of a reign of terror in China. This is a poor explanation for the matter. Why antagonize a whole region by massacring discontented peasants when it is so simple to send an army of propagandists who will transform recalcitrants into convinced Marxists, into zealous and possibly into cheerful workers? Certainly the revolution was not established without violence, but why would the revolutionaries continue to resort to it when they have found, in persuasion, a better way?
'But after all,' the doubter will say, 'surely the Chinese don't accept such a regime cheerfully; they are intelligent. Aren't they bound to resist all that propaganda?'
The ancient enemy of China is hunger. It had been in occupation of the whole country for millennia; ten years ago it was still defying the people. Crouched before every door like a menacing dragon, it killed Chinese by the tens of millions. Who was it that vanquished this implacable enemy? Mao.
That fact alone would be enough to explain the behaviour of this ancient civilization, which one would have expected either to vomit up Maxism or to assimilate it, as it has assimilated everything that has come from the foreigner. Mao conquered hunger, and told the Chinese that it was thanks to Marxism. Hence the Chinese put their trust in the regime.
It is not a matter of promises: control of the waters by dykes and dams, afforestation, reclamation of land, mechanization of agriculture, expansion of industry, and above all the bowl of rice or loaf of bread on every table in China--these are the facts that each Chinese can verify at the ends of his chopsticks.
'Hold on a minute, please! Isn't famine raging in China a this very moment?'
Do you mean the famine in which the conservative press of the West takes so much delight? The famine of which the Formosan government speaks with such cheerful compassion? It is true that dispatches from Hong Kong report a 'shortage of provisions that in some districts verges on famine'. It is true that during our journey people mentioned to us droughts in the south and floods in the north. That while there was 'no rationing' there was 'controlled distribution' of foodstuffs. All the same, it has to be acknowledged: it would take more than that to overturn the government of Mao Tse-Tung.
It has been related in the West how the Russian famine of 1932 killed millions of people. Well, the outcome of that was an increase in Stalin's dictatorial power. However, famine was not as common in Russia as in China, where it has been known for thousands of years. But as long as they are less frequent and less deadly than those of yesterday, the Chinese will be conscious of progress and hopeful that it will continue.
In fact a famine of the same gravity today will do less harm than in the past, for there will be no financial sharks to speculate on misery. And the instruments of distribution and apportionment (roads, trucks, staff) are better organized today than they used to be.
Conclusion: the Chinese will continue to listen to the teachers of Marxism at the weekly meeting.
'But still, it's a totalitarian regime--a dictatorship!'
Of course. Chiang Kai-shek and the emperors were also dictators, but their power was not directly founded on the people, and they were not so well organized for giving thought to the people's problems. The present regime, in contrast, since it attacks the feudal lords, the capitalists, and the superstructures of the old days, is bound to be as little alienated as possible from the Chinese masses. And it takes the trouble to convince them of its good faith, to convert them to its teaching. By every means.
Now let us fast forward nearly 40 years to examine the judgment of history. After all, Trudeau and Hebert were there in the middle of The Great Leap Forward.. From The Black Book of Communism, Chapter 21, China: A Long March into Night by Jean-Louis Margolin, 1999
To that total should be added the staggering number of deaths during the ill-named Great Leap Forward--estimates range from 20 million to 43 million dead for the years 1959-1961--all victims of famine caused by the misguided projects of a single man, Mao Zedong, and his criminal obstinacy in refusing to admit his mistake and to allow measures to taken to rectify the disastrous effects.
Posted by Kevin Steel on April 25, 2005 in International Politics | Permalink
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d834515b5d69e200d83476b40f69e2
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference A Canadian history lesson:
Comments
Truedough's paypals included: Castro, Mao of Red China,socialist mavens by the score, and:
Maurice Strong, Trudeau's choice to head up the state-owned Petro-Canada, The National Energy Policy along with socialist Marc Lalonde from Quebec. They robbed Alberta of oil & etc.
Who Is Maurice Strong?????
http://www.afn.org/~govern/strong.html
Posted by: maz2 | 2005-04-26 6:54:04 AM
Dude, I've got that book. i woulda sent it to you had i have known you needed it. Unintentional hilarity abounds inside its pages. One day i am going to use mine for bum wipe
Posted by: matt | 2005-04-26 7:28:11 AM
Thanks for the thought, mazz (the one about lending the book, not the toilet paper one).
Just to let you know, I posted this for a few reasons. First of all, the copy I obtained though worn on the outside had actually never been cracked open, so it occurred to me that this might have been one of those political books that was in its day fashionable to own but no one ever actually read. Second, many people--if they had vaguely heard of the book--might be tempted to excuse it as youthful folly. (The old bookseller who helped me locate it seemed to think it the book was about some kind of hitchhiking trip--this was Trudeau's second trip to China, the first was in 1949.) In fact Trudeau was 40 years old when it was written, just eight years away from his Prime Ministership. Third, I wanted to encourage people to read it because there is much more in there as you, mazz, note.
One aspect of the book I found interesting is in the Preamble and Epilogue, written in 1968 to accompany the new translation. Trudeau takes pains to describe how they set out to combat the notion of the "Yellow Peril," in other words to humanize the enemy and, though he doesn't use the word, combat the racist element of the anti-Communist movement. This is interesting because he is essentially playing the race card, something the Communists would persist in doing in subsequent years, notably after the publication of a book "The Coming Confict with China" in 1996. The official line at that time was if you oppose our regime you are anti-Chinese, a racist. This is a luxury that the Soviet tyrants didn't have.
You will also note in the excerpt here how the authors depict the anti-Communists, or the conservative press, as delighting in the famine. (Yet the authors are the ones over there on a holiday excusing and justifying the famine, the effects of which they aren't shown by their hosts of course.) This attempt at portraying the critics of Communism, the conservatives--those who are actually raising the alarm--as uncaring is really disgusting. But note it is a habit of mind in modern liberal thought that continues today to shore up their sense of superiority.
My favourite line? From the Epilogue: "The accredited anti-Communists, of course, will go on believing for the next fifty years that the Chinese are on the verge of rising against their Communist government, just as some people have believed the same thing of the USSR for forty-four years."
The book is permeated with a sense of smug superiority, the sense that our authors can easily see beyond all the official propaganda. Indeed, on the back of the book the publishers seem to think this a main selling point:
"The diary of the trip, now published in English for the first time, is a document of permanent value for the history of China--and of Canada. Intensely political men, Hebert and Trudeau saw through the official jargon of their guides (paying 'no more attention to their stereotyped formulae than if they were so many belches') to the human realities of China, good and evil."
What they really demonstrate is a wilful ignorance--the capacity to be what Stalin called 'useful idiots'--much of it apparently based on their own sense of superiority to those they oppose politically back home.
Posted by: Kevin Steel | 2005-04-26 10:58:35 AM
Two observations, if I may:
Being a bibliophile,(sic), the one and only book ever garbaged by this reader was a copy of Walter Duranty's, "---------- -------- ...". Duranty: pervert Parisian-stlye, Stalin's aide/abetter, awarded (gag) a Pulitzer Prize (New York Times , gag again). Read and destroy.
Believe V. Lenin coined "useful idiots"; or is attributed to him.(Must search.).
The other book is the one fathered in his youth? by Hey You Che Guevara,one of the "idols" of the Left. Do not have title at hand.
Put the books to the test; clones?
Posted by: maz2 | 2005-04-26 2:40:00 PM
BTW, an aunt of Moe Strong was a member of the Communist International (Comintern). She was awarded etc./honoured by the Chinese Reds.
Norman Bethune, Trudeau, & others: Canadian traitors; haters of Western civilization; as is Moe Strong.
Posted by: maz2 | 2005-04-26 2:46:18 PM
Have just returned from 32 days in China. Every young person I spoke to in China knew that the great leap forward was really the great leap backward and that the cultural revolution was a complete disaster. They also know that capitalism is alive and well in China right now and that Mao would roll over in his grave if he could see China now. About the only difference between LA and Xian is that the people can't vote in Xian..... That will probably also change someday in the future.
Left-wing pinkos worldwide have lost big time in the past 30 to 40 years and hopefully Canadians will understand this some day and we too will get the Liberals and NDP off our backs.....
One can only hope!!!!!!
Posted by: themaj | 2005-04-26 2:50:34 PM
Fascinating post. I've linked it to a discussion I have on similarly ideological idiocies going on at the CBC today:
http://www.thepolitic.com/archives/2005/04/26/the-trauma-of-ideology/
Posted by: Tom | 2005-04-26 3:18:11 PM
"The real Che" by Anthony Daniels:
http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/23/oct04/che.htm
Posted by: maz2 | 2005-04-26 5:37:53 PM
funny you mention the race card. Getting called "anti-American" is something that happens if you criticize the U.S. regime right now. Hmmmm...all these similarities to past tyrannical regimes.
Posted by: bdillon | 2005-04-26 7:01:51 PM
"The Black Book of Communism" is the definitive study on the "past tyrannical regimes".
Long live freedom and democracy.
Posted by: maz2 | 2005-05-10 6:06:18 PM
The comments to this entry are closed.