Maoism. Shall we not discuss Maoism. Let us sit around and
discuss Maoism.
Shouldn't people of a certain age and political experience formally
and openly confront and hopefully, not counting the diehards of whom I know a
few, disabuse themselves of Maoism?
I am of that age and political experience.
I shared in the intoxication. We knew about Stalinism. Revisionist,
repressive. We knew about the Terror, the show trials, about the Bolshevik Revolution
eating its young. And though Solzhenitsyn had not yet published his Gulag trilogy,
we had intimations enough.
Maoism blindsided us. It was a mutation for which we had no
immunity. Stalin was cold war, old hat. Mao something different. Mao promised
revolution everywhere. If it was possible in China, then why not Cuba, Vietnam,
and ah yes the United States. You just had to adjust the strategy (we'd now say
algorithm), tweak/fine tune it to the specifics of your country, and it was possible.
Totally possible.
Vietnam.
Mao supported the Vietnamese, didn't he?
Mao wrote poetry and say what you will some of it is good. (I
used to have one of his odes, in the classical Chinese manner, I gather, posted to my door.) Mao was the poet as revolutionary. the revolutionary as poetry.
Dazzling.
Irresistible.
I remember sitting in the student union of the University of
Wisconsin, in Madison, reading about the Red Guards, and their China-wide attack
on bureaucracy. Mario Savio had done the same at Berkeley a few years back,
hadn't he? Wasn't he all about attacking faceless bureaucracy?
Mao analog to Mario Savio, Mario Savio analog to Mao.
These days: the Chinese struggle constantly with Mao, as they
do and will with many of their emperors, and as they do with Confucius. Mao and
Confucius. Confucius and Mao. Mao cum Confucius.
In the west though, we haven't really come to terms with how
Mao blindsided us, how we had no immunity, and how it screwed things up.
The Berkeley Free Speech Movement took place 1964-65. The Red Guards were "mobilized", according to the Wikipedia, in 1966-67. I'm ashamed to say it wasn't until years later that I understood how radically opposite these movements were
ReplyDelete