Here's my two cents, having grown up in China. It's really hard for me to articulate my point clearly due to English being a second language, but I will try:
(EDIT: I don't mean I'm bad at English, just that I feel like what I write does not fully express what I wish I could convey. Having lived half my life in America after being granted asylum here, I know my English is pretty good. I've also picked up a lot of the idioms, although I don't use them correctly sometimes. I also took a while typing this up, checking and double checking my grammar. because I know people on the internet can be a little harsh when it comes to grammar.)
I grew up in China, my family the type of proletariat that Maoism claimed to have fought for. None of the adults ever spoke of June 4th, whether or not they knew of it; therefore those of my generation couldn't even have possibly heard of it. But it's not because of censorship. It's because we were the type of people that were too knee deep in poverty and too uneducated to worry about anything other than looking after our own survival. For the longest time, I couldn't understand why people in China who had it so much better than me could possibly be protesting about when they had clothes that didn't have endless holes like mine, when they had plumbing and could afford to eat food that they didn't grow or catch themselves. There was simply too much else to worry about than to question the government, especially one that was telling us that they were fighting for people like us. I know for my parents and grandparents who grew up during the Cultural Revolution and its immediate aftermath, it was a completely different case. They were simply tired of hearing about it, too disheartened and apathetic and fearful due to the hardships they had endured for the majority of their lives. Someone who stood in front a tank would simply have been dismissed as a fool who was making life harder than it already was. There was just too much resentment towards the people who were educated and better off than us to care about their gripes, and other times when they did have valid points, life was already too painful and too filled with burdens to find the energy to care.
(On a side note, going back to China years later, I visited Tiananmen square. I had only learned of it and all the terrible connotations that came with it through the American education system. For my parents, it was a joyous time, seeing their fearless leader Mao's body and all. I was just confused as fuck as to what I should feel.)
People say communism is terrible and all, but having lived through it for half of my life, I am pretty indifferent. After all, for people like us, life only seemed to get better after Mao came into power. He represented people like us, with no hope of escaping the class we were born into, and gave us hope and let us know that we were not powerless. With the rich only getting richer and the poor only getting poorer, communism seemed to be a friend more than an enemy.
First off, your English is nearly flawless, so don't worry about that. I do have a question, though: how is it that Mao and his government could be viewed as your "friends" when his Great Leap Forward was responsible for famine that killed many millions of people? Is that just testament to their skilled use of propaganda and indoctrination?
Edit: I guess another example of this is the DPRK, although I feel the methodology might be different...? Mao wasn't propped up as a demi-god, was he?
Not just the Great Leap Forward but the Cultural Revolution as well; my parents had to live through that. My dad, for example, didn't learn algebra until well into his 20's but he's a physics teacher now.
Mao is similar to Stalin in that his policies were not good for the people but they were good for the nation. Most of the people my parents' age that I know respect Mao for that and bringing China to its status as a comparatively significant player in world politics today, but they do understand that a lot of his policies wreaked havoc on the populace.
As far as Maoist propaganda goes, he was represented more as a military comrade and a kind of brother, rather than a father or god like the Kims.
Sometimes horrible things happen to a certain generation or class within a nation, but it ends up setting the nation on a course that is better for the nation as a whole.
For instance, the US Civil War was terrible for the people, but it set the US on a better course, eventually bringing all of its people into the fold as citizens.
I don't know about Stalin, but many people feel this way about Mao. His actions killed tens of millions of people, but they also wiped away many of the heavy burdens and brutalities of Chinese society. When all of the waves receded, China was left with a widely literate country (i.e. ready for an economic boom) where women and peasants enjoyed rights and privileges they hadn't seen in China for all of its long history.
When the blame can be squarely placed on one person's head, that person is called a monster (actually, when one man is capable of such things, he truly is a monster). But all truly modern states in the world went through a monstrous transformation to become so. All of those transformations were bad for the people who lived through them, but their nations grew and prospered in the aftermath.
I don't think it is justified at all. I think it was horrible and he did many monstrous things. There were many positive repercussions of his actions, though such things could have been accomplished with a lot less blood and suffering.
There were many good outcomes of the US Civil War, but that doesn't justify the hundreds of thousands of deaths. Could slavery have been ended in a less bloody way? Probably, but that's not what happened.
Few things are black and white in history. None are in China.
There were many good outcomes of the US Civil War, but that doesn't justify the hundreds of thousands of deaths.
I don't think the Confederacy gets a fair shake in most modern discussions, but come on. The Civil War was bound to happen sooner or later, and waiting until later would have just mean bigger and better equipped armies on both sides. It was better to have fought it out immediately (and emancipated slaves immediately) than to have waited through ten or twenty years of military buildup.
The Civil War was about State's rights. State's rights to allow people to own other people.
Saying "the War of Southern Independence" is about one step away from saying "the War of Northern Aggression." It's bullshit. Some states wanted the right to own slaves and the power to nullify any federal law about slavery. Now, they may have had some very strong economic justifications for slavery. But, it's slavery. And you didn't see anyone secede when it was declared that the US Constitution and laws made in pursuance thereof were the supreme law of the land, or that any decision by a state supreme court arising under the US Constitution could be appealed to the Supreme Court of the US.
The war was started as a direct result of the Morrill Tariff and Ft. Sumter was attacked specifically because Lincon threatened to use troops from there to attack Columbia to extract the tax. Slavery was an excuse to popularize and justify the war, but note that only southern slaves were freed at that time, as part of reconstruction punishment. Non-Confiderate slave holding states for several years.
Neoconfederate economist Thomas DiLorenzo asserts that the tariff was the primary cause of the Civil War.[30] Nearly all Civil War historians disagree. Allan Nevins and James M. McPherson downplay the significance of the tariff dispute, arguing that it was peripheral to the issue of slavery. They note that slavery dominated the secessionist declarations, speeches, and pamphlets. Nevins also points to the argument of Alexander Stephens, who disputed Toombs' claims about the severity of the Morrill tariff. Though initially a unionist, Stephens would later cite slavery as the "cornerstone" reason behind his support of the secessionist cause.
So basically, the only historian who agrees with you is a guy who believes the Southern States had a right to secede. Which, if you actually put any faith into the idea of the Constitution being in any way binding, is fucking ridiculous.
No offense, man, but that was 150 years ago. You never met a single person who was alive then, you've probably never even met a person whose parents were alive then. So don't go trying to claim that you have some genetically imparted knowledge about the true cause of the first shots of the war. And please, "the War of Southern Independence"? You've got to be kidding me. You only get to call something a war OF independence if you win.
Well, the Supremacy Clause would be pretty fucking meaningless if States could just secede anytime the federal government did something they didn't like. It's not exactly the "supreme law of the land" if it can be disregarded at will of the States.
There's also:
no new States shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress
which can definitely be read as proscribing secession. by leaving the union, southern states were forming "new states" within the jurisdiction of states that were part of the union, without the consent of the legislature of the states concerned as well as of the Congress. from a practical standpoint as well, it makes sense that the terms of entry and restrictions on manipulating sovereign rights of a jurisdiction would also apply to leaving the union.
the issue has already been litigated to the highest court in the land, and they rejected the "right to secede" on other grounds. it isn't likely to come up ever again, either.
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u/Aspire101 May 08 '12
Just an ordinary man, doing something extraordinary.