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| Jing, 1 October 2010, Zacs, Discovery Bay Waterfront. Hong Kong |
Leftists -- never able to leave well enough alone, never knowing a person they disagreed with that they didn't want to kill or imprison -- launched, under Mao, the "Anti Rightist Campaign", 1957-59.
Overlapping this, and just to ensure complete, not just partial, chaos, the party, under Mao, launched the ludicrous "Great Leap Forward", 1958-62.
Still not enough, for there remained a few voices calling for Common Sense, Mao instigated the most rigorous, the most fearsome, the egregious, the longest-lasting of them all: "The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution", 1966-76.
That's when I arrived in China. At the very end of that Cultural Revolution, on 5 September 1976. Three days before Mao died on 9 September.
I saw with mine own eyes, experienced with mine own body and mind, the worst of socialism. I saw and well noticed what happened when the shift came to capitalism, to an economy run by the market, not by communist apparatchiks.
That's what made China rich -- to the extent that it is rich -- the market economy, not the Communist Party. China's economy succeeds to the exact extent that the Communist Party stays out of the way. It fails, gets weaker, to the exact extent that the Communist Party intervenes.
Net victims out of all those campaigns? Deaths from all those political movements, all that getting rid of people who don't agree with you: 32 million to 50 million.
Add these to the hundreds of millions killed by Lenin and Stalin, by Pol Pot, by Cuba, Venezuela, Zimbabwe and every tinpot socialist crackpot dictatorship in the history of the last century, and you've got such a pile-up of skeletons, such a mountain of maimed lives, all down to far Leftism.
Which the Democratic party in the US is moving toward. (vide: Zohran Mamdani, mayor-in-waiting of New York City, a self-declared, bizarrely proud of being... "Democratic Socialist").
Looking at the Left in the United States, it's hard not to compare them with what happened in China. Specially with the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. Those barely pubescent indoctrinees. Brainwashed in schools teaching the neo-version of a "nice" socialism, a neo-Marxism, a "democratic" socialism, no less!
How are the youth of today, in today's academy in the US, how are they different from those Red Guards, who brandished their Little Red Books, and persecuted those who thought differently, just as today's Green and Red Guards, brandish their keffiyehs and AK-47s?
Me? I'm not buying it. The lesson of China and its ructions of "movements" is too much, too clear, of a lesson. Instead of half-digetsted European Marxism, how about we steer the middle course? The Great Way, the 大学, the Da Xue. The "Way of the Mean". 中庸之道 Zhōngyōng zhī dào.
Now that's something China could teach us! The Middle Way, from the teachings of Confucius. For goodness sake let's not follow China's mangled marxism, recycled for the n-the time, in the half-formed minds of mini-Maos or student-Stalins.
I mean it! I Mean it! The Way of the Mean. We could learn from Confucius. The Middle Way!
中庸之道
ADDED: And... 1 October yesterday, at Miru Japanese atop St Regis Hotel, Chicago, also celebrating a birthday:
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| Lookin' good in Black & White Miru restaurant, Chicago |
