Iraq II, Come to think of it (was...China's wealthy)

James A. Donald jamesd at echeque.com
Sun Nov 14 08:39:25 PST 2004


    --
James A. Donald:
> > Qin had a cult of personality, in which every single person 
> > subject to his control had to participate.   A subject of 
> > Qin, like a subject of Mao,  was more aware of Qin, than he 
> > was of his mother and father.

Tyler Durden:
> You are apparently simply unaware of the real size and 
> terrain of China. There were villages in remote parts of 
> China that were unaware of Mao's death into the early 1980s.

Bullshit.  Everyone knew that which the regime decided they
must know.  And if true, which I very much doubt, you are not
only arguing that Qin's legalism was a different thing than
communism/nazism, you are also arguing that Mao's communism was
a different thing than Stalin's communism.

It was a lot harder to get to Afghanistan from Moscow than to 
get to any place in China from Peking, yet every Afghan child 
knew in painfully excessive detail what Moscow commanded them 
to know, and the regime was partially successful in preventing 
them from knowing what it wished them to not know.

When, during the great leap forward, Peking commanded 
unreasonable grain requisitions from the provinces, *all* 
provinces contributed, and *all* provinces suffered starvation.

It is often said that Mao's famine was an unfortunate accident, 
while Stalin's famines were intentional, but any differences 
are merely a matter of greater self deception.  Both did the 
same things for the same reasons, but Stalin justified his 
actions by anti peasant rhetoric - "liquidation of the kulaks", 
whereas Mao justified his action by pro peasant rhetoric, but 
this is a mere difference in the emphasis in the 
rationalizations and propaganda, not any difference in means 
and ends.

Both used ruthless terror to establish extraordinary control 
over a far flung empire that had formerly been ruled by 
relatively light hand, and then used that extraordinary control 
to extort extraordinary resources from the peasantry.  The 
difference between Stalin's frequent references to the poor 
peasants (who were supposedly carrying out the liquidation of 
the kulaks in revolutionary zeal) and Mao's similar references 
is merely that Mao was more thorough in creating the simulation 
of a mass movement. 

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         James A. Donald
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