Lenin, Mao

"The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is generally understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist."

John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (Macmillan, London, 1949), p. 383

Mao and his communists formed a strong alliance with Chiang Kai Shek and his nationalists to drive out the Japanese, and once that goal was accomplished, Mao's people turned on the nationalists and claimed the country for themselves.

In Russia, Lenin collaborated with groups, including democrats, to first overthrow the czar, then he stayed out of government, and worked furiously to get rid of the democrats to establish a communist dictatorship. Lenin experimented with, guess what, a constituent assembly, but did not like the results, and promptly dismissed it. Ensued a bloody civil war between the reds and the whites, the whites were loyal to the old order inspired by the now gone czar.

These two parallels have to be mentioned because the Nepali Maoists have never spoken one bad word about either Mao or Lenin, Stalin yes, but not these two Maoist gods. These parallels also have to be mentioned because the US paranoia about the Maoists are derived from these historical precedents. Many in the royalist camp also offer the same as the reason why the democrats must ally with the royalists or face oblivion at the behest of the Maoists.

What do I have to say about this?

I say, watch out. By the way, that is the advice I also give to my Sadbhavana comrades about the Congress and the UML. You might get a constituent assembly and still not get federalism, so watch out for them Congress and UML people.

So, yes, watch out for the Maoists. On the other hand, do we accuse physicists today of subscribing to theories that were in vogue before Einstein came along? I don't think we have the option to ignore the Maoists. They are the most transparent of the three forces. Where they stand, they make very clear. The Prachanda-Baburam rift from early in 2005 was like an open book, and all the details of how they parted and then patched up is online for the world to see. So when they say they have come around to accepting a multi-party framework after rigorous ideological debates amongst themselves, I think we have to take their word for it.

Prachanda Statement
To: Dr. Baburam Bhattarai
Baburam Bhattarai, Pramod Aryal, Ram Chandra Poudel

We can't carry the communist republic phantom in our minds, and then take every opportunity to reject the fact that the Maoists are for a democratic republic and not a communist republic.

But I go one step further. I say, let's not trust these Maoists. Let's have a roadmap that leaves little room for trust. That roadmap would be to dismantle both the armies totally under UN supervision before the country goes to a constituent assembly. So that their options to disobey the results of a constituent assembly, or to reignite a civil war at a later date, are near nil.

Dismantling the two armies might also be less complicated than trying to integrate the two armies. A poor country like Nepal needs to be spending on education and health and not on armies in the first place.

The 12 point agreement is the work of the seven party alliance and the Maoists. It is for the king to negotiate with that agreement in good faith, or face the wrath of a decisive movement.

He could offer a conditional constituent assembly: that could wean away the seven party alliance from the Maoists, or that might not, in which case the king should feel bad that he did not come out for a constituent assembly when the Congress and the RPP were still strongly behind the idea of a constitutional monarchy. Karma.

Lenin Internet Archive Arthur Ransome, 1919 .... Whatever else they may think of him, not even his enemies deny that Vladimir Ilyitch Oulianov (Lenin) is one of the greatest personalities of his time. ..... He was talking of the lack of thinkers in the English labour movement, and said he remembered hearing Shaw speak at some meeting....... He was entirely convinced that England was on the eve of revolution, and pooh-poohed my objections. ....... Talking of the lies that are told about Russia, he said it was interesting to notice that they were mostly perversions of truth and not pure inventions ...... "I was wishing a happy New Year to a friend over the telephone, and said 'And may we commit fewer stupidities this year than last!' ...... Lenin struck me as a happy man. Walking home from the Kremlin, I tried to think of any other man of his calibre who had had a similar joyous temperament. I could think of none. This little, bald-headed, wrinkled man, who tilts his chair this way and that, laughing over one thing or another, ready any minute to give serious advice to any who interrupt him to ask for it, advice so well reasoned that it is to his followers far more compelling than any command, every one of his wrinkles is a wrinkle of laughter, not of worry. I think the reason must be that he is the first great leader who utterly discounts the value of his own personality. He is quite without personal ambition. More than that, he believes, as a Marxist, in the movement of the masses which, with or without him, would still move. His whole faith is in the elemental forces that move people, his faith in himself is merely his belief that he justly estimates the direction of those forces.......... With his philosophy he cannot for a moment believe that one man's mistake might ruin all. He is, for himself at any rate, the exponent, not the cause, of the events that will be for ever linked with his name........ But the quickest way of restoring good conditions in Russia was, of course, peace and agreement with the Allies...... Lenin. "Tell them to build a Chinese wall round each of their countries. They have their customs-officers, their frontiers, their coast-guards. They can expel any Bolsheviks they wish. Revolution does not depend on propaganda. If the conditions of revolution are not there no sort of propaganda will either hasten or impede it......... Your socialist movements, your socialist parties . . . when I was in England I zealously attended everything I could, and for a country with so large an industrial population they were pitiable, pitiable . . . a handful at a street corner . . . a meeting in a drawing room . . . a school class . . . pitiable. ......... the way in which insensibly, quite apart from war, the Communist theories are being modified in the difficult process of their translation into practice ....... the wild committee business that at first made work almost impossible ..... the antipathy of the peasants to compulsory communism ....... the elasticity of the Communist theories tested by the inevitable pressure of the peasantry...... Civil war, whatever happens, is likely to be more bitter in the Ukraine than elsewhere, because there the instinct of property has been further developed in the peasantry ........ Leon Trotsky ......... His life, however, was chiefly filled by the study of Marxism and its application to the economic and political development of Russia and subsequently of the whole world........ In 1898 he married N. K. Krupskaya, a comrade in the St. Petersburg Union and his faithful companion for the remaining 26 years of his life....... his most important economic work, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, based on an enormous mass of statistical material (1899)....... the paper Iskra (The Spark) appeared in Munich, with the motto “From Spark to Flame.” ...... to form a centralized “underground” revolutionary party of Social Democrats ...... the shooting of the workers on Jan. 9 (22) in 1905, by agrarian disturbances and political strikes. ...... but to retain their illegal apparatus in anticipation of counter-revolutionary blows. ....... the use of force by the people against those who had employed it against them. ...... The rising in Moscow at the end of Dec., lacking as it did the support of the army, without simultaneous risings in other town and sufficient response in the country districts, was quickly suppressed.......... revolutionary exploitation of parliamentary methods as a means of fresh attack...... Lenin’s constant revolutionary struggle went hand in hand with his theoretical controversies. ....... a legal newspaper, Pravda , which in its constant conflict with the censorship and the police exercised a guiding influence on the vanguard of the working class...... Lenin sent articles under different pseudonyms almost every day to the Bolshevik legal newspapers...... Lenin subjects to a merciless criticism not only Socialist patriotism, but that pacifism which, while occupied with platonic protests, withdraws from the revolutionary struggle with Imperialism........ all Lenin’s work was characterized by a twofold struggle, on the one hand with reformism which from the beginning of the War gave its support to the imperialist policy of the propertied classes, and on the other hand with anarchism and all the different varieties of revolutionary adventurists......... In Sept. 1915 (Sept. 5 and 8) there was held at Zimmerwald in Switzerland the first conference of European Socialists who were opposed to the imperialistic war. Thirty-one delegates were present.......... Lenin was prepared for his struggle on an international scale not only by his profound knowledge of Marxism and his experience of the revolutionary party organization in Russia, but also by his intimate acquaintance with the workers’ movement throughout the world. He was master of the English, German and French languages, and could read Italian, Swedish and Polish. He was firmly opposed to the mechanical application of the methods of one country to another, and he investigated and decided questions concerning revolutionary movements, not only in their international reactions, but also in their concrete national form........ The overthrow of Tsarism, he said, was only the first stage in the revolution. The bourgeois revolution could no longer satisfy the masses. The task of the proletariat was to arm, to strengthen the power of the Soviets, to rouse the country districts and to prepare for the conquest of supreme power in the name of the reconstruction of society on a Socialist basis....... Plekhanov called Lenin’s programme “crazy.” ..... The small daily Pravda became at once in his hands a powerful instrument for the overthrow of bourgeois society. ....... The popular movement was crushed. The hounding of Lenin reached its height. He now began to work “underground,” hiding first in Petrograd with a worker’s family and then in Finland....... The constituent assembly which was elected in Nov. and met on Jan. 5 was an anachronism. The conflict between the two stages of the revolution was at hand. Lenin did not hesitate for an instant. On the night of Jan. 7 the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, on Lenin’s motion, passed a decree dissolving the constituent assembly.......... By the end of the summer of 1918 Central Russia found itself surrounded by a ring of fire.....On Aug. 30 the Social-Revolutionary Kaplan aimed two shots at Lenin when on his way to a workers’ meeting. This attack intensified the civil war....... The struggle ended at the beginning of 1921 ...... His doctrine was that the Western European proletariat should refrain from mere declarations of sympathy with oppressed nationalities, and instead should join them in the struggle against imperialism....... At the eighth congress of Soviets (1920) Lenin made a report on the work carried out on his initiative for the drafting of a plan for the electrification of the country. ..... “Socialism is a Soviet Govt. plus electrification.” ..... The exhaustion brought on by excessive hard work over a number of years ruined Lenin’s health. .... His way of life in the Kremlin was little different from his life as an emigré abroad. The simplicity of his daily habits was due to the fact that intellectual work and intense struggle not only absorbed his interests and passions but also gave him intense satisfaction. His thoughts never ceased to labour at the task of freeing the workers.
Vladimir Lenin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Leninism, which he described as an adaptation of Marxism to "the age of imperialism." ....... Lenin was of mixed ethnic ancestry. .... In July 1898, he married Nadezhda Krupskaya, who was a socialist activist. .....founded the newspaper Iskra...... When Inessa Armand left Russia and settled in Paris, she met Vladimir Lenin and other Bolsheviks living in exile, and is believed to have become Lenin's partner during this time....... When the First World War began in 1914, and the large Social Democratic parties of Europe (at that time self-described as Marxist), comprising luminaries such as Karl Kautsky, supported their various countries' war efforts, Lenin was shocked ...... After the 1917 February Revolution in Russia and the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II, Lenin knew he needed to get back to Russia as soon as possible. ....... On April 16, 1917, he returned to Petrograd and took a leading role within the Bolshevik movement, publishing the April Theses [5]. The April theses called for an uncompromising opposition to the provisional government. Initially by this lurch to the left Lenin isolated his party. However, this uncompromising stand meant that the Bolsheviks were to become the obvious home for the masses as they became disillusioned with the provisional government, and with the luxury of opposition the Bolsheviks were freed of the responsibility for any consequences from the implementation of their policies (Christopher Read: From Tsar to Soviets pp151-3)........ After a failed workers' rising in July, Lenin fled to Finland for safety. He returned in October, inspiring an armed revolution with the slogan "All Power to the Soviets!", against the Provisional Government..... On November 8, Lenin was elected as the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars by the Russian Soviet Congress. ..... On March 3, 1918, Lenin removed Russia from World War I by agreeing to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Under this treaty, Russia lost Ukraine, Finland, the Baltic states, and large areas to Poland. ..... After the Bolsheviks lost the elections for the Russian Constituent Assembly, Lenin became skeptical and used his military guards to close the first session of the Assembly on January 19th. Later, the Bolsheviks organized a counter-Assembly, the third Congress of Soviets, allowing themselves and their allies over 90% of the seats. [8]. They formed a coalition government with the left wing of the Socialist Revolutionaries. However, their coalition collapsed after the Social Revolutionaries opposed the Brest-Litovsk treaty, and they joined other parties in seeking to overthrow the government of the soviets. The situation degenerated, with non-Bolshevik parties (including some of the socialist groups) actively seeking the overthrow of the Soviet government. Lenin responded to these conspiracies by shutting down their activities and jailing or shooting some of the members of the opposing parties....... Leon Trotsky argued that a direct correlation cannot be made between Lenin and Stalin because this perspective ignores many external factors, such as the turmoil of revolution and civil war during Lenin's leadership. Also, a "river of blood" separated Lenin from Stalin's actions. For instance, Stalin eventually executed many of Lenin's old comrades and their supporters, grouped in the Left Opposition, including Trotsky himself...... Meanwhile, the civil war raged across Russia. A wide variety of political movements and their supporters took up arms to support or overthrow the Soviet government. Although many different factions were involved in the civil war, the two main forces were the Red Army (communists) and the White Army (Tsarist). Foreign powers such as France, Britain, the United States and Japan also intervened in this war (on behalf of the White Army)....... Lenin's brain was removed before his body was embalmed. The Soviet government commissioned the well-known German neuroscientist Oskar Vogt to study Lenin's brain and to locate the precise location of the brain cells that are responsible for genius.
TIME 100: VI Lenin Not long after the Bolsheviks had seized power in 1917, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin filled out a bureaucratic questionnaire. For occupation, he wrote "man of letters." ....... the author of mass terror and the first concentration camps ever built on the European Continent. ..... Lenin was the initiator of the central drama — the tragedy — of our era, the rise of totalitarian states. A bookish man with a scholar's habits and a general's tactical instincts, Lenin introduced to the 20th century the practice of taking an all-embracing ideology and imposing it on an entire society rapidly and mercilessly; he created a regime that erased politics, erased historical memory, erased opposition. In his short career in power, from 1917 until his death in 1924, Lenin created a model not merely for his successor, Stalin, but for Mao, for Hitler, for Pol Pot....... after completing a three-year term of Siberian exile, he began his rise as the leading communist theorist, tactician and party organizer...... In his personal relations with colleagues, family and friends, Lenin was relatively open and generous. Unlike many tyrants, he did not crave a tyrant's riches. ....... a peculiarly modest figure who wore a shabby waistcoat, worked 16-hour days and read extensively. (By contrast, Stalin did not know that the Netherlands and Holland were the same country, and no one in the Kremlin inner circle was brave enough to set him straight.) ....... Before he became the general of the revolution, Lenin was its pedant, the journalist-scholar who married Marxist theory to an incisive analysis of insurrectionist tactics. His theories of what society ought to be and how that ideal must be achieved were the products of thousands of hours spent reading...... all-consuming intellectuality — the fact that from his calculations, from his neat pen, flowed seas of blood, whereas by nature this was not an evil person ....... a rather kind person whose cruelty was stipulated by science and incontrovertible historical laws. ...... Lenin made a perverse reading of the Enlightenment view of man as modeling clay and sought to create a new model of human nature and behavior through social engineering of the most radical kind. ....... Bolshevism was the most audacious attempt in history to subject the entire life of a country to a master plan ....... a unique effort to apply science to human affairs ...... Stalin's murderous statistics are superior to Lenin's. And yet Lenin contributed so very much. ....... Very few of Stalin's policies were without roots in Leninism: it was Lenin who built the first camps; Lenin who set off artificial famine as a political weapon; Lenin who disbanded the last vestige of democratic government, the Constituent Assembly, and devised the Communist Party as the apex of a totalitarian structure; Lenin who first waged war on the intelligentsia and on religious believers, wiping out any traces of civil liberty and a free press. ...... By the Brezhnev era, Lenin's dream state had devolved into a corrupt and failing dictatorship. Only the Lenin cult persisted. ...... the publication of Vassily Grossman's Forever Flowing, a novel that dared compare Lenin's cruelty to Hitler's. ....... Gorbachev admitted, "I can only say that cruelty was the main problem with Lenin." .....
Vladimir I. Lenin

Mao Zedong - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
TIME 100: Mao Zedong especially after 1955, when he was in his early 60s and at the height of his political power as leader of the Chinese People's Republic, swimming became a central part of his life...... He swam so often in the large pool constructed for the top party leaders in their closely guarded compound that the others eventually left him as the pool's sole user. He swam in the often stormy ocean off the north China coast, when the Communist Party leadership gathered there for its annual conferences. And, despite the pleadings of his security guards and his physician, he swam in the heavily polluted rivers of south China, drifting miles downstream with the current, head back, stomach in the air, hands and legs barely moving, unfazed by the globs of human waste gliding gently past. "Maybe you're afraid of sinking," he would chide his companions if they began to panic in the water. "Don't think about it. If you don't think about it, you won't sink. If you do, you will." .............. Mao was equally unsinkable in the turmoil — much of which he personally instigated — that marked the last 20 years of his rule in China....... Mao's earliest surviving essay, written when he was 19 ...... In Mao's mind, the intensive marshaling of China's energies would draw manual and mental labor together into a final harmonious synthesis and throw a bridge across the chasm of China's poverty to the promised socialist paradise on the other side....... the curious mixture of jocularity and cruelty, of utopian visions and blinkered perceptions, that lay at the heart of his character ..... but firmly rebutted figures — quoted in Hong Kong newspapers — that 20 million had perished. "How could we possibly kill 20 million people?" he asked. ....... Mao combined the ruthlessness of Shang Yang with the absolute confidence of the long-distance swimmer........ drew his sustenance from the chanting crowds of Red Guards....... Leaders Mao trained, like Deng Xiaoping, were able to reverse Mao's policies even as they claimed to revere them. They gave back to the Chinese people the opportunities to express their entrepreneurial skills, leading to astonishing rates of growth and a complete transformation of the face of Chinese cities......... Despite the agony he caused, Mao was both a visionary and a realist.
A Biography of Mao Tse-Tung Mao Tse-tung may be the most powerful person who has ever lived. He controlled almost a billion people for more than twenty five years. He controlled more than 9 million square kilometres of land. He controlled a country whose present value is more than $980 billion American. He overthrew an army of more than 4 million to get it, and killed many more to keep it...... he began to study at a Hunan Provincial library on his own ....... advancing his personal health and fitness which would serve him well in the future. ....... became a poorly paid assistant in the university library. ....... In 1921 he was one of 12 delegates at the ‘First Congress’ of the Communist Party at a time when national membership of the party totalled 57 ........ By 1925 the membership was still only 900 ........ Mao preferred political activity among the peasants with the KMT to the worker-orientated CCP. ........ Shanghai was the main communist city in China and it was ‘hit’ first ...... Over the next few months CCP membership dropped from 60 000 to 10 000...... He would work through villages one by one, finding the landlords, gathering together the peasants to discuss the ‘crimes’ of the landlord, and then having the landlord executed at the hands of the peasants - with the supervision of armed Red Army guards. The offer of political stability, moderate taxes and the distribution of the landlord’s land were naturally very attractive rewards, and by February 1930 Mao was able to declare the ‘South-West Soviet Provincial Government’. ....... 1928 to 1937 has come to be regarded the ‘Nationalist decade’. ....... Mao was soon powerful enough to defy such orders from the CCP leadership. ....... the ‘Long March’, a legendary epic of retreat from the harassment of KMT forces ....... The marchers saw 11 provinces, 6000 miles and 200 million people ....... Chiang Kai-Shek was arrested by a young KMT army general who had read of Mao’s attempts to unite the warring parties to defeat the Japanese and was frustrated with Chiang turning a blind eye to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and north eastern China. Mao surprised everyone by sending Chou En-lai, one of his long time friends and right-hand man, to plead for Chiang’s life, to prove to everyone defeating the Japanese was to be given absolute priority. ........ chronic bribery and corruption within the KMT meant the general population sympathised with Mao. ....... There were attempts at negotiation between Mao and Chiang but they produced nothing and full-scale civil war began in 1946...... Aged 56, Mao now was Chairman of the most powerful political party to have existed to date...... the central theme of the intense ideological work carried out amongst the people was the exaltation of Mao himself. ..... In the first years of the Communist regime, conservative estimates of the number killed for voicing their opinions of the Communist party stand at around 3 million; hostile estimates are much higher. Dissenters were taken prisoner, executed or told ‘You are sick, comrade’, and subjugated to formidable brainwashing procedures. .......... Mao ordered, ‘the greatest reform in history’ (in terms of people involved) ....... ‘Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom, Let All the Schools of Thought Contend’ ...... A huge torrent of criticism flowed out; attacks on the most basic philosophies including many along the line of ‘the old ruling class has been overthrown to make way for a new one’, and complaints that the party officials were acting like plain clothes police meant Mao terminated the idea in just 6 weeks, arresting all the dissenters and either brainwashing them, sending them to work in the fields or having them otherwise silenced. ........ China responded by attempting to form a third world superpower by aligning other communist Asian nations, but this was largely a failure. ....... Mao wanted to do in a decade what Russia had done in four. ....... For the first time since 1935, Mao was demoted from the top job, replaced by Liu Shao-chi...... Mao’s successor, Liu Shao-chi, suddenly admitted to many ‘crimes’ against Marxist-Leninist-Maoism, and was subsequently ridiculed and made a symbol of hate for the Red Guards. Mao was reinstated as leader and his greatest ally, the Army, made up half of the party leadership elected at the Ninth Congress....... unified China and oversaw the greatest social reform in man’s history .... a military tactician. His adaptation of guerilla techniques from the writings of ancient military experts ........ many Chinese people still worship Mao as a demi-god, and the saviour of their people. And, indeed, living standards in China have risen substantially in the past 50 years ...... today China is making serious efforts to improve human rights, the most recent of which is the promise to sign the Human Rights Declaration of the United Nations. ...... while there are no beggars on the street, the vast majority of the population still live in relative poverty and spend most of theirs days tilling fields or doing menial work in factories, the main enjoyment of comfort by Western standards being restricted to Party officials and some factory owners. ......... China only tried to align itself with other poorer, peasant-based nations fit for socialist reforms..... Mao will be remembered as a socialist, a poet, a military strategist and ruthless ruler. He has earned his place among the most powerful rulers of the world......
Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, ToC
Reference Archive: Mao Zedong At age 27, Mao attended the First Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai, in July 1921. Two years later he was elected to the Central Committee of the party at the Third Congress...... From 1931 to 1934, Mao helped established the Chinese Soviet Republic in SE China, and was elected as the chairman...... Starting in October 1934, "The Long March" began ..... In 1937, Japan opened a full war of aggression against China, which gave the Chinese Communist Party cause to unite with the nationalist forces of the Kuomintang. After defeating the Japanese, in an ensuing civil war the Communists defeated the Kuomintang, and established the People’s Republic of China, in October 1949....... In August 1966, Mao wrote a big poster entitled "Bombard the Headquarters." ........ Chiang Kai-shek’s 8 million-man armed force is also a thing which can be eliminated piece by piece...... I don’t oppose military academies. They can remain open, but the school term should not be too long. It would be too long if it lasted two or three years. A few months would suffice. ...... One month is enough to train artillery troops...... The sentence I’ll fight my way may be divided into two more sentences: if I can win, I will fight; if I cannot win, I will run away. Imperialists are most afraid of this method. If I can win, I will eat you up; if I cannot win, I will run away, making it impossible for you to find me.......... We were a minority, so how could we eat them? We did it piecemeal. The result is that we swallowed them...... One should spend most of one’s time in his own country. Perhaps, there is no need to go abroad ......... ......... In 1960 you told me that 90 per cent of the people supported the government and only 10 per cent opposed it.... The Dalai Lama himself had told Mao he didn’t believe he was a living god although if one said that openly the Dalai would have to deny it...... the Chinese did not have only one god, but many. There were gods for everything, door gods, kitchen gods, rain gods, mountain gods, mercy gods, and so on....... he had never been to Tibet ..... Victory or defeat was not determined by weapons at hand at the outset. What was really decisive was the will to victory and right aims........ ‘People then were thinking mainly of liberating China from Japan. Certainly I did not then foresee the full significance of revolutionary China’s rise in the world.’ ....... By 1947 the People’s Liberation Army already had more than a million men, against several million troops on Chiang Kai-shek’s side......... But if I should tell United States leaders that they were building up a revolutionary movement which would defeat them, they would not listen. They would not let the Vietnamese decide their own affairs....... now already the Vietcong had the American intervention to help arm and educate the rank and file and the army officers....... what the French like to call the “Third World” ....... Mao Tse-tung said that he had not reached an opinion about that. Perhaps I could help him? He recalled that President Kennedy had also been interested in that question. Had he not declared that as far as the United States, Canada, and Western Europe were concerned there was not much real and basic difference? .......... ‘Perhaps it could be said that France is in the Third World but not of it?’ ........ This question which had engaged the interest of President Kennedy had led him (Mao said he had read) to study Mao’s own essays on military operations. He had also learned from Algerian friends during their struggle against France that the French were reading his works and using his information against them......... Chiang Kai-shek had also studied the Communists’ materials but he had not been saved either........ They ignored the decisive political fact that whether it was Diem or some other puppets, no government cut off from the masses could win against wars of liberation........ but in most countries I was talking about the people were merely seeking national independence, not socialism — quite another matter. European countries had also had anti-feudal revolutions, but the United States had had no real feudal period........ When the United States first established a republic it was hated and dreaded by all the crowned heads of Europe. That showed that the Americans were then revolutionaries. Now the American people needed to struggle for liberation from their own monopoly capitalists. What part of the United States did I come from? ........... Most of the countries concerned were still very far from socialist revolutions. In some there were no Communist parties at all while in others there were only revisionists. It was said that Latin America had about twenty Communist parties; of those eighteen had issued resolutions against China. He paused and ended by saying that only one thing was certain. Wherever severe oppression existed there would be revolution......... He replied that Mr. Khrushchev had not been very popular in China even before his fall. Few portraits of him were to be seen. ...... China would miss him as a negative example......... the disappearance of Khrushchev had deprived them of a good target for polemical articles.......... Probably Mr. Khrushchev fell because he had had no cult of personality at all. . ....... He added (thinking of his American critics, perhaps) that he had never read any American Marxist theorists. Were there any good ones? ........ Of course the bomb could kill people. But in the end the people would destroy the bomb. Then it would truly become a paper tiger........ so that he was more backward than they, was not that so?’ [Mao was ridiculing, by implication, those who supposed him to be an ignorant peasant unaware of the full meaning of nuclear terror.] ...... For the bacteria, the birds, the mice, and the trees, the atom bomb really was a paper tiger......... The deeper implication of Mao’s last remark was that even if man disappeared from the earth — committed mass suicide — life could not be extinguished by man’s bomb......... All the governments were talking about complete and total disarmament. China herself had proposed disarmament since a long time past. So had the Soviet Union. The U.S.A. kept talking about it. What we were getting instead was complete and thorough rearmament........... China’s proposal to hold a summit conference to consider the total destruction of nuclear weapons........ Mao feared that his reputation was not good; the imperialists just did not like him. ......When the assassination of President Kennedy occurred the Chinese (Communists) were quite surprised. They had not planned that. Once more, they were quite surprised when Khrushchev was removed in Russia. They had not ordered that........ . China was a large country with plenty of work to keep her busy outside the U.N. ...... Ganefo — Games of the New Emerging Forces — organized after the United States excluded China from the Olympics....... China then regarded the Afro-Asian organization as the potential centre of planned development of a Third World largely independent of neo-colonial or Western capital. Following Chinese principles of ‘self-reliance’ in internal development, and of mutual help between the Afro-Asian states, the process of modernization might by-pass the slow and painful methods of capital accumulation by traditional bourgeois means. Such a theoretical alternative of course would have implied more rapid and radical political evolution and an earlier arrival at pre-socialist conditions in the capital-poor Afro-Asian states............ The Chairman replied that he really did not know. Some said that there were 680 to 690 millions but he did not believe it. How could there be so many? ........ As usual the American rulers would not listen. ....... ‘I have heard some people in Washington argue that the fleet and the marines might as well be in Vietnam as anywhere else. They have to be paid anyway.’ ........ In the end, they must all go home. In the past China had seen American troops in Tientsin, Tsingtao, Shanghai, even Peking. They had all left. In fact they had left very rapidly. ....... Chiang Kai-shek, a man who was always losing battles ....... Mao asked what kind of internal problems Mr. Johnson faced. ...... Now only about eight per cent of the total U.S. population was needed to produce more food than the country could consume...... Mao asked me to repeat the figure. When I did so he shook his head sceptically. How could that be? was all he said....... Mao said that forces of history were also bound, eventually, to bring the two peoples together again; that day would surely come. Possibly I was right that meanwhile war could be avoided........ there would be no war because if they did not send troops to China the Chinese certainly would never send troops to attack the United States....... Chinese were very busy with their internal affairs. Fighting beyond one’s own borders was criminal. Why should the Chinese do so? ........ China was overrun but only by Chinese. ...... China had no troops outside her own frontiers. ..... China supported revolutionary movements, but not by invading countries. Of course, whenever a liberation struggle existed China would publish statements and call demonstrations to support it. It was precisely that which vexed the imperialists.........how was it that shooting off empty guns at home could be called aggression while those who actually intervened with arms and bombed and burned people of other lands were not considered aggressors? ....... Some Americans had once said that the Chinese revolution was led by Russian aggressors but in truth the Chinese revolution was armed by Americans. In the same way the Vietnamese revolution was also being armed by Americans, not by China. The liberation forces had not only greatly improved their supplies of American weapons during recent months but had also expanded their forces by recruiting American-trained troops and officers from the puppet armies of South Vietnam. China’s liberation forces had grown in numbers and strength by recruiting to their side the troops trained and armed by the Americans for Chiang Kai-shek. The movement was called the ‘changing of hats’......... Sino-American relations ..... Maybe there would be no improvement in his generation (lifetime). He was soon going to see God....... No, he did not, but some people who claimed to be well informed said that there was a God. There seemed to be many gods and sometimes the same god could take all sides. In the wars of Europe the Christian God had been on the side of the British, the French, the Germans, and so on, even when they were fighting each other. At the time of the Suez Canal crisis God was united behind the British and the French but then there was Allah to back up the other side..........
Mao had mentioned that both his brothers had been killed. His first wife had also been executed during the revolution (1930) and their son had been killed during the Korean war. ....... it was odd that death had so far passed him by ....... His personal bodyguard was killed while standing right beside him. Once he was splashed all over with the blood of another soldier but the bomb had not touched him. ....... There had been other narrow escapes. ....... he had begun life as a primary school teacher ........ events did not move in accordance with the individual will. What mattered was that China had been oppressed by imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucratic capitalism. Such were the facts. . . ..... to hear about history and to read books was not the same thing as living it....... a continued development of the revolution towards communism.......... future events would be decided by future generations, and in accordance with conditions we could not foresee....... The youth of today and those to come after them would assess the work of the revolution in accordance with values of their own....... Man’s condition on this earth was changing with ever increasing rapidity. A thousand years from now all of us, he said, even Marx, Engels, and Lenin would probably appear rather ridiculous........ Before I rose to leave the Chairman sent his greetings to the American people and said simply that he wished them progress...... to those among them who were not really liberated, and desired liberation, to them he wished his best.......... Mao Tse-tung walked me through the doorway and, despite my protests, saw me to my car, where he stood alone for a moment, coatless in the sub-zero Peking night, to wave me farewell in the traditional manner of that ancient cultured city. I saw no security guards around the entrance nor can I now recall having seen even one armed body guard in our vicinity all evening......... ..... You are putting up a good fight! Under exceptionally difficult conditions, you have, by relying on your own strength, battered U.S. imperialism, the most ferocious imperialism in the world, so that its forces are in disorder and it has no way out. This is a great victory. The Chinese people salute you.......... a nation, big or small, can defeat any enemy, however powerful provided only that it fully mobilizes its people, relies firmly on the people, and wages a people’s war ......... Perseverance means victory........ ...... Well, so long as he doesn't kill people, we should not dismiss him, nor should we send him away for labour reform. Let him stay in school and continue to study. You people should hold a meeting and ask him to explain in what way Chiang Kai-shek is good and what good things he has done. On our part, you may tell why Chiang Kai-shek is not good......... Teachers should lecture less and make the students read more. I believe the student you referred to will be very capable in the future since he had the courage to be absent from the Saturday meeting and not to return to school on time on Sunday. When you return to school, you may tell him that it is too early to return to school even at eight or nine in the evening, he may delay it until eleven or twelve. Whose fault is it that you should hold a meeting Sunday night? ....... When you return to school, you should take the lead to rebel....... Don't care about the system. Just don't return to school. Just say you want to violate the school system........ I don't think you will be very capable in the future. You are afraid of being accused of violating the school system, of criticism, of a bad record, of being expelled from school, of failing to get party membership. Why should you be afraid of so many things? The worst that can come to you is expulsion from school. The school should allow the students to rebel.......... I think the student you mentioned will be more capable than you for he dared to violate the school system....... How can you do translations or handle foreign affairs if you do not study the Holy Bible and Buddhist sutras? ..........