Xiu Xiu; The Sent Down Girl
The Snow; Mao Tse-Tung
All the scenery in the North
Is enclosed in a thousand li of ice,
And ten thousand li of whirling snow.
Behold both sides of the Great Wall.
There is only a vast confusion left.
On the upper and lower reaches of the Yellow River,
You can no longer see the flowing water.
The mountains are dancing silver serpents,
The hills on the plains are shining elephants.
I desire to compare our heights with the skies.
In clear weather,
The earth is so charming,
Like a red-faced girl clothed in white.
Such is the charm of these rivers and mountains,
Calling innumerable heroes to vie with each other in pursuing her.
The emperors Shig Huang and Wu Ti were barely cultured,
The emperors Tai Tsung and Tai Tsu were lacking in feeling,
Genghis Khan knew only how to bend his bow at the eagles.
These all belong to the past--- only today are there men of feeling!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetry_of_Mao_Zedong
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/poems/poems18.htm
I read this and cannot resolve the fact that I find this poem beautiful, but written by, according to some sources, the greatest mass murderer in the history of the world. A murderer with more deaths on his hands, than Hitler at somewhere around 14,000,000 persons ( not including any of the obvious deaths of Civilians and Soldiers during World War II ), more than Stalin put at somewhere around 20,000,000 persons. Mao, if credited is the correct word, may be responsible for as many as 40,000,000 to 70,000,000 deaths of his own country men. How can I or we comprehend these numbers???
‘According to Mao: The Unknown Story, "Mao Tse-tung, who for decades held absolute power over the lives of one-quarter of the world's population, was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth century leader" and claimed that he was willing for half of China to die to achieve military-nuclear superpowerdom.
Between 1967 and 1976, nearly 8 million Chinese youths were "sent down" for specialized training to the remotest corners of the country.
The relocation of millions of urban youth to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution is one of the major social events in modern Chinese history, and it has profoundly shaped the life experience and mental outlook of a whole generation. Many prominent personalities in China today are members of that generation; some of these people will lead the country in the next century. Yet, although personal recollections, memoirs, and literary writings about the lives of the "rusticated youth"—as they are sometimes referred to in English literature—are so abundant that "sent-down youth literature" constitutes its own rich genre in recent Chinese writing, no serious scholarly work on the subject has been undertaken by historians, in China or abroad.’
Xiu Xiu is the story of this one young woman, not millions, that type of number is too large for me to understand, but just one of these ‘sent down’ girls. In the mid 1970’s as part of Cultural Revolution, a young 15 year old woman, Xiu Xiu, leaves her family and her home, the city, by order of the Chairman, the main Mao, to a remote location in Tibet to be educated…as it turns out, as a Herdsman. She comes to live with and be apprenticed to the Horse Herder, Jao Lin. The settings on the Tibetan steppes are as wondrous and broad as her life is interminable. Here is her part, her life, and that of millions of others, unfolding or ordained as part of Mao Tse Tung’s Cultural Revolution. To write anything more will only lessen the film’s impact, but who is this human being who could write poetry like this and destroy millions of individuals? A human being, nothing yet contradictory?
‘…only today are there men of feeling.’
Good God, what does this part mean???
What does it mean that this statement was written by Mao???
If anything, the happy, smiling people, shown in these inspiring posters beneath Mao's benevolent gaze, should be replaced with the grimacing, rotted, tattered, desiccated corpses of Men, Women, and Children, his millions of victims, rising from their graves.
Here is a bit more about Madman Mao:
from: David Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter; America and the Korean War
Speaking first of Stalin:
‘…Leonid Leonov, a prominent Russian writer of the time, typically wrote of the great man that “ the day would come when all mankind would revere him and history would recognize him as the starting point of time, not Jesus Christ”.
Now for Mao:
‘…But Mao would soon rival him in the art of totalitarian self-glorification. He might at the beginning have had his doubts about the cult of personality, but he soon came to understand the greatest truth of self-glorification: like so many other dictators, he discovered that what was good for the leader was good for the revolution is well. Besides, as he emerged ever more clearly as China's sole leader, he came to see himself as nothing less than a modern Chinese emperor. His favorite among his imperial predecessors according to his doctor Li Zhisui, was Emperor Zhou, a mythical tyrant supposedly much despised by most Chinese because of his appalling cruelty, a man who liked to mutilate and then display the bodies of potential rivals as a warning to other enemies. About his own special role in history and about his own greatness Mao was absolutely sure. It was something he spoke of constantly. "He was the greatest leader, the greatest emperor of them all--- the man who had unified the country and would then transform it, the man who is restoring China to its original greatness," as Dr. Li wrote.
In some ways he would prove to be very much like Stalin. The more he schemed against those around him, the more he came to believe that they were already scheming against him. He gradually got rid of all potential rivals, no matter their loyalty to him, to the Party, or to the revolution. As a cult grew, as the ordinary peasants of China came to revere Mao ever more, he became ever more distanced from them in lifestyle. No head of a capitalist society could have lived with more privilege or with more of his country's resources diverted to him. Each province chief built a villa for him--- he was always on the move, fearing he would become too much of a target for his enemies if he stayed in one place too long. No head of state in a free society could have lived as a comparable sexual predator, relentlessly devouring young peasant women, who were eager to serve their leader and thus their nation in whatever way he suggested. "Women were served to order, like food," as Andrew Nathan a Columbia University scholar wrote in the introduction to Li Zhisui’s book. In time, his cult of personality grew to even more gothic proportions than Stalin’s. He swam in the Yangtze River as Laquer wrote, was treated as a turning point in history. "He was," Laquer wrote, "not only the greatest Marxist of all time, he was the greatest genius who have ever lived. He'd never been mistaken, everything he said was the truth, every sentence he uttered was worth 10,000 sentences of everyone else." One Chinese poem summed it all up: "Father is close/Mother is close/but neither is as close as Chairman Mao."
His days as a supplicant had been difficult for Mao, and he came to hate Stalin for the way the Soviet leader had treated him. Mao was not a man to take second-class treatment lightly, or to forgive or forget, though when he finally evened the score, it was with Stalin's successor Nikita Khrushchev. He once held a summit meeting with Khrushchev in a swimming pool, forcing the Soviet leader, who did not swim, to wear a life preserver during the session. It had been his way, he told his doctor, "of sticking a needle up his ass."
In December 1949, Mao finally made his trip to Moscow. Harrison Salisbury,, of the New York Times, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Moscow in those days, remembered the shroud of silence that Stalin had already placed in the preceding months over the news of Mao’s coming victory. There was virtually no mention of it in the controlled press; "a snippet on the back page of Pravda, or a few paragraphs inside Izvestia. The word ‘China’ hardly appeared." Now with Mao on his way to Moscow, there was more open evidence of cold Soviet shoulder. Stalin's 70th birthday was self-evidently a great moment of celebration in the Communist world and an occasion not to be shared with any other event or person. On December 6, Mao sent out by train for the Soviet capital. The war was barely over and he was fearful of attacks by nationalist dissidents. He traveled in an armored car, with sentries posted every hundred meters along the tracks. In Shenyang, the largest city in the northeast, Mao disembarked and checked to see if there were posters of him. There were very few, it turned out, and a great many of Stalin, the work of Gao Gang, whom Mao saw as a pro-Soviet dissident. Mao was furious and ordered that the car carrying gifts for Stalin from Gao be uncoupled from the train and the gifts returned to him.
Mao's arrival in Moscow on December 16 was an edgy one. He was treated not as the leader of a great revolution bringing into the Communist orbit one of the worlds greatest nations, but rather, as a historian Adam Ulam has written, "as if he were, say, the head of the Bulgarian party." V. M. Mototov and Nikolai Bulganin, both senior politburo members, came to the station to meet him. Mao had laid out a handsome luncheon buffet. He asked the two Soviet leaders have a drink with him. They refused---based on protocol, Molotov said. They also refused to sit and share the food. Then Mao asked them to accompany him to the residence where he was scheduled to stay. Again, they refused. There is no major celebration or festive party for him. It was as if Mao was now to learn his place in Stalin's constellation, the real Communist universe; if he was a fraternal brother, then he should know that there would always be one Communist brother who was so much bigger than all the others. One of Khrushchev's aides told his boss someone named ‘Matsadoon’ was in town. "Who?" The perplexed Khrushchev asked. "You know that Chinaman," the aid answered. That was how they saw him: that Chinaman. And that was how they treated him. The main reception for the Chinese delegation was not held in the main hall of the Kremlin but in the old Metropole Hotel, "the usual place for entertaining fisting minor capitalist dignitaries," in Ulam’s words.
Things did not get better after the first reception. For day on and Mao was isolated, waiting for Stalin to arrange meetings. No one else could meet with him until Stalin had, and Stalin was taking his time. When Mao first arrived in Moscow, he announced that China look forward to the partnership with Russia, but he emphasized as well that he wanted to be treated as an equal. Instead, he was being taught a lesson each day. He had become, in Ulam’s words, "as much captive as a guest," as such, he shouted at the walls, convinced that Stalin had bugged the house: "I'm here to do more than eat and shit." He hated Russian food. At one point Kovalev, his contact man, dropped by to visit him. Mao pointed outside at Moscow and said, "Bad, bad!" What did he mean by that? Kovalev asked. Mao was said he was angry at the Kremlin. Kovalev insisted he had no right to criticize "the Boss," and that he, Kovalev, would now have to make a report.
When Stalin finally met Mao, they proved to have a remarkable mutual instinct for misunderstanding….’
The tale of the perished:
Source List and Detailed Death Tolls for the Twentieth Century Hemoclysm
List of Recurring Sources
Alphabetical Index
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Elsewhere, I defined the Hemoclysm as that string of interconnected barbarities which have made the Twentieth Century so fascinating for historians and so miserable for real people. Here, I have listed the sources for determining the body count for the Big Four -- the First and Second World Wars, Communist China and the Soviet Union -- which together account for maybe ¾ of all deaths by atrocity in the 20th Century
Hitler:
- Courtois: 25,000,000
- Rummel: 20,946,000 democides
- Brzezinski: 17,000,000
- Urlanis: 15-16,000,000 (11-12M civilians + 3.9M POWs)
- MEDIAN: ca. 15.5M
- Our Times: 13,000,000 (6M Jews + 7M others)
- Compton's: 12,000,000
- Grenville: 10,000,000, including 2M children.
- NOTE: These numbers only include outright murders, but keep in mind that some 28M civilians and 14M soldiers died in the European War. That's 42,000,000 deaths which can probably be blamed on Hitler to one extent or another
Stalin's regime (1924-53): 20,000,000
People's Republic of China, Mao Zedong's regime (1949-1975): 40,000,000 [make link]
- Agence France Press (25 Sept. 1999) citing at length from Courtois, Stephane, Le Livre Noir du Communism:
- Rural purges, 1946-49: 2-5M deaths
- Urban purges, 1950-57: 1M
- Great Leap Forward: 20-43M
- Cultural Revolution: 2-7M
- Labor Camps: 20M
- Tibet: 0.6-1.2M
- TOTAL: 44.5 to 72M