Posted on 14th May, 2024 in Blog posts
Chinese resistance to the suppression of the truth
Anyone who visits China today and is interested in Chinese civilisation wants to know whether ‘it’ has survived the bludgeoning it has had since 1949. Can anything remain, after the extermination of 100 million people in, or as a result of, political campaigns? Does anybody dare to pass on the truth of what happened when the people of China were pulverised in attempts to rid them of all human feeling, all thought and all knowledge of the past? And, as if that weren’t enough, greedy developers and avaricious capitalists assaulted what remained of the cultural ecology and brought Wild West attitudes and behaviour to replace whatever vestiges of civility and morality had survived. But, as visitors with Chinese friends know, the westernisers have not crushed everybody. Ian Johnson’s book tells the stories of those who are keeping the truth alive, despite persecution of their parents and friends, more horrible than that inflicted by Nazism. He gives the context – the savage malignancy of Mao Zedong who revelled in the humiliation and torturing of others. His wretched ideology, adapted from the Lenin monster, was a vehicle for taking power. Other power seekers, and the gullible who – like the father of Wild Swans author Jung Chang – wanted so desperately to believe in a saviour that they excused his bloody vices, served him until kicked out of the way. But dont get me wrong, it is not the psychopathic personalities of Mao or Hitler that we should blame, but the ideas they moulded into a faith that put millions into their hands and millions into hell. The faith, the ideology, gave vile men the tool to take power.