From: David McInerney, Australian National University
Responding to Brad DeLong (May 3):
The point is though, surely, that there is a significant difference between a state and/or party structured to systematically destroy a community and another that, due to certain features of its structure, produced the effect of depriving large areas and large numbers of the rural population of sustenance (i.e., what happened in the GLF). The Cultural Revolution was an attempt to overcome certain structural problems of the Chinese party and state, which depended upon the formation of parallel organizations supposedly under the direction of Mao himself, turned against the party. There is nothing that suggests that he exercised the control over those organizations in the sense that the SS (for example) formed a organization within the Nazi state against the armed forces and bureaucracy, instead the "control" seemed to exist in a highly-charged ideological situation in which Mao was able to influence these groups through certain gestures or remarks, and that his opponents did not have sufficient symbolic power to oppose him (or to appropriate his symbolic power) while he was alive, and the Gang of Four was able to do so, given Madame Mao's position.
The point is that the old "totalitarian" psychologistic explanation just
doesn't cut it, except with those who want easy answers. A concrete analysis of the political institutions and their articulations with the ideological and economic levels is necessary to make any sense of these very different situations. Although the GLF and CR were disastrous on the whole, they were not the result of a logic of genocide. The KKK and Nazis are genocidal, racist organizations. The CPC is not, and has never been, despite the effects of its administration upon the population. The charges of "cultural genocide" that one often hears with regard to the Tibetan case could also be said with regard to the Han population, if the undermining of practices of footbinding and Manchu pigtails could be considered the destruction of a culture. The campaign against the "Four Olds" and the Cultural Revolution would then be genocidal in intent. I'm not convinced that such a definition of genocide really helps.
From: Jeff Sommers, Northeastern University
Brad is right, this is more or less a "fact" on numbers in a sense. His
Burroughs adding machine is in good working order. Yet, there is room for discussion on whether this is the last word on the subject.
For example, the University of Wisconsin's Maurice Meisner, who many consider to be the dean of post WW II Chinese scholarship, presents three related ways of looking at the 20-30 million deaths caused by the Great Famine begun in the late 1950s under Mao's tenure in his THE DING XIAPING ERA AND INQUIRY INTO THE FATE OF CHINESE SOCIALISM 1978-1994 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996). One, it was a horrible miscalculation. Two, it was the end of famines on this scale (literally, that had been occurring for the last few centuries off and on in China about every generation or so). In other words, it brought this horrible historical pattern to an end. Or, three, it was both. Both a horrible miscalculation, while also afterwards bringing this pattern of famine every generation of so to an end, thus, perhaps, saving millions.
One could, for example, and I think many won't like this, see the US war on Vietnam as a more direct attack on people with intent to kill, than Mao's failed policies and the famine it produced.... Of course, I understand your position is that it was intended to prevent more Maos and Stalins. A position I don't buy as primarily causal in the creation of those policies, for the same policy direction was taken against a stridently democratic experiment such as Allende's Chile, or because of the very democratic character of that phenomenon, perhaps more accurately labeled Chile's Allende.
Stalin is more complicated. Let's just say that his main target was the
democratic left, who he labeled the right (Here, I'm referring to the 800,000 people actually shot under his 25 year rule, rather than the millions killed through misguided policies). Made all the more complicated the real siege conditions under which the Soviet experiment existed. For anyone looking to escape ideological histrionics on the subject (of which I argue most of the scholarship is and will be for some time due to the politically charged nature of the subject), the University of Michigan's, formerly of the University of Chicago, Ronald Grigor Sunny handles this complex topic of a horrible period in his text THE SOVIET EXPERIMENT (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1988).
Brad wrote: "these count as among the greatest human disasters of this century..."
Again, Brad, I agree, yet at the same time, decontextualized from the struggles of domination and freedom in the 19th and 20th century along with ultimate multi-causality for these events, along with unintended consequences of actions taken to prevent them, none of it will make much sense, nor will we make any progress to prevent such future events. I'm all for simplicity. I dislike complexity for complexity sake (often the motor of the academy), so the complexity of these problems, believe me, brings me no joy.
At any rate, I think David McInerney's point is well taken. Intent does matter (and no doubt Stalin intended death for many), as do the historically specific conditions and place in the global system which created these people and events.
With all due respect to you Brad, an Economist, I think this is the greatest failing of Economics currently. You can't just break out the Burroughs adding machine to explain society, nor economy. I grant it's helpful, but is not the last word, and would argue further that reliance on mechanistic formulations are what have led Economists, and ideologues generally, to having so badly faltered in predicting and seeing the causes of recent historical phenomena, such as the Asian economic crisis. Some exceptions exist, such as with your acquaintance P. Krugman, who has completely reoriented away from unidimensional methodological tools for explaining history, society, and economy, in his most recent book. May I respectfully suggest you try the same?
Sorry to keep an old argument rolling Brad....
From: Henry C.K. Liu
Responding to Brad DeLong (May 3):
Would Brad DeLong care to detail how many of the more than 30 million people were killed by Mao? The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were complex revoultionary undertakings that incurred heavy cost for the Chinese nation, but only propagandists would describe them as among the greatest human disasters of this century. These two programs performed very critical functions in China's protracted struggle against Western imperialism. I would think it would be more apt to describe the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan in three days as the greatest human disaster of this century. -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: Patrick Manning <manning at neu.edu> Subject: laws of history Date: Thu, 6 May 1999 07:16:12 -0400 Size: 2779 URL: <../attachments/19990506/a8a37ba6/attachment.eml>