← The Fifth Column
The Fifth Column
The Temple Is Rich. The Monks Are Poor (w/ Frank Dikötter) Members Only #336
00:17:46
Loading summary
Transcript58 lines
- [00:00]
A
So you remember what Mal said, power comes from the barrel of the gun. But what matters also is what you do with the gun. What are you prepared to do?
- [00:11]
B
We know of new methods of attack,
- [00:15]
C
but how do you pronounce your name?
- [00:16]
A
Well, like it's a Trojan horse column. Yeah, that's the way I would do it.
- [00:22]
C
But no one does that.
- [00:24]
A
I do.
- [00:25]
C
You're the only one. A lot of you listeners and viewers know that. I often do interviews with historians, do one on one interviews. And there's been one historian, but has been my quarry for some time and we invited him and then he was, I think, trapped by a snowstorm in January or something or around the time this book came out. In this book is Red Dawn Over China. How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity. And it is the great Frank Dickater, who is kind of Dutch, but not really kind of Swiss maybe, teaches in Hong Kong and now has a perch at the Hoover Institute in Palo Alto at Stanford.
- [01:14]
A
Yes, indeed.
- [01:15]
C
Welcome, Frank. Thank you. You know, it's funny, cause I was looking up, I saw a review you did a trilogy. I did of books of just the horrors of Maoist China. In one of the quotes that I found that this should be required to read Frank Dakota's masterpiece of historical investigation. And that quote was from me. I reviewed your book on the Great Leap Forward for Commentary magazine. It was in tandem with. With a book, I think, Richard Wolin, about Maoist France.
- [01:52]
A
Yes.
- [01:53]
C
But I wanted to kind of start there because there's a lot of it in this book, although it's a lot earlier than. But the title, Red Dawn Over China reminds one of a book that I was required to read in College in the 90s by Edgar Snow, an American journalist who, as you write in this book, kind of made modern China in the perception of people outside of China. And I wanted to start on that, particularly on intellectuals in the west falling in love with what has to be the most, just as far as body count goes, most brutal authoritarian regime of the 20th century, which had many of them. What is the kind of overall view that you have when you keep on running into these people? It's in your book, John Service, the people that were around Amora, you know, the Owen Lattimores of the world, you can look these people up. They were not necessarily spies.
- [02:56]
A
John Service was a traitor.
- [02:57]
C
John Service was a traitor.
- [02:59]
A
And then he admitted that much before he died, to Jonathan Mirsky, journalist of the Sunday Times.
- [03:04]
C
Oh, so he actually admitted it.
- [03:05]
A
Yes, he admitted that.
- [03:07]
C
And there are a lot of these People that were in America, they were State Department people then. They were journalists, like Edgar Snow. How would you explain something that seems so transparently awful from even the stuff that's coming out in the early days of Maoist China, of why so many people fell in love with such a horrid regime?
- [03:29]
A
Yes. So the regime is horrid from day one. You might say that's quite normal. After all, it's supposed to be a revolutionary party. And as the good old chairman says himself, revolution is not dinner party.
- [03:48]
C
Yeah.
- [03:48]
A
It's based on violence. You must throw violence.
- [03:51]
C
Barrel of a gun.
- [03:52]
A
Exactly. Power comes at the barrel of a gun. So it's violent from day one, which is what this book demonstrates.
- [03:58]
C
Well, this book is before day one. It's incredibly violent, too.
- [04:01]
A
Yes. You could say if day one. Depending on where day one. Day one is. Right. 1921, foundation of the Communist Party. They trek like bandits through Wasteland for years. 1936, their star is at the lowest. This is when Edgar Snow comes in, publishes a book called Red Star Over China. Now, at that point in time, 15 years after this party has appeared, entirely built up by the Soviet Union, by the Communist International. Their funding, the man, their advisors, their munitions. They number about 40,000 people, 40,000 followers in the country of half a billion. I'll let you calculate how much that is. It's not a great deal.
- [04:46]
C
I mean, I think you point out in the book that the cpusa, the American Communist Party, which never made any major inros, I think was larger per capita than the Chinese Communist party.
- [04:55]
A
So by 1936 is roughly one for every 12,500. Whereas in a country like Portugal under Salazar, 1934, about one in 280 people's
- [05:07]
C
economy, which is effectively a fascist dictatorship,
- [05:10]
A
is a fascist dictatorship. I don't think he can accuse them of being soft on communists. Finland, 1 in 700, the list goes on. Maybe Nazi Germany possibly has fewer communists as a proportion of the overall population. By 1940, it's got about one person in 1700 in China, according to the numbers of the Comintern, Communist International, Communist, which is the same as the number of followers of the. What is it called? The Communist part of the United States. Is that the formal title?
- [05:40]
C
Yeah. Cpusa.
- [05:42]
A
There you go. Not exactly seen as a leader in the international communist movement. Snow is invited. Naive journalist from Missouri, willing to go along, becomes the mouthpiece of the Communists, publishes this book which puts Mao and the Communists on the map. And I think from there onwards, to answer your question, I think what happens is that not only is this book translated in 20 languages, Mao becomes a sort of leader, is seen to be the sort of leader in a romantic tale of David against Goliath, with sympathy going towards the boy with the sling. You know, the Communists are fighting for freedom and liberty in the hills against fascism, feudalism and imperialism. Needless to say. Now, why do so many people buy into this tale of horror, which becomes even greater after the red flag goes up over the forbidden city in 1949 and China becomes communist, what not. With several million killed at the barrel of a gun in the 1950s and tens of thousands perished through famine from 1958-62. Tens of millions.
- [06:59]
C
In your book on the Great Leap Forward, you say upwards of 50 million
- [07:03]
A
people, 45 million or more. Now, a number of Sinologists who have never set foot in an archive have contested this figure, including a sociologist who probably hasn't seen a library. But the point is that every historian from the People's Republic of China who's actually done research, as I have in the archives, comes up with a figure of 50 million-plus. So I'm not exactly alone.
- [07:33]
C
I mean, in that book you quote things from the archive of, you know, people. I mean, it's Rwanda, like in certain places, people being killed with clubs and sticks. And this is documented in party archives. Now, granted, a lot of this stuff isn't front page news in Western newspapers, but there's a lot of stuff that is known. The Communists come to power in 1949. I want to show you two things that I saw in the past day which were both shocking to me. I'm never shocked by this stuff. I mean, there's a great historian since past. He might have actually been a sociologist named Paul Hollander.
- [08:13]
A
Wonderful man, wonderful man.
- [08:14]
C
Did great research on Hungary.
- [08:16]
A
Escapee from Budapest.
- [08:18]
C
Escaped from Budapest in 56 and then becomes a professor at the University of Massachusetts and does an enormous amount of research on why people fall for this stuff. Yes, this was one that I hadn't seen. It's the New York Times in 1972. 71 or 72. And it's John Kenneth Galbraith, the great liberal historian. And the headline is Galbraith, pull that. Galbraith has seen China's future and it works. Which is a reference to Lincoln Steffen's quote about him going to the Soviet Union, seeing the future, and it works. And this is in the 70s, in the 70s. Now, a harder thing to find, which has been shown at film festivals and such, is a clip I wanted to show you from a film that came out in 1975, played on PBS and then was nominated for best documentary at The Oscars in 1975 called Under Half the Sky. And it was directed by and voiced by Shirley MacLaine. Here's just a sample of this documentary.
- [09:19]
A
This is painful.
- [09:30]
B
There's a saying in China now, women must have equality so they can learn to uphold their half of the sky. The liberation of women is official policy and its accomplishment is as much a goal for men as it is for women. In New China, all women are encouraged to achieve economic independence. Most women work and leave their children in state run nurseries and daycare centers. During the day. The government encourages women to become pilots, engineers, surgeons, scientists and soldiers. The Chinese say that a society cannot be liberated unless all of its members are free from oppression. Such a fundamental change of values in 23 years has resulted in more equal relationships between all people.
- [10:17]
C
How about that? 23 years equal relations. Women are pilots and engineers. And this was nominated for best documentary in 1976 at the Academy Awards. That's pretty far from 1949. And the sort of horror that we'll get to that you document in this book, does that shock you in some Shirley MacLaine?
- [10:41]
A
Well, I've heard it a thousand times, but of course 1975 is very much just about a year before the chairman dies.
- [10:48]
C
Yeah, it's the anti cultural Revolution.
- [10:50]
A
The Cultural Revolution, which of course is not horror in terms of people dying of starvation or beaten to death as was the case during the famine from 58 to 62, but really being a society torn apart, where every individual is pitted against everyone else, including family members, neighbors, and must demonstrate their loyalty to the chairman generally by denouncing others, the
- [11:16]
C
whole students, denouncing teachers.
- [11:18]
A
Indeed, fabric of society has been torn apart. But I want to get back to the question you asked me in the beginning, including Paul Hollander, why? Why are there so many? Why is there so much blindness when it comes to the People's Republic of China and the horrors inflicted there? First, I should say Mao does have the benefit of size, right? It's a very large population, so it's relatively easy as a dictator to get very large numbers, including the ones I've just quoted. Whereas if you have Pol Pot working in Cambodia, he does manage to get rid of about 2.4 million.
- [11:56]
C
A third of the population.
- [11:58]
A
Yes, roughly a fourth, a fifth of the population. It is not nothing. Right, but the point really is, it seems to me that there are two things at work here. One is what Paul Hollander showed Fellow travelers, intellectuals who fall in love with an idea and are willing to travel to the Soviet Union, travel to Cuba, travel to China and embrace it. He calls them political pilgrims. But there's something else which I think is more specific to China that's very interesting as a refusal from the beginning to actually recognize that Chinese Communism is communism. And this mistake is made repeatedly by the Americans in particular, but also by others. The first time the Americans make this mistake is in the wake of Red Star over China when the number of people, including the ones you just evoked, China hands. The China hands continue to portray the Communists during the Second World War. They have a wartime capital in Yen and far away from enemy lines as mere agrarian reforms. Now why is this so insidious? Because Stalin himself, who has really shaped the Communist Party of China, given it ideas, a plan, weapons, money, he's the one in 1943 to suggest to the Americans in particular, in particular their ambassador, Avril Harriman I believe is his name, that the Chinese Communists really are nothing but margarine. Communists. They're not real. The message is repeated by other Russians and here go the Americans, including Henry Wallace. Your Vice President travels to Siberia, sees the Gulag, arrives in China to speak to the central government of the Republic of China. Its president, Chiang Kai Shek says you really should follow the example of the Soviet Union. They're doing so well. I've seen their agriculture. It works. Marshall who's sent to China as late as 1946 writes to Truman to say that the so called Communists are nothing but bands of people here and there that pose no threat to anyone. So that's mistake number one. They don't recognize them as communists before the Civil War is unleashed. 45 up to 49. Then of course you fast forward Nixon, Kissinger, rapprochement. Kissinger, enamored of this country, doesn't understand a thing about it, doesn't understand the entire region as a matter of fact gets it wrong at great cost. And not just to Southeast Asia and East Asia, but also to the United States of America and believes that China is somehow nothing to do with Communism. Confucian entity from the ancient sage Confucius. Now I admit it can at time be confusing, but Confucian it is not. Definitely not. This is just by the way as there is a campaign to destroy Confucius. Right, Confucius, yeah, and all remnants of the past. Here's this intellectual from the United States who proclaims that China is merely following the example of.
- [15:19]
C
Because that's by the way A common thing of destroying the past. I mean, you mentioned Pol Pot in Cambodia. Just by numbers, as proportion of the population. Probably the most brutal genocide of the 20th century. But that was resetting the calendar and the clock to year zero to destroying the intellectual class and killing people if they wore glasses kind of thing. Eliminate eliminating Confucius from modern Chinese thought in resetting what China was. This seems to be a common theme amongst these regimes.
- [15:51]
A
Yes, yes. So the point of the Cultural Revolution, which inspires of course, Pol Pot, but all communist regimes want to set the clock back to zero. But the idea is somehow on the part of Mao that the Bolsheviks, Lenin seized power in 1917 with the Bolshevik revolution and took the assets of the so called capitalist class. But according to Mao, they didn't do enough. Which is why he thinks the Soviet Union is going revisionist, they're going soft. They're talking about peaceful evolution, coexistence with the so called capitalist camp. Mao wants to tackle it head on. Why has this happened? According to him, because nobody's actually attacked the capitalist ideas, the culture. So the assets of the capitalist have been seized, but the culture is still there, influencing.
- [16:42]
C
So this is the second part of the kind of Maoist plan is take
- [16:45]
A
the assets, destroy all of.
- [16:47]
C
Destroy all there's thought in the idea. And that can be done through re education.
- [16:52]
A
You read a bourgeois novel, you play piano. All of that has to do with the bourgeois capitalist culture that must be eliminated and replaced with something more proletarian.
- [17:04]
C
Do we have enough? I don't know. I don't know if that's gonna work.
- [17:08]
A
I don't care.
- [17:09]
C
All right, cheapos. You got as much as we're gonna give you for free. It gets a lot worse from here.
- [17:15]
A
So much worse.
- [17:15]
C
There's gonna be so many mispronounced words like archite, which is a favorite of a friend of ours. Wait, that's not right. And a lot of fluffing, a lot of kerfluffs. And that will be three, sometimes nine syllables. But you can only find out if you take out that credit card, swipe it a couple times and subscribe. Why have you not done this already? So many of you send me emails that say, okay, I finally subscribed because Moynihan was pressuring me. The pressure's back, baby. Subscribe. Bye bye.