Guest post: Not empty jingoism
Originally a comment by Artymorty on Friends in high places.
Taiwan is almost the size of Australia, population-wise. The idea that the democratic freedom of some 23 million people ought to be erased for any reason, let alone some romantic interpretation of the Maoist takeover of Beijing in 1949 or whatever, is absurd to me.
I know that “freedom” is a word that has been somewhat tainted by the Right, turned into empty jingo, but seriously: freedom versus non-freedom is not a two-way street. When people obtain freedom, they have to fight to keep it. And when they lose it, it’s often almost impossible to get it back. The Chinese Communist Party is a force for destroying individuals’ freedom, and the Taiwanese democracy is its opposite: a force for human rights. The millions of Taiwanese are not pawns and it’s not arbitrary which government they end up subjected to. Under the CCP, their lives and freedoms are immeasurably worse off, and their ability to voice their disapproval and choose for themselves a better alternative is also cut off: under China it’s a one-way street. It’s night and day. For the Taiwanese people, I choose day over night.
(In my local Chinatown, even though the grocers are all Mainland Chinese, they hawk imported green Taiwanese pomelos, which have become symbols of Taiwan’s independence. Baskets of them are kept next to the cash-out like impulse purchases, where you’d normally find packs of gum or candy bars. Tossing one of these overpriced imported sour grapefruits into your grocery bag has become an act of defiance against China’s attempts at authoritarian control over the island. It seems to have had an effect. Long live the Taiwanese pomelo! Long live Taiwan!)
If you’ve never had one, I recommend it. The Taiwanese pomelo tastes like a mellower, more aromatic grapefruit. Less bitter, a bit sweeter, with a lovely kinda floral smell. Pricey, though. Like, $4 for one. That’s the price of freedom!
Governments and regimes do not fall for no reason. The Chinese Communist Party and the Red Army it created did not make the Chinese Revolution of 1949: the Chinese people made it, and for the simple reason that they had had a complete gutful of the oppressive and corrupt Kuomintang regime led ny Chiang Kai-Shek, and eventually overthrown by the Reds..
A handful of dissidents cannot overthrow a whole regime. Ony a mass movement can do that. But here’s the rub: the series of regimes that followed the fall of the Manchus found themselves ruling over not just a single country, but a whole empire, of which Taiwan had been a part, and for a long time. Moreover, the Maoists had understandably made a lot of enemies in the course of that revolution they led, so they played it safe for themselves and ran a very tight ship afterwards, aware that giving any province (eg Tibet) full independence would inspire such independence movements elsewhere, and lead to a situation that could rapidly run out of their control.
There was also no shortage of American Christian missionaries among the refugees, and with stories that lost absolutley nothing in the telling, so it was hardly surprising that the Red Chinese found themselves at war with the US (in Korea) within a year of their final victory in China, and the US backing Ciang in Taiwan..
But please don’t get me wrong; I think that humanity’s default state is feudalism, which can only be defeated by putting liberalism and its preservation forward as the number 1 goal. So, like it or not, Mao was the George Washington of China, just as Ho Chi Minh was the George Washington of Vietnam. (Perhaps Americans can relate to that.) And Maoism fell after the Tienanmen Massacre, and was replaced by a liberalism which rapidly evolved into crony capitalism, proving once again that old Heraclitus got it right.
As he observed in around 500 BC, ‘everything is becoming; nothing is being.’
Freedom
friespomelos!Omar:
I’m sorry, but “Moreover, the Maoists had understandably made a lot of enemies in the course of that revolution they led, so they played it safe for themselves and ran a very tight ship afterwards,” is a bit of a light touch for a regime that killed between 40 and 80 million of their own subjects. That’s not a tight ship; it’s a sealed Iron Maiden.
Freemage:
Sealed iron maidens would nonetheless fall into the category of ‘tight ships.’ Definitely not the other way around.
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. One can hardly blame Yeshua bar Joseph (aka Jesus Christ) for the bloodbath and worse of the Holy Inquisition. (Some would say that it’s the thought that counts.) ;-)
Actually, I believe you can blame Jesus Christ for the bloodbath…or the people who made him up, whichever is the case.
iknklast: That means that if someone from generations hence takes exception to some comment you made in auld lang syne on this site, you will have to take the blame for any consequences.
See you on Mars. ;-)
Well you can, but is it likely to get you anywhere? It’s the living that have to take responsibility for what we do now.
No, Omar, it doesn’t mean that. A faith-based-religion or a political movement that requires its adherents to believe that certain things are true beyond question, and to think in certain prescribed ways and not in others, readily results in hunting down heretics as well as unbelievers; and this began very early in the Church’s history.
from Matthew 13 (Christ speaking):
49 So shall it be at the end of the world: the angels shall come forth, and sever the wicked from among the just,
50 And shall cast them into the furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Paul: 2 Thessalonians 1:
6 Seeing it is a righteous thing with God to recompense tribulation to them that trouble you;
7 And to you who are troubled rest with us, when the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels,
8 In flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ:
9 Who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power…
***
And the same applies to a political movement like Communism. I should say that I have respect, in the main, for the critiques by Marx and Engels of the suffering that early capitalism brought about, but none for the conflation of ‘scientific socialism’, which posits a wholly determined ‘march of history’, with morality, so that the ‘moral’ thing to do is to go full steam ahead towards the coming Utopia and never mind who gets smashed in the process. (This conflation is curiously similar to the ideas that Elon Musk peddles.) You might read Lord Acton on this.
In fact, the same kind of myth of constant progress towards some imagined future drove capitalism & colonialism.
Many, many years ago my wife (who is a pianist, and Japanese) were very slightly acquainted with the great Chinese pianist Fou Ts’ong, whose parents (who were that terrible thing, ‘intellectuals’) committed suicide together during the Cultural Revolution. No doubt, this sort of thing didn’t matter much, if at all, in the great Marxist scheme of things, but it mattered very much to Fou Ts’ong, and it mattered very much to millions of people – and not only ‘intellectuals’ (think of the Ukrainian peasants who starved to death under Stalin, and the millions of Chinese who died because of Mao’s ruinous policies). I have no desire, by the way, to defend the USA or any other Western nation with respect to the appalling acts that they have perpetrated, often excusing therm in the same sort of way – for that manner of thinking is, unfortunately, our inheritance.
But I don’t think flippancy is the right way to approach these matters.
I just think if someone is on record as saying to bring everyone who doesn’t believe in him and kill them in front of him, he is responsible if his followers kill people who don’t believe in him. I haven’t said to go out and kill anyone, so if someone uses my words wrongly, that’s a different sort of thing.
Tim, it strikes me that you are under the impression that I am a Marxist. Well, I was once, but left it behind long ago. My ideological evolution was: 1. Christian, of the Anglican persuasion, but not an evangelical, so therefore a dissenter from the get-go, then 2. Australian Labor Party supporter (in my primary and high school years) to: 3. Marxist (but never a Communist Party member) in my university days, beginning in 1957, then 4. a Trotskyist, and then 5. a freethinker and a liberal (with an ‘l,’ not an ‘L.’)
As it happens, my wife, whom I married in a church 45 years ago, is a practising Christian (Presbyterian) and I always accompany her on those days, usually Sundays, when she decides that she wants to go to Church. And I have never disrespected her right to be a Christian, nor she my right to be an empiricist, and all while living under the same roof. And though modern hymns do not do much for me, I sing the traditional ones with great gusto. My favourite has been, and for a long time, John Bunyan’s immortal To Be a Pilgrim, and there is IMHO no finer version than that sung by Maddy Prior and her Carnival Band. But for God knows what reason, one never hears it sung these days, in church or out. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KY3MnQRVmOc )
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maddy_Prior )
But I digress.
I suggest also that flippancy, however defined, is in the eye of the beholder. And I stand by my comment at #7.
Good luck, and goodnight.
No, Omar: I was under no impression that you were a Marxist.
Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress became a favourite book of mine after I found it my father’s library at the age of 6 or 7. I skipped some – probably most – of the theological discussions between Christian & Faithful, and in other places, since I wasn’t able to understand them well, but it was, and is, a wonderful story, and written in wonderful prose. I was very excited by the battle with Apollyon, and made crayon pictures of Christian & Hopeful in the dungeons of the Giant Despair. I still have my father’s copy, with illustrations by Edward Ardizzone. So I know ‘Who would true valour see’ very well indeed, and think the tune a good one. I have sung it as a choirboy. .
But I find his ‘Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners’, which is about his spiritual life, unbearable: a good man caught in the thicket of Calvinism, unable to tell whether he is of the elect, or predestined to damnation; and it goes on and on, shuttling incessantly between extremes of hope and despair….
Perhaps I should add that Milton is my favourite poet, and what morals I possess derive principally from the poems of William Blake, who was a Christian of, perhaps, an odd sort.
This is beginning to sound like a confession of sorts…
But, forgive me for saying this, I don’t think the flippancy was entirely in the eye of the beholder…
All good wishes for the Year of the Serpent.
Omar #2
“humanity’s default state is feudalism”
Or the way I’ve seen it put, which I think accurate:
Peasants ruled by brigands.
Considering the deaths of Chinese under Mao, it’s hard not to see Chiang Kai-Shek as the lesser evil.
Omar, that hymn, To Be a Pilgrim, was my school’s anthem back in the seventies. Like you and your wife, I was a believer (Roman Catholic) who married a man brought up in Anglicanism (but an atheist by the time I met him) in my church, coincidentally also 45 years ago. However, I abandoned my faith over ten years ago. It didn’t make any difference to our relationship; we were already cool with the idea that we didn’t have to think alike, politically as well as spiritually. I had a good example to follow: my parents (born in the early thirties) had very different beliefs, too, but were happily married until my father’s death in 2019.
My connection to Taiwan is more tenuous; my youngest son is engaged to a Taiwanese woman, a scientist (he’s a linguist) and they plan to settle either there or in Japan after he has completed his qualifications. They met at university. Visa restrictions mean that they both do a lot of travelling between England and Taiwan. She’s travelling back to the UK in February, so my husband and I are travelling over there to meet her in person, having only met hitherto via video calls. The political situation hasn’t yet caused any problems to either of them during travel, but I don’t know how long that will be the case.
Jim @ #13: “Considering the deaths of Chinese under Mao, it’s hard not to see Chiang Kai-Shek as the lesser evil.” With 20/20 hindsight, that is arguably true, though then again, Taiwan under Chiang was no Garden of Eden either, though its own internal politics headed it in the direction of increasing democracy and economic prosperity; a bit like the story of Japan.
Mao was a clear embodiment of Lord Acton’s famous dictum: “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Though the 1949 revolution which brought him to power was the collective effort of the whole nation (population then 650 million from memory,) all the way through it and afterwards, he had to watch his back. By 1949, he had made one helluva lot of enemies, many out for revenge, so he opted always for increasing his own power. His attacks on the landlord class, and his promises of land reform, won him the support of a decisive part of the peasantry. But then he disappointed them by embarking on a forced collectivisation, resulting in mass starvation; all the while having to pretend that he knew more about growing rice etc than they did. As in post-1917 Russia, the result of the overthrow of one absolutism (the Tsar’s) was an even worse one: Stalin’s.
tigger @ #14: My choice would be Japan; an absolutely immaculate country; nothing out of place, and a product of superb craft skill at every level. And if you are into skiing, the snowfields of Niseko are as good as it gets..