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The Book of the Week is “Swimming to Freedom, My Escape From China and the Cultural Revolution” by Kent Wong, published in 2021. Wong was born in 1948 in a coastal town in China. Mao became the official leader of China in October 1949. So that Wong’s father could keep his job at the customs agency, the family moved to Hong Kong. However, they returned to Guangzhou because the father missed his homeland.
Mao brainwashed people into believing that the Americans and their puppet, Chiang Kai-Shek were evil imperialists. The people in northern China were mostly peasant-farmers, while the people in southern China worked in factories and were better educated. More northerners starved to death, as local Communist leaders stole their harvests of grain. So after the food sources of chickens, pigs and horses were exhausted, the people resorted to cannibalism.
From the mid-1960’s, onward, Mao recovered his all-powerful position and cult of personality in the Chinese government. The Chinese times, they were changing in many ways, including:
- Anyone who joined the Communist Party enjoyed a significantly better lifestyle than not.
- Beginning in the early 1960’s China was gradually becoming less friendly with Russia, claiming via Mao’s drama-queen performance that Khrushchev had criticized their Communist idol, Stalin, and that their ideologies differed (actually, China didn’t want to pay Russia the humungous financial debt it owed).
- Contrary to a decade earlier, the schools began to teach the English language instead of the Russian language.
- High school kids were sent to the countryside to be “reeducated” (do hard manual labor) with the peasants.
- Mao brainwashed the teenagers into becoming child-soldiers called Red Guards.
Across the country, the Red Guards got uniforms, marched in parades, and once they got weapons, they acquired the power to behave like Nazis. And did. They harassed people on the streets, looted stores of cigarettes and cold drinks. They incited terror by whipping people with a belt, in the public square.
In 1966, there arose two different gangs of Red Guards, who were enemies of each other. The main target of the Red Guards, though, was any “Black” family (see the paragraph below) or individual who showed capitalist leanings (thoughts, actions, writings of any kind) or association with bourgeois rich people. Every man, woman and child in China had what amounted to an FBI file on them from the time they were born, as they were legally required to register with the government.
A family was labeled Black if, prior to Mao’s reign, it had been in any kind of business or had been affiliated with Chiang Kai-Shek. One family member could shame the entire family, and cause it to be labeled Black. Wong’s family was labeled Black because they had lived in the Chiang-affiliated, British colony of Hong Kong, and his father had criticized workplace conditions.
Red Guards ransacked the family’s house for any evil materials, but found none. A Red family consisted of loyal Communist peasants. After a while, people of all ages whose families were Black were sent to the countryside. Only loyal Party hacks and rich people dodged the recruitment process.
The internet has greatly automated the kinds of surveillance, censorship and propaganda practiced by China (and the United States!) since Wong’s generation. Political retaliation has never been so easy.
On the other hand, the unbloodied elites (i.e., Donald Trump, Zelensky, etc.) don’t need to actually go into physical combat the way their countries’ militaries (or their cult-of-personality members) do. They simply sit in a TV studio to boost media ratings during a slow-news period, and have a screaming match like the clowns on the “Jerry Springer Show” used to do.
Dictatorial leaders in recent history whose names are still known, of course, have varied in their evilness and attention whoredom. However, only two (Hitler and Stalin) dominated lands (not including Churchill– whose empire was in decline) that potentially had the resources (not including nuclear weapons) to take over the entire earth. They might have, if events had happened a bit differently.
Mutual Assured Destruction has thus far kept world leaders from obliterating one another. There are other factors at work that provide a smidgen of hope for the continued survival of global humanity:
- Because nations of the world are so economically interdependent or incestuous of late, no matter how much their leaders rant, rave, brag and deny– their governments are liars regarding trade negotiations.
- It has become routine for leaders to incite a hue and cry from their citizens via instantaneous communications methods. This means fewer people are paying attention to the propaganda that is filtered through the narrow lens of a small number of media outlets (which are monster-sized, but not as influential as they used to be).
- At least in the United States, more and more families of different ethnicities and religions are converging or assimilating, so hypocrisy among xenophobes is on the increase. The voices of the xenophobes will be eclipsed eventually when the U.S. leadership becomes more diverse. It might take a while, but it has to happen.
- Nowadays, violent places of the world are confined mostly to ones that have a reputation for centuries of tribal or religious warfare, as practically all the resources have been looted from once-colonized territories.
The above are reasons why world conquest is too difficult to achieve for any current aspirant. Even so, here’s a little ditty on Trump’s latest speechifying to Congress.
JUST AN OLD FASCIST LOVE SONG
sung to the tune of “Just an Old Fasioned Love Song” with apologies to Three Dog Night, their estates, and to whomever else the rights may concern.
Just an old fascist love song, emanating from the idiot-box,
and wrapped around the words, is the bragfest of a power-hog who’ll never go.
In-history you’ve heard it before. Hypocrisy rolls on.
Money, power, political-hacks. They’re never really gone.
Just an old fascist love song.
One I’m sure they wrote for GOP.
Just an old fascist love song.
Coming forth from backroom bargaining.
Boosting ratings but failing to question,
because their intellect’s low.
To emphasize Trump’s love affair
with phoniness and meanness, that we’ve come to know.
In-history you’ve heard it before. Hypocrisy rolls on and on.
Money, power, political-hacks. They’re never really gone.
Just an old fascist love song.
Coming forth from backroom bargaining.
Just an old fascist love song.
One I’m sure they wrote for GOP.
Just an old fascist love song.
Coming forth from backroom bargaining.
Just an old fascist love song.
One I’m sure they wrote for GOP.
Boosting ratings but failing to question the song.
Just, an old song, coming forth.
Just (just) an old song.
One I’m sure they wrote for GOP.
Just an old fascist love song.
Coming forth from backroom bargaining.
Just an old fascist love song.
One I’m sure they wrote for GOP.
Just an old fascist love song.
Coming forth from backroom bargaining.
Just an old fascist love song.
One I’m sure they wrote for GOP.
Just an old fascist love song.
Coming forth from backroom bargaining.
Just an old fascist love song.
One I’m sure they wrote for GOP.
Anyway, read the book to learn of the author’s adventures (which included serious hardships, although he avoided getting shot, drowned, bitten by a shark, or killed by a typhoon) during his quest for a better life.