Posts Tagged ‘Mao Tse-tung’

Not a dictator, but a scholar. (Photo: Rachel Moltz)

When Mao Zedong died on September 9, 1976, hundreds of thousands of people poured into the streets, weeping over the dictator who is responsible for at least 50 million deaths.

According to Frank Dikötter of the University of Hong Kong, the cult of personality turns everyone into liars. “These are not true tears,” he told an audience at the Hoover Institution last week. “It’s not really clear who is really crying. Everyone knows there is lying. Not everyone knows who is lying.”

Dikötter is the author of Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, which won the 2011 Samuel Johnson Prize, Britain’s most prestigious book award for non-fiction. He spoke at Hoover about “The Making of the Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century.” He is working on a “global history of the cult of personality,” focusing on prominent dictators of the 20th century.

“Millions were led to the death as they cheered their master,” said Dikötter of Mao. “The cult of personality obliged everyone to become a sycophant, destroying their dignity in the process.”

The Dutch author quoted Dostoevsky‘s Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov, saying the ruler has two tools at his disposal: on one hand magic and mystery, on the other, the sword. Yet “the cult of personality” is born of the age of democracy. “Dictators depend on popular support,” he said. A totalitarian ruler needs at least the illusion of a mandate at the ballot box.

Romania’s man about town.

“The rise and fall of dictatorships is often determined by the cult of personality,” Dikötter said. The creation of the cult is far from a solo effort; a dictator needs plenty of support. “There is, at least, a ministry of propaganda, an army of photographers, bureaucracy, whole sections of industry, the army.” Mao, for example, had a whole industry to produce cult objects. Under Pol Pot, who caused the death of millions, a whole prison was dedicated to printing images of the leader and developing cult objects. Dikötter said the regime failed precisely because Pol Pot was unable to establish himself as a cult personality.

 Dikötter noted that there were some excellent studies on the cult of personality, although in many cases scholarly efforts remain scattered. In the case of Germany, for instance, the first exhibition of cult objects about Hitler took place only five years ago. “It seems almost obscene to look at the shiny surfaces the state produces rather than at the horror it hides,” he said.

The shiny surfaces also have a practical purpose: “In a dictatorship, you develop the image and the cult so that you will not have to turn to force. That’s the point.”

Forever young.

The ministry of propaganda, photographers and others have plenty of work to do. For example, Romania’s Nicolae Ceaușescu traveled the country so much that he seemed to be everywhere at once. He made a record 147 whistle-stop tours of the entire country between 1965 and 1973. Some regimes rubbed out the images of fallen aides and sidekicks from photos (Milan Kundera famously describes how Vladimír Clementis was erased in a 1948 photo when he fell from favor).  Ceaușescu went one step further: he had himself inserted himself into photos of meetings he never attended, sometimes meetings that occurred at the same time miles away from each other, suggesting a sort of bilocation. After his fall, the cult images came down very rapidly.

Adolf Hitler, author of the Holocaust, buffed his image throughout the 1930s. Popular images portrayed him as a vegetarian, non-drinking, non-smoking, hard-working, modest man – and not just in Germany. “You can read it in the New York Times,” said Dikötter – dictators make a point of courting the foreign press and journalists, and the favor is apparently returned. The Hitler Nobody Knows (1933) was almost a companion volume to Mein Kampf. Hitler is always seen without his glasses.

Propaganda presented Benito Mussolini as “good family man, a far-seeing statesman, a stern dictator,” said Dikötter. The voice of the leader is an important tool in the legend, and Mussolini used it for maximum effect in his balcony speeches – ““a metallic voice with sentences delivered like the blows of a hammer.” While many of Italy’s poor did not have ready access to the radio, loudspeakers suddenly appeared in the public square, to make sure they got the message.

By contrast, genocidaire Joseph Stalin hardly speaks at all, but that’s just as important. He appears before millions of the Red Guards and says nothing. “By not speaking he becomes the center of gravity,” said Dikötter.

Ceaușescu, like the other dictators Dikötter studied, drew his inspiration from others. In his travels, “he was smitten by what he sees in China and Korea – he takes it quite seriously,” said Dikötter. “Dictators don’t do this on their own.”

They draw their lessons not only from other lands, but other histories. They must present themselves in an imaginative line of succession rather than as illegitimate upstarts who grabbed power. Thus, Stalin presides over the canonizing of Lenin. The Ethiopian genocidaire Mengistu Haile Mariam, responsible for killing 500,000 to 2,000,000 people, adopted the symbols and trappings of the Emperor Haile Selassie, whom he had killed and buried beneath the palace, before turning to Marxism-Leninism. Mussolini presented himself as the reincarnation of Caesar Augustus.

Kim Il-sung presented himself as the tradition of thousands of years embodied in his very own person. “It’s difficult to pull it off, unless you have a hermetically sealed state, like North Korea,” said Dikötter.

“Papa Doc” Duvalier in Haiti, who killed 30,000 to 60,000 of his countrymen, was the only one who reached into another world for his authority. He used voodoo as a prop to develop his cult of personality, and he took it very seriously. He came across to his minions as a gentle person in dark glasses, half-mumbling as if he were casting spells.

Yes, someone asked, but what happens when the dictator becomes sleek and very fat. Surely the starving and impoverished workers are no longer bedazzled by the ugly frog that waddles before them?

“Once the image develops, it tends to stay fixed,”said Dikötter. “It stays fixed and ever youthful, even though Mao in his last years looked pretty ghastly,” with black teeth, Lou Gehrig’s disease and, yes, very overweight.

The funeral of Mao: faking it.

Real writer

It’s the 100th anniversary of the assassination that triggered World War I. On this day in 1914, the 19-year-old Serbian Gavrilo Princip shot the Austrian  Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The assassin was one of those nobodies who pops up occasionally in history, rather like John Wilkes Booth, but the Austrian writer Robert Musil has another take on the schoolboy, who was secretly a poet – as well as French leader Georges Clémenceau, who “obviously had a poet living inside him,” and Italian novelist/playwright Benito Mussolini. In this passage taken from his notebooks in late 1935 or early 1936:

Writer wannabe

“In a word, one must remind those irredeemably blind people who despise literature that even Nero set Rome on fire once, and this not just because he was mentally ill, as is maintained, but above all because he was a writer. Their respect for writing will increase if they notice that not only amateur writers, writing dilettantes, but also writers who for one reason or another never fully managed to devote themselves to writing, have set the world on fire.

“Compared to them, the real or fully developed writers are not dangerous in any way and, aside from spiritual theft, bourgeois bankruptcy, and offences against public decency, have never done anything serious at all. The source of restlessness in the kind of people who destroy worlds is transformed in these writers to a quietly burning and nourishing hearth-flame and they make a well-ordered export business out of the adventures of their fantasy…”

Read the rest at the blog on Musil, Attempts to Find Another Human Being,  here. As I recall, Joseph Stalin was an aspiring writer, too, and Mao Tse-Tung was a poet of note. I suppose it could be flipped around to be an argument for killing all of us early… Some sort of fireworks exploding outside as I write. I find it rather chilling on a warm summer night.

A "global citizen" who eats Japanese

Liu Xiaobo‘s Nobel Prize in literature is not the first award to a Chinese writer.  That honor went in 2000 to novelist, playwright, critic, and painter Gao Xingjian, who emigrated to Paris as a political refugee in 1987.  Now, he says, “I live in Paris, but eat Japanese food almost every day for my health.”  The 70-year-old writer adds, “I hate Chinese food most.”

Excerpts from Akihiko Shiraishi‘s interview in today’s Asahi:

On nationalism and the writer:

Nationalism isn’t necessarily pushed on the people by the powers that be. Nationalism can bubble up from among the people themselves, as did Japanese militarism during World War II. That war was not caused by the emperor alone. The Japanese people themselves were caught up in their nationalistic frenzy. Mao Tse-tung was responsible for the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, but the Chinese masses were also guilty of irrational behavior. We all need to become more aware of this sort of insanity inherent in human nature. And perhaps literature can help there.

On his play, Escape:

Q: You then dashed off the play Escape. The story revolves around a young man, a young woman and a middle-aged intellectual who escape the massacre at the hands of the military and hide in an urban warehouse. But in the end, they are all killed, aren’t they?

A: I wrote it at the request of an American playhouse. But when I sent my finished manuscript, they asked me to rewrite it and include an “American hero” in the story. I refused. Even some of my pro-democracy activist friends in China got on my case because I didn’t give them the hero they wanted. After the publication of “Escape,” I was dispossessed of my home in China, purged from public office, and expelled from the Chinese Communist Party. I became a bona fide fugitive.

Q: But your play wasn’t a denunciation as such of the Tiananmen protests. It dealt with a theme that is universal–how people act in extreme circumstances.

A: I wrote a tragedy of contemporary people, not a political drama. There is no mention of China or Tiananmen. Just like in any classic Greek tragedy, I tried to depict the difficulties of human existence itself. The play has since been performed around the world, including Japan. When it was recently staged in Slovenia, one local reviewer said, “This play is about our very history.”

On Chinese culture:

Q: Soul Mountain, which you published in 1990, chronicles your spiritual odyssey when you traveled deep into the Chinese hinterland. The work left a lasting impression on me, especially your depictions of quaint villages of ethnic minorities and sensuous folksongs sung by village elders. Am I correct to assume that China, in your mind, is a conglomeration of these diverse cultures, rather than a nation-state?

A: That is exactly my understanding of Chinese culture. In China, the history of emperors has been recounted as China’s legitimate history. But aren’t there also other histories? I always asked myself. While traveling along the Yangtze river, I collected many old local poems and mythical folk tales, including those of the ethnic minorities. This made me realize that there is no single source of Chinese culture, but that Chinese culture is a composite of diverse ethnic and regional cultures. This revelation deepened my understanding of ethnic and cultural diversity, and freed me from thinking of China as a monolithic state.