Otto's War Room (毛派): In the US there are those who will help to counter the anti-communist historians who are trying to re-write history

By សតិវអតុ

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, right-wing historians have worked hard and it seems likes they have worked overtime to try and destroy the legacy of all communist leaders. Bourgeois Historians and pundits have tried to make VI Lenin (Владимир Ленин) look about the same as their top communist leader boogeyman, Joseph Stalin.[1] Since the end of World War II, the bourgeois media has used Stalin and images from his days in office as a major propaganda tool.

It is no surprise that historians are now trying to make Mao Zedong (毛泽东) into a boogeyman. They are also trying to convince the Chinese public and some officials that Mao and his companions were really just nasty bullies who did nothing for the people around them. According to Francis Grice, writing for National Interest:

“In conventional accounts of the Chinese Revolutionary Civil War (1926–1949), Mao Zedong is shown towering heroically above a great throng of adoring peasants, who have surged up in a great wave to defeat their imperialist foes and propel the Communists into power. Commonplace during Mao’s reign, this depiction remains a major keystone in Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda and claims to legitimacy today. Yet, its truthfulness has come into question in recent years and this directly threatens the survival of the Party.

A growing number of historians—both in China and abroad—have begun to unpick the myth. Among the most prominent are Jung Chang and John Halliday, who wrote a scathing retelling of Mao’s life and actions, with the thesis that Mao and his followers were bloodthirsty thugs who bullied their way into power through anti-civilian violence, sinister manipulation and dumb luck. Chang and Halliday’s revisionism has been demonized by the CCP (and condemned by some Western Sinologists), but their core claims about the cruelty and fundamental unpopularity of the CCP during this early period have been correlated by numerous other researchers.”

In some ways this is not surprising. Since the end of the Cold War, such revisionist historians have worked hard to try and destroy the credibility of Mao and any other communist leader from past. Many conservatives feel they have won the cold war. But they want to make sure that communism stays dead. They know that there are still many Maoists and Marxists in the world. Some are people in the poorer Third world countries, but there are some in the more developed countries also. They want to put doubt in such people’s minds. They want to prevent others from reading up on such leaders as Mao and they want to prevent a positive image as we saw by some celebrities in the 1960s and 1970s.[2]

I have to admit that such articles do put doubts in my mind. I really don’t believe Grice and such historians just make things up. But they do look for the facts and testaments that support their claims. They try to build cases based on their own research, or the research that others have put together that supports their claims. Just as with the US government’s case on Venezuela, these right-wing historians hope that their work will lead to a policy that most people will not dare to question. Most Americans don’t question what they are told about Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela or for much of any other foreign leader their government tells them about. It is easy in America to convince the public that some one else’s leader is no good. For those of us who have made up their mind about Mao and communism, this leaves us with the difficult task of trying to undo the damage that Grice and others do. In some foreign countries such as Philippines, it is not so hard to convince people that the US government lies to them. They are usually able to see for themselves what simply isn’t true. But in comfortable middle class America, pro-US, anti-foreign leader propaganda sticks like cement.

Luckily we have a few left of center pundits and historians who can counter some of their conservative clap-trap. Kristen R Ghodsee and Scott Sehon have written an essay called Anti-anti-communism. They called it that because they are quick to point out that they are NOT communists, but they feel it is wrong to try and falsify history just to make a propaganda point:

“The public memory of 20th-century communism is a battleground. Two ideological armies stare at each other across a chasm of mistrust and misunderstanding. Even though the Cold War ended almost 30 years ago, a struggle to define the truth about the communist past has continued to rage across the United States and Europe.

On the Left stand those with some sympathy for socialist ideals and the popular opinion of hundreds of millions of Russian and east European citizens nostalgic for their state socialist pasts. On the Right stand the committed anti-totalitarians, both east and west, insisting that all experiments with Marxism will always and inevitably end with the gulag. Where one side sees shades of grey, the other views the world in black and white.

Particularly in the US, labour supporters and social liberals who desire an expanded role for the state hope to save the democratic socialist baby from the authoritarian bathwater. Fiscal conservatives and nationalists deploy memories of purges and famines to discredit even the most modest arguments in favour of redistributive politics.

For those wishing to paint 20th-century communism as an unmitigated evil, ongoing ethnographic and survey research in eastern Europe contradicts any simple narrative. Even as early as 1992, the Croatian journalist Slavenka Drakulić ‘worried about what would happen to all the good things that we did have under communism – the medical care, the year’s paid maternity leave, free abortion’. As governments dismantled social safety nets and poverty spread throughout the region, ordinary citizens grew increasingly less critical of their state socialist pasts.”

One important point that this article seems to make is that no leader or system is all bad. They want to remind people that such exaggerated and stacked statistics and horror stories can be seen for what they are. When something is painted as All Bad, there seems to be a lack of credibility. As Ghodsee and Sehon point out:

“Of course, conservatives might insist that they are merely reminding people of the genuine flaws of communism, lest there be any tendency to fall towards that path. They argue that communism must be rejected in any form, for they fear that we might repeat the mistakes of the Soviet bloc. But given the extreme unlikeliness of the West’s return to communism in the 21st century, and the continuing nostalgia for state socialism in eastern Europe, it’s worth examining these anti-communist arguments closely.

Thoughtful observers should suspect any historical narrative that paints the world in black and white. In Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), the Nobel-prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman warns of predictable cognitive flaws that inhibit our ability to think rationally, including something called ‘the halo effect’:

The halo effect helps keep explanatory narratives simple and coherent by exaggerating the consistency of evaluations: good people do only good things and bad people are all bad … Inconsistencies reduce the ease of our thoughts and the clarity of our feelings.

Since nuance in the story of 20th-century communism might ‘reduce the ease of our thoughts and the clarity of our feelings’, anti-communists will attack, dismiss or discredit any archival findings, interviews or survey results recalling Eastern Bloc achievements in science, culture, education, health care or women’s rights. They were bad people, and everything they did must be bad; we invert the ‘halo’ terminology and call this the ‘pitchfork effect’. Those offering a more nuanced narrative than one of unending totalitarian terror are dismissed as apologists or useful idiots. Contemporary intellectual opposition to the idea that ‘bad people are all bad’ elicits outrage and an immediate accusation that you are no better than those out to rob us of our ‘God-given rights’.”

So we do have those historians who insist on a true and accurate picture of what really happened in the past. We need to keep them in mind, as we do our work, as we try to counter the anti-communist propaganda that the bourgeoisie uses to protect its positions of power. They don’t want to have to deal with those who dare question the legitimacy of capitalism.

That is the job, writers as myself, here in the US must do. Ghodsee and Sehon are a big help. I don’t mind some criticism of communism, if it allows people to see more balanced and less biased view of history.