This is an archive of the former website of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which was run by the now defunct Maoist Internationalist Party - Amerika. The MIM now consists of many independent cells, many of which have their own indendendent organs both online and off. MIM(Prisons) serves these documents as a service to and reference for the anti-imperialist movement worldwide.

Asia


Anarchism in China

Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution
by Arif Dirlik

Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture
by Peter Zarrow


Reviewed by RC42

Why is it important to study the history of anarchism in China? By learning the content, progress and fate of anarchism in China - especially how anarchism compared to the later dominant and more effective Maoism - we can get a better understanding of anarchism today in North America. [See also MIM Theory 8. -ed.] The following is a summary of an essay that reviews and compares two books about anarchism in China during the first quarter of this century: Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution by Arif Dirlik, and Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture by Peter Zarrow.(1)

According to the reviewer, Zarrow's book is "dedicated to summarizing the anarchist thoughts and hundreds of years of related intellectual history in China... [with] ... historical and intellectual context for the anarchist movement ... Zarrow's are helpful services to those seriously considering anarchism." Dirlik's book depicts "the mindframe of the Chinese anarchists and the link of Chinese anarchism to recent intellectual current."

"What we learn is that far from being pure-minded, idealistic and naive, anarchists in China had an uncanny knack for finding themselves on the wrong side of history as far as socialists and progressives are concerned ... we find anarchists actively promoting programs that never had the slightest chance of creating structural change and rapidly frustrating themselves to the point of political capitulation."

Defining Anarchism

In order to understand Chinese anarchism, we need to compare the ideology and political self-definition of Chinese anarchists with their practice. Zarrow gives several descriptions of his own, and a few from some original anarchist sources. According to Zarrow,

"Anarchism can be broadly defined as the belief that individual freedom and social good can be reconciled without coercive agents. In this view, the state may be abolished or brought to a level of minimal functions ... a broad kind of antiauthoritarianism. ... Chinese anarchism broadly represented a set of beliefs about the moral basis for action. To many it seemed no less possible, no more utopian than republicanism, communism, or any other program for change."(2)

Clearly, this definition differs in basic ways from communism. By proposing that significant change can succeed without "coercive agents," one must wonder how. Will big landowners just give up their land when threatened with a "moral basis for action"? History proves otherwise, that no ruling class has ever abdicated its wealth or power, procured and maintained violently and coercively, without coercion.

Chinese anarchists held widely different opinions on questions of methods. Wu Zhihui (who was in Paris, a promoter of science and language reform, and involved with the Guomindang in the 1920s) believed that true education would lead both to true morality among the people and thence instantly to revolution. He made it clear that his political beliefs were no threat to the republic: "My anarchism cannot be realized before three thousand years."(3)

Liu Shifu, however, in spite of his insistence on individual perfection, placed revolution before morality.(4) Liu's anarchist career began in 1912; he established the Conscience Society (Xinshe). He advised a number of people to remain in China (to fight) rather than study abroad (and improve themselves). He believed that since immorality stemmed from the perversions of the social system, a social revolution would lead to a new moral standard, rather than the other way around. Since social evils stem from the existence of government, once the affliction of government is removed, human morality would in this theory immediately revert to its pure state.(5)

Liu's position gets closer to the communist view of an active overthrow. But the sculpting of a socialist morality will also be an active process, since nothing will "immediately revert to its pure state" without political struggle.

Liu Shifu's Definition of Anarcho-communism:

"[We] advocate the abolition of the capitalist system and the creation of a communist society, all without the use of governmental coercion. In sum, we seek absolute liberty on both the economic and the political planes. ... Through the true spirit of liberty, equality, and fraternity we will attain our ideals: a society without the institutions of landlords, capitalists, leaders, officials, representatives, family heads, soldiers, jails, police, courts, laws, religion, or marriage. Then society will consist only of liberty, only of mutual aid and only of the joy of labor ... Anarchism is the inevitable end of evolution ... Thus, it is mistaken to say that anarchism is idealistic and impossible."(6)

Zarrow tries to answer the question: But how was this ideal to be achieved?

"The root of the matter lay in one's learning to be independent-again, a common theme not unique to the anarchists. International social parties would then overthrow the various nations. Gradually the functions of government would be decreased as people learned to govern themselves (zizhi). Then contracts freely agreed upon would replace the legal system (an idea of great appeal at the time), until, in this view, they too could be replaced by the human Way (rendao). ... In this ultimate stage the human Way is that of 'pure reason,' and 'real liberty, real equality, and real love' mark the Datong. ... Most Chinese anarchists would later abjure this kind of blatant utopianism, even without the mystical overtones. But they still shared a faith in social evolution, a sense of the perfectibility of the individual, and a determination to rid the entire would of oppression."(7)

What are the historical similarities and differences between anarchism and communism? Why did communism prevail in China?

In the 1920s, the communists and anarchists both started in the same social groups - "primarily the workers and intellectuals -especially the 'cultural elite.' Later the communists would gain ascendancy in the largest social force - the peasantry - but in the 1920s when communism surpassed anarchism in influence in China we cannot say that a difference in where the movements recruited was the reason for the communist triumph ... [therefore] the character of the two ideologies themselves stands as an explanation for the ascendancy of the communist movement over the anarchist one."

Zarrow gives a nice summary of the difference in the ideologies that led to communism's relative importance in China.

"...the intellectual tools of the anarchists included ideas about the evolution of societies, human nature, and human potentiality for which the evidence remains ambiguous. But the Marxist intellectual analysis in China led directly to effective practice: linking communist organization with worker and then peasant movements, in order to give these movements a revolutionary thrust ... In some cases, especially in labor organization, the anarchists were there first ... But anarchist attention to means over ends and organizational weakness were probably fatal in the long run."(8)

"Zarrow goes on to accept the basic anarchist contention that anarchism is 'more pure' than communism because it sanctions no stages of coercion like the dictatorship of the proletariat that is central to Marxism ...[and that] Marxists' compromise with principles ... is the reason that Marxism appears more successful than anarchism as an ideology."

Certainly it would be nice not to need to kill anyone in the process of revolution, but those capitalists just don't seem like the types to give away their property without a fight. The violence that is currently inflicted on the world's people must stop, but purity and abstract principles won't stop it. If "Marxism appears more successful" based on historical facts, then it probably is more successful. To verify that Maoism was indeed more successful in practice, we need to examine what the Chinese anarchists actually did.

The Revolution of 1911 lead to the end of the Chinese monarchy in 1912 (9) and "no self-avowed anarchist movement existed in China itself until 1912."(10) The Guomindang (GMD) "had been created as an open, electioneering political party, out of the revolutionary T'ung Meng Hui and other groups."(11) The Chinese Communist Party was organized in 1921 in Shanghai. The Nationalist Revolution took place from 1925-1928, with Chiang Kai-shek as leader.(12) In 1927, the revolutionary government was dominated by the alliance between the left-wing of the GMD and the communists.

Anarchist Capitulation

Anarchists in China did not sustain their activist commitments like communists did. Both books provide examples of the eventual capitulation of many prominent anarchists. He Zhen, an anarchist feminist, and her husband Liu Shipei supported monarchism after 1914. He Zhen may also have helped split Sun Yatsen's "Revolutionary Alliance" (Tongmenghui). (13)

Sun Yat-sen was founder of the GMD, and may have been an anarchist himself.(14) However, the GMD was pro-capitalist while under Chiang Kai-shek, especially by the 1940s. Yet other supposedly dedicated anarchists supported the GMD even after the Liberation of China in 1949; several anarchists were on the central committee of the GMD, and many anarchists simply joined the GMD. Some anarchists in the GMD voted to expel communists from the GMD and arrest the communists in Shanghai.

"'Anarchists' joining the GMD, taking posts in the Japanese puppet regime, aiding monarchist governments or movements or accepting government positions in republican organizations would be a much more generally accurate picture of the Chinese anarchist movement than the image of the self-reliant activity of the Liu Shifu types. The anarchists joined the state or proto-state organizations all the while proclaiming their anarchism, whereas the Marxists never claimed to be able to do without seizing state power."

It's understandable why the anarchists ended up without a consistent revolutionary practice: "Anarchists claim to oppose all politics which is impractical because it leaves them no real way to change the world; and leads to compromise of anarchist goals and capitulation to the status quo."

Notes:
1. Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution, by Arif Dirlik (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), and Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) by Peter Zarrow; Reviewed by Henry Park, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Vol. 24 No. 2 (1994). Quotes from this article unless otherwise noted.
2. Zarrow, pp. 2-3.
3. Zarrow, p. 65.
4. Zarrow, p. 215.
5. Zarrow pp. 213-5.
6. Zarrow p. 214.
7. Zarrow pp. 216-17.
8. Zarrow p. 224.
9. Fairbank, John King; The United States and China, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press), 1983. p. 220.
10. Zarrow, p. 3.
11. Fairbank, p. 222.
12. Fairbank, p. 236.
13. Zarrow, p. 35.
14. Fairbank, p. 216.

Buy Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution
Buy Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture


Argument without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy
by Robert S. McNamara, James Blight, Thomas Biersteker & Col. Herbert Schandler
(NY: Public Affairs, 1999), 479pp. pb.

War criminal, former Ford Motor Company executive and recent president of the World Bank, Robert S. McNamara has worked through a process resulting in this very satisfying book. Young people with no understanding of the 1960s and older people seeking to piece the puzzle together will find this book very useful.

Genocide

Right on the book jacket in the first sentence it says, "More than three million people were killed in the Vietnam War." By the end of the paragraph, we learn that Vietnamese leaders participated in dialogues reprinted in the book. For these two reasons alone--honesty about the scale of violence and Vietnamese participation--this book is the most useful one by the imperialists about the Vietnam War yet.

Throughout the book, "United States Secretary of Defense" McNamara from 1961-1968 explains that the United States Government could have "won" the war, only if genocide is winning or risking all-out nuclear war is winning. In other words, McNamara does not hide that the Yankee military killed 3.8 million Vietnamese, lost 58,000 Amerikans and still did not persuade the Vietnamese people of the U.$. imperialist way of life.(p. 1)

As a bourgeois internationalist, McNamara went on to be an influential president of the World Bank and he also upholds the UN charter. Toward that end, he advocates giving a greater role to "morality" in U.S. foreign policy and he believes the Amerikan people will support such a change. "'Americans are a moralistic people, and their concern carries over into foreign policy. . . . Given the nature of American political culture, there will always be a demand for moral expression in foreign policy."(p. 4)

"Mistake"

When the United States finally and completely lost the Vietnam War in 1975, the general watchword was "mistake" and "learned its lesson." Yet, anyone reading the imperialist media at the time would see there was not much substance behind this idea. What was the mistake and lesson learned one would wonder. This question was answered so indecisively that President Reagan elected in 1980 popularized the myth that the Yankee imperialists could have won the Vietnam War if the military had been freed from corrupt politicians' control.

McNamara was the cabinet official in the Kennedy and Johnson administration responsible for the war and even he says he could not come up with the "lessons learned" chapter of his book until 1995. His earlier book on the Vietnam War titled "In Retrospect" in which he admitted mistakes and took blame was the spark for a series of conferences involving Vietnamese officials and scholars. In 1999, McNamara is 83, but he is still struggling arduously he says to learn the lessons for peace in the 21st century. Like MIM, he observes that 160 million died in wars in the 20th century.(p. 2)

The full meaning of what McNamara means by "mistake" is that he believes the Vietnam War could have been prevented by its leaders. The Vietnamese could have cultivated Amerikan doves in the imperialist leadership and people like McNamara could have paid closer attention, says McNamara. "We all make choices. We observe the results."(p. 5) That's McNamara's way of saying there are no inevitable tides or forces in history. As an example he says that President Kennedy did not bomb Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis and he successfully resisted pressure to do so. Likewise we learn in the book that the Joint Chiefs of Staff constantly advised President Johnson to go to all-out war and invade northern Vietnam (above the 17th parallel.)

McNamara's paradigm is demonstrated by his visit to Castro in 1992 to replay some of the Cuban Missile Crisis history. It turns out that as "Secretary of Defense," he did not know how close he came to nuclear disaster in October, 1962. He learned that Castro had tactical nuclear weapons and had those 180,000 U.S. troops gone ashore in Cuba, they would have been used. Castro said it would have been the end of Cuba and probably the world and McNamara agreed.(pp. 10-1) McNamara said he hoped that he would not do the same thing if in Castro's shoes.

MIM would say that McNamara is correct that it is possible to learn from history. The dialectic has not completed its work with McNamara though, because he does not acknowledge the blame for invasion belonging to imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, which is very impersonal and not just a matter of occasional choices by leaders.

Mao's role

According to McNamara, it is possible to see from Chinese documents and U.S. intelligence that Mao was serious about sending troops to Vietnam. Since Mao's own son had died in the Korean War (1950-3) when the U.S. troops invaded the northern part of Korea, the United States should not have needed anymore proof than it had of China's commitment to internationalism.

A picture also emerges that contrary to what some Trotskyists sometimes say (and no doubt the opportunist-splittists can be found saying the exact opposite as well), the Maoists were not "selling out" Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, but pushing the Vietnamese toward military victory they did not want quite as much. In fact, the relative "hard-liners" in Vietnam were Maoists in the southern region of Vietnam according to McNamara--Le Duan and Gen. Nguyen Chi Thanh. Truong Chinh and Vo Nguyen Giap of the North were more pro-Soviet.(pp. 181-2) The Maoists came to dominate the whole Vietnamese communist party in the early and mid-1960s. This picture of ideological division within the Vietnamese party is not something MIM can confirm. We only know that there were some comrades who were Maoists while others leaned toward the Soviets.

Only in the late 1960s did the Soviets become the dominant partner according to McNamara. The southern Vietnamese comrades of the 1960s wanted to go ahead to military victory no matter how much it would provoke the imperialists while others said they should not bring down the government even though they could, because they were not ready to defeat the Yankee invasion that would result. The way the imperialists portrayed this was that Mao was the war-monger and Vietnam would have been open to peaceful overtures: "Mao was relentless in pushing Hanoi toward military confrontation with the United States, and it was understood in Hanoi that the Chinese would not mind if the Hanoi government was weakened as a result, so long as it survived as a communist buffer next door to China."(p. 112; see also p. 127) Obviously the imperialists were trying to create a split, which points up why communists must never split over tactical questions or strategic mistakes. Only when questions reach the level of line is there a possibility there should be split. There will always be those who say a strategy is too soft or too hard, too optimistic or too pessimistic. If a split occurs in the proletarian camp every time there is a disagreement on the assessment of the balance of forces, then there won't be a proletarian camp.

McNamara also makes it clear that the U.S. imperialists preferred to deal with the Soviet Union. The Soviets were more likely to follow diplomatic niceties and the Chinese in retrospect were suspect friends of the Vietnamese because of 1000 years of history between imperial China and Vietnam. McNamara goes so far as to say: "Soviet motives in aiding the Vietminh, and later the government in Hanoi, were clearly ideological."(p. 116)

In 1954, the Soviet Union and China prevailed on the Vietnamese comrades to split Vietnam like Korea so that there would be peace with the Yankees--at least according to the Vietnamese presented in this book. Because of distrust created in the Vietnamese by the 1954 situation, China and the Soviets had no role in the final Paris Peace Conference that settled the Vietnam War in 1973. Only in connection to 1954 is there some resentment toward Chinese "sellout" apparent in this book; however, MIM would point out as always that hard-core Trotskyists make going on the offensive a dogma despite never actually implementing a successful offensive since 1924. They do not understand the difference between moralizing and the science of proletarian victory. We believe it was a reasonable assessment of the balance of forces to believe that having just ended the Korean War, a similar partition of Vietnam was the way to go in 1954. The Chinese had fought and suffered heavy casualties in the Korean War; the Chinese had not just a scientific role in the struggle but also a blood role.

Another role that Mao had was in inspiring the war strategy. According to McNamara, the U.S. military leaders could not figure out a way to win against "People's War." "What kind of war--conventional or guerrilla--might we develop? Answer: Neither. We encountered something called 'people's war,' which we did not anticipate or understand."(p. 58)

For more on Chinese aid to Vietnamese comrades during the Vietnam War, see (pp. 129, 287, 412).

U.S. imperialist victory impossible

In this book, we finally get a clear picture of the upper echelons of imperialists and what they were thinking strategically during the Vietnam War. In retrospect it should have been clear all along why the U.S. imperialists thought they could not "win" the war--at least not until recent revisionist book-writers inspired by rabid reactionary chauvinists like Reagan.

It turns out that both "defense" and CIA intelligence knew the war could not be won and they told President Johnson. They calculated that if they invaded northern Vietnam (Vietnam above the 17th parallel), Mao would send troops welcomed by Vietnam to fight the U.$. invaders--something confirmed by the Vietnamese officials and already seen in the Korean War.

Meanwhile, no one in the U.S. government believed there was a possibility that the U.S.-backed regime in southern Vietnam (the region below the 17th parallel) would survive against the people. "By the end of 1967 the United States had 107 battalions, and a total of 525,000 men in Vietnam, all the while mounting a virtually unprecedented bombing campaign against the North."(p. 355) This amount of force did not even succeed in propping up the puppet regime in the South. Hence, from the military angle, the choice was between invading northern Vietnam and wiping it out or losing. Those in favor of wiping out northern Vietnam believed the battle in the South would end in Yankee favor if the North were wiped out.

If China had sent in troops to fight the United States it would have been another Korean War all over again, and McNamara knew not even the U.S. people would stand for that. He also calculated there was no saying how embarrassed the Soviet Union would be if Mao's China had to do all the heavy fighting against the United States. Perhaps the Soviet Union would also take aggressive action, including nuclear weapons. Hence, the idea that the United States could waltz into a country created by treaty with Western imperialism at Geneva in 1954 was silly on imperialist terms. The imperialists had to reckon with the Chinese revolutionaries and the contention of Soviet social-imperialists. That is not to mention that victory by killing off all the people of Vietnam would leave the Yankees in charge of nothing. It is for these reasons that the Yankee concluded that even on imperialist terms it would be better to surrender.

From MIM's perspective that conclusion is better than nothing, but not a very thorough basis for peace. It is still a variant of "might makes right." Only we communists are seriously addressing underlying causes of war and peace. McNamara and company are simply working to avoid "mistakes." That is the difference between our approaches. McNamara won't concede that capitalism makes war more likely than socialism does. He believes leaders must simply stand tall against their people and advisers urging them to war. In contrast, we evaluate the pressures on leaders and seek to reduce those pressures on a regular basis.

History

According to the Vietnamese military leaders, 1954 was a missed chance for peace. The French were withdrawing after military defeat by the Vietnamese people. A peace treaty at Geneva was signed. Yet, the United States was aloof at the Geneva meetings and according to McNamara, the reason was the United States did not care much. However, the British and French had already decided that partition of Vietnam was the best solution and agreed with the Soviets and Chinese.(p. 71)

Contrary to the image of the West as the propagators of democracy, the Vietnamese communists favored all-Vietnam elections as mandated by the 1954 Geneva accord. Yet, in 1956, the West and anti-communists refused to carry out the Vietnam-wide elections.(p. 75) They feared loss and wanted ongoing partition.

According to McNamara, the United States only paid for the French war up till 1954 as a favor to the French, not because the U.S. imperialists cared about Vietnam. The United States simply wanted France to be a firm friend in Europe.(pp. 78, 96) Thus it was a matter of solidifying the imperialist bloc against the Soviet Union. He calls bowing to France and earning Vietnamese enmity a mistake.

Next, in the early 1960s, we learn that McNamara and a handful of career diplomats and State Department people favored making Laos, Cambodia and southern Vietnam neutral countries. Some were also open to the idea of coalition government with the NLF, the communist-led opposition movement in southern Vietnam that included non-communists. However, his efforts failed and soon he was sidelined and agreeing to send Gen. Westmoreland all the troops he asked for. It was not until McNamara left office that the war ended.

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Blood Red Sunset
by Mao Bo
Viking Press, 1995
861 pp.
Ma Bo Howard Goldblatt, translator

Blood Red Sunset: A Memoir of the Chinese Cultural Revolution NY, NY: Viking, 1995, 371 pp. hb

reviewed by MC5 June 4, 2000

Ma Bo was a male Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution in China (1966-1976) and this book is about that period of time which Ma Bo spent mostly in Inner Mongolia with herders of the Mongol national minority.

MIM's 1999 Congress has already summed up the type of memoirs that the bourgeois press is cranking out with tremendous speed in connection to the Cultural Revolution: "the mode of production and structure of society with regard to patriarchy bored the rightists and ultraleftists during the Cultural Revolution. They also didn't like it when Mao kept telling them the enemy was only five percent of the party--and not a different five percent every day. They sought to bring about disunity in the proletarian camp by focussing on lifestyle questions." The memoirs being printed sometimes referred to as "survivor" literature or the like are the perfect genre for promoting the disunity of the proletarian camp if unchecked.

By its nature, any biography or autobiography will focus on the individual at the expense of class, nations and genders. Some authors will make up for that weakness while others will glorify that weakness by accentuating subjective and partial factual descriptions. Ma Bo is one of the many Chinese authors caught up in this sub- reformist trap, but the benefit of this book is that an astute proletarian reader can see all of what MIM is saying in one author.

Ma Bo was the son of Right-leaning high-ranking party officials. His mother was under criticism for a novel she wrote for the youth and his father once had the rank equivalent to an army commander (vice- minister).(p. 58-9) His young friend Xu Zuo who later in life proves to be Ma Bo's best -- maybe life-saving --ally was the son of a former vice-minister who disgraced himself in the Great Leap. People whose parents achieved such rank were conservative in wanting to retain that rank and filled themselves with pride. Ma Bo said in regard to his first sight of the womyn he fell in love with, "Words fail me when I try to describe what it was like to see her all alone on the snow-covered steppe. I always believed that children of senior officials were leaves from the same tree. She and I didn't meet often, but I considered her a friend."(p. 62)

Her father was another very high official purged and then killed by the masses. Ma Bo openly defended her father as not being counterrevolutionary and got himself in trouble. The social background of Ma Bo's network and Ma Bo's obsession with it is not surprising, because the Western publishing houses always publish 1000 memoirs of people of high social background for every one by people of proletarian background. The few things that Westerners read about China end up being by pre- scientific upper-class intellectuals of the "dissident" sort.

During the Cultural Revolution, Ma Bo's confusion in politics appeared almost immediately. He joined a conservative Red Guard organization designed to protect their party official parents from attack called the United Action Committee. Ma Bo does not fill in readers on this organization, so MIM will have to instead, because this organization is the key to Ma Bo's subsequent political development or lack thereof. The United Action Committee was the largest Red Guard faction in Beijing. It's leaders came under arrest at the end of 1966. Jiang Qing criticized the Beijing Garrison Command for supporting Ma Bo's Red Guard faction instead of the more radical Red Guards. Zhou Enlai also called on the military to stop supporting the conservatives and to help the leftists in the Red Guard movement to form the core of a united Red Guard movement. At the same time, Zhou Enlai pressed Mao successfully to release the United Action Commitee members under arrest. From this conflict, Ma Bo and others learned some of the distinctions in the central leadership in the party. In the critical struggle that required the conservatives to unite under a radical leadership core, the conservatives put forward different slogans. By this time they were happy to criticize Liu Shaoqi, because he was already a "dead dog," but instead of seeking a big struggle and big alliance to replace old power-holders,(1) the conservatives quoted Lin Biao that "'we should make ourselves the object of revolution. . . . If one does not revolutionize oneself, the revolution cannot proceed smoothly.'"(2) The intention of this statement issued at the height of ultraleftism in the Cultural Revolution was to keep the ultraleft from splitting the proletarian camp by finding fault with all their peers' individual behaviors. Instead, this statement and others failed to dig up the sub-reformist roots of rightist and ultraleft individualist thinking and led to a new wave of "self- cultivation," Confucian/Liu Shaoqi style. As a result, at this critical juncture of the revolution, the radicals dominated the media and all officials paid lip service to them, but power did not change hands: "all the vice- premiers survived, and their mass organizations also survived, so that the radicals gained nothing in terms of power."(3)

Throughout China one faction of Red Guards arose to defend party members loyal to Deng Xiaoping, Liu Shaoqi etc. by deflecting the spear of attack away from party members. These Red Guards turned out to be the ones that would vacillate wildly from rightist to ultraleft, sometimes aping their radical counterparts in the process, thereby lending further to confusion and also discrediting the whole Cultural Revolution. In their original rightist mode, Ma Bo's type of Red Guard had nothing to say about the structure of society. In the ultraleft mode, they found flaw in everyone and tended toward anarchism. When Ma Bo got to Inner Mongolia, he and his friends took up anarchism in the first movement to criticize party officials.(p. 69) Whether in rightist or ultraleftist guise, the Red Guards of Ma Bo's sort left the power- holders and direction of society unchanged.

Not surprisingly, Ma Bo's memoirs are very similar to those of the widow of N. Bukharin in the Soviet Union in that they both focus on persynal loyalties, integrity and other supposedly timeless and context-less elements of so-called character. Under this sort of thinking, there is no mode of production, only individuals of outstanding or weak "character." Someone who is loyal is loyal even if the one he or she is loyal to turns into Adolf Hitler. According to Ma Bo and his friend Lei Xia, the turncoat is lowest of low making all other categories of people look good. Ma Bo's memoirs are even worse than Anna Larina's, because she at least had some idea of the general line struggle over the direction of society and chooses to downplay the line struggles. Ma Bo either avoids all such discussion or was completely unaware of such line struggle.

Ma Bo may protest that he is reporting on his political life and so is not avoiding line struggle, but failure to take a subject matter to the level of what Mao called "rational knowledge" is indeed failure to present the line struggle to readers. All that Ma Bo does is show the subjective perceptions of a member of the pre- scientific intelligentsia who never engaged the line he presumably would have been attacking had he known how. Ma Bo knew enough to criticize Jiang Qing for being an "empress dowager" allegedly keeping Mao under wraps while she ran the show,(pp. 121-2, 132) but beyond that he knew nothing of the differences in direction offered by Deng and Jiang Qing. He even admitted to lying about not smearing Jiang Qing. He knew he did smear Jiang Qing and then denied it as a matter of pride. The reader is only lucky that Ma Bo admitted it in print. Ma Bo knew his fortunes improved when Jiang Qing's fortunes declined, but he did not know anything about the line differences. At the end of the book he is declaiming her again, with no substance: "'How could you have been such a fool, Chairman Mao, to marry someone like that? Your people are suffering terribly.'"(p. 364) Then he says, "'China, you cowered beneath the skirts of a witch.'"(p. 364)There was no mention of family farming, running industry for profit, pay incentives to increase work, allowing foreign exploiters use of Chinese workers, art in the service of proletarian politics etc.--the issues which divided Deng and Jiang.

It is not surprising to us that Ma Bo came from a fiction-writing family and his own mother criticized him for being stuck in bourgeois novels.(p. 185) Cultural intellectuals can do great damage to movements, and we refer to people like Ma Bo who may or may not be vaguely revolutionary at the level of emotions and feelings as the "pre-scientific intelligentsia." Ma Bo put in tremendous energy trying to be revolutionary and he definitely had his good side that served Mao's line, but on the whole his political consciousness never developed to channel his own tremendous energy.

On the plus side, Ma Bo was willing to criticize his mother's work, ran away to go fight U.$. imperialists in Vietnam (without succeeding) and above all, he took up the call to go to the countryside by volunteering for perhaps the most difficult assignment possible, the freezing cold of remote Inner Mongolia where the people lived a very poor life. He went from being an elite Beijing student to asking for permission to go to the most difficult military conditions in China.

When he arrived in Inner Mongolia, he imagined himself to be one of the most radical of radical Red Guards and he beat up a herder in such a way that he believes he caused the man's subsequent death. As promised, Ma Bo did not varnish his account. Attacking a herder was ultraleft--seeing too many enemies- - and it demonstrated Ma Bo's lack of an overall view of society, a sense of its structure and who would be enemy and who would not be. In particular, we should stress that in handling the pre-scientific intelligentsia like Ma Bo, there is lacking a quantitative sense. Hence, when a herder expresses some bourgeois feelings, even slightly, Ma Bo pounces for the (physical) attack, because Ma Bo himself operates at the level of feelings.

By the way, Ma Bo appears to have been the strongest persyn in the whole book, as he demonstrates in wrestling matches, fights and physical labor--chopping down 400 trees a day for instance. His work ranged from lumber, to coal, to dynamiting to horse driving. In this regard, the book is not a run- of-the-mill whining of the pre- scientific intelligentsia. We gain some insight into manual labor from the perspective of the physically strong.

Right away, Ma Bo's expedition to Inner Mongolia is one of self- esteem and pride. He complains immediately that no one greeted him as a hero the way the people in the countryside greeted students from the cities in the newspapers.(p. 12)

Then following the practice of Red Guards in the cities, Ma Bo and Lei Xia search a herder's hut for hidden wealth and old world possessions. They found none and killed the herder's dog. Xu Zuo showed up to talk sense, but Ma Bo stood his ground. The herder was classed as a "poor peasant," but Ma Bo said it didn't matter and that the beaten man was beaten in such a way as to be OK later.(p. 18) Interestingly enough, the revolutionary committee in the locale backed Ma Bo up and put the man who cracked Ma Bo's skull in the fight under supervision.(p. 19) The account raises the problem of memoirs--that the other side is not heard.

In this case, there may be two sides not heard, the side of the herders and the side of the revolutionary committee on why this particular herder may have been suspect. From the point of view of the bourgeoisie, it does not matter whose side is correct: the strongest and wealthiest individuals always win when fights are reduced to a one-on-one level. Thus, the more he-said-she-said conflicts and rumors in the whole society, the better from the point of view of the bourgeoisie--if the oppressed and exploited take the bait. Spreading these memoirs does exactly that. The preferred course of the oppressed and exploited is to keep things focussed at the group level with a firm eye to numbers and overall direction while letting the bourgeoisie corrode itself with its own individualism, subjectivism and partial view of things.

The same thing in the United $tates is seen in cases of crime. Individual cases are handled incorrectly all the time. Witnesses have proved unreliable in about one-third to one-half of all situations. There is a tendency of individualists and pre-scientific people to focus on each case, instead of the statistics that show the United $tates is the world's imprisonment leader. While the disposition of each case is uncertain, the overall number of prisoners is not, but somehow ideology blocks the conclusions that would have to be drawn about the injustice system in the United $tates overall, while there is no shortage of opinion about the supposed crimes of O.J. Simpson or Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky.

Does MIM really know if Ma Bo deserved his arrest and subsequent rehabilitation or not? Certainly Ma Bo had his good side, but in the United $tates, he could have done a lot more prison time just for his numerous fights, never mind his criticisms of Jiang Qing and networking with reactionaries. As it was, Ma Bo was briefly arrested and then sent out to labor in the most difficult places in Inner Mongolia. He says in his diary of 1970: "Letting me live among other people but forbidding them to have anything to do with me is worse than dropping me in the middle of a desert. I'd love to find some sympathy somewhere; even pity would do."(p. 169)

Ma Bo tries to impress us with his sincerity. Everywhere throughout the book, he is looking at emotions, not results or direction. Sentences like the following abound: "I wanted to see if there was any sympathy hidden in her eyes, but she averted them."(p. 159) For Ma Bo, emotional contact with humyns was everything and without it he says he became a pure animal.

Not surprisingly, Ma Bo had to be reminded that his ideas about humyn character are wrong. When Mao's right-hand Lin Biao attempted a coup and died fleeing, Ma Bo concluded that everything Lin ever did was wrong. The party had to tell him: "You can stop dreaming. Anyone who opposed Lin Biao before his fall from power is a counterrevolutionary."(pp. 224, 254) Across China, there were those like Ma Bo trying to say that Lin was always no good and they had been right to criticize him based on their presumedly constant persynal characters.

With such an obsession on persynal character the whole way through the book, it is not surprising that the book missed completely on the larger issues. The book jacket denounces the environmental destruction wrought during the Cultural Revolution, but Ma Bo only mustered a paragraph or two of denunciation without the details, (e.g., p. 352) and in characteristic self-contradiction but consistent pride he says a few pages later: "The company had three buildings when we arrived; now the people were housed in nearly two hundred. There wasn't a single tree on the steppe when we arrived; now there was a line of them, all green and shiny, behind the company area. The herdsmen never ate green vegetables before we arrived; now the company could boast a fifty- acre truck farm, with turnips, squash, potatoes, and scallions. Those were the changes we wrought."(p. 363)

It is a measure of how shallow Western politics and media are that an accusation about an historical period's devastation of the environment is repeated so casually with so little evidence, taking advantage of the currents of anti- communism, individualism and fascination with upper- class "dissidents." Reading the latter paragraph from Ma Bo above, one could just have easily concluded that the Red Guard were green paragons.

Conclusion

The translation into English is lively, making full use of slang and idioms appropriate to young and middle- aged people of the United $tates today. It is also very graphic and unvarnished with frequent descriptions of feces and mucous. The book is very much a Western autobiography that Westerners will relate to very easily--unfortunately without getting too deeply into politics. We can only hope that it will raise some things that people will look into more fully later in life.

Notes: 1. Hong Yung Lee, The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Berkeley, CA: 1978), pp. 192-8. 2. Ibid., p. 199. 3. Ibid., pp. 200-1.

[Another review of the Ma Bo book focussing just on patriarchy will appear in a subsequent issue of MIM Notes.]

Postscript on gender

reviewed by MC5 June 4, 2000

Ma Bo and patriarchy

In a previous review, MIM handled Ma Bo's general lack of political development and unscientific view of life during the Cultural Revolution in China (1966-1976). Here we handle his views of patriarchy. Ma Bo had a hard time with the opposite sex from fourth grade onwards. He was afraid of being called a "sex fiend." He wrote a self-criticism in 1964 for his preoccupation with sex.(p. 24)

In the depths of his struggles in Inner Mongolia where he came to be known as an "active counterrevolutionary," he said only the thought of a pretty womyn he liked kept him alive. He constantly alternated between thinking he had higher revolutionary aspirations to thinking he went all the way to Inner Mongolia only to have the same obsessions with sex.(p. 25)

In his military unit, people were not allowed to start romances inside or outside the unit for at least three years. The order was in line with the push toward later marriages in China.(p. 175) We don't know if this was onerous to everyone the way it was to Ma Bo and presumably city youth, especially those from the pre- scientific intelligentsia.

One interesting observation that Ma Bo makes is that in his constant search for approval from others, he often wished he was a womyn, because he believed people were nicer to wimmin than men, and in Ma Bo's case, the strongest man in the area and deemed threatening. From MIM's perspective, Ma Bo spent much too much time concerned about his self-esteem and not enough time concerned with his scientific understanding. His feelings led him astray often, landing him in fights and directing his political activity in a vacillating direction.

A related point is that Ma Bo says that party leaders tended to end up with pretty wimmin around them.

When the party leaders had sex, there ended up being a scandal and demotions, but nothing about the fact that pretty wimmin were well treated or hung around party leaders was wrong per se. Ma Bo felt discriminated against.

While Ma Bo's accentuated male features of muscle landed him harder and harder work and higher expectations, pretty wimmin obtained good treatment according to Ma Bo. "Pretty girls were always welcome in the offices of the men who ran the show; they were first in line for promotions and got all the cushy assignments. Unlike us boys, who worked our asses off for nothing."(p. 315) We suspect that Ma Bo's charge is true, at least in some locales in revolutionary China under Mao. (Today wimmin do a disproportionate share of China's field work, while men take the easy jobs in the city.) It would be difficult to detect and certainly impossible to prevent promotions of wimmin based on their looks. If Ma Bo's charge is true, this is an interesting example of how sexual privilege works according to the MIM line, but once again, MIM would say it does not mean the society is not going forward. For that matter, we are quite sure that although China made great strides statistically compared with pre- revolutionary China and Asian societies that remained capitalist, wimmin climbing through the political ranks had yet to attain their 50% share.

On a related point, Ma Bo felt that wimmin still had old attitudes toward men. Ma Bo was the strongest person around, and hence if his accentuated male characteristics were attractive to the opposite sex, he should have had attention from wimmin, after his three years of service were up. Instead, he felt that "The local girls avoided you as soon as they heard you were a driver. They called us 'horse-ass nibblers.'"(p. 326)

MIM has no intention of implementing policies that forbid sex in the military or elsewhere. Only very narrow conflict-of- interest situations warrant not having romantic relations across professional boundaries.

Too much Christian-type energy gets wasted on sex issues that divert from scientific development.

Ma Bo's political leaders started dropping off like flies in sex scandals. Wang Wanping was a medical doctor in his military unit, Company Seven. Wang made up a story about rape by a national minority herdsman so as to explain why his girlfriend had to have an abortion.(pp. 174-5) Such things would happen even more often in the United $tates in any attempt to impose a sex-related behavior policy like the one in China.

Then Ma Bo's number one enemy political commissar Shen got caught having affairs.(pp. 216-7) He was replaced with Ma Bo's allies, a turning point in his struggle for rehabilitation.

One of the wimmin involved in the affair was known to be obsessed with joining the party. She received her application the day after sleeping with the party official in charge. When she criticized Ma Bo for being counterrevolutionary, Ma Bo dismissed it as coming from someone "who thought nothing of using her body to gain admission to the party."(p. 273) MIM trains its people in science. Whether or not someone used her body to join the party, her statement is either true or false independent of that fact. Ma Bo should have dealt with the substance of what she said about him. It is the bourgeoisie that benefits from obscuring the truth and making everything a question of individual motivations and personal attacks. When people are forced to line up on differing sides of great questions, it is the bourgeoisie that is going to lose. That is why the bourgeoisie sidetracks the people from the great questions and lowers them into personality conflicts.

Of course the people who make revolution are flawed at all times, but that does not mean the society cannot progress in spite of those flaws by applying science to class struggle. People are not born knowing how to manufacture penicillin and so are born with the flaw of being able to die from the slightest infection; however, the application of science lets people surpass the weaknesses they are born with or grow up with.

Only a generation earlier, wimmin in China did not aspire to careers of their own. Now according to Ma Bo, there are wimmin who not only want careers, but they set about aggressively to get careers in political power and use tools they shouldn't. That's not all bad.

MIM does not want to be relativist: Having sex with a man to gain a party membership application is wrong. However, in the scale of things, it's a less than secondary wrong. If the party or the revolutionary masses find themselves bogged down in examining cases like this, they will definitely throw out the revolutionary baby with the bath water.

The radical scientist asks right away, had this womyn had the opportunity to get an application from a womyn, would she have traded sex for power? Would her womyn political comrade leader have forced sex for the party application? In other words, if the structure of society were already correct, would this problem of trading sex for party applications still exist? MIM thinks not in most cases. Rather than focussing on what the individual did wrong, in millions of cases, we prefer to change the underlying situation and forget about the cases. It tires us out and distracts us from the things we have to do change the structure.

With regard to the social structure of China, if China had accomplished a 50% share of wimmin in political power, it might be time to crack down on wimmin like the one Ma Bo complained of. Alternatively it might turn out to be necessary to have one more radical structural change before all the wimmin trading sex for power disappear--not to mention the men who get involved in withholding power for sex.

Yet, since no modern society has achieved a 50% share of wimmin in political power, we do not know that there would be any wimmin who would trade sex for power once equality had been achieved. Ma Bo's complaint may only make the gender structure of political power worse and thereby increase the chances that wimmin trade sex for power. Since men currently monopolize political power everywhere, it is wrong to put wimmin or men under suspicion for political contact with each other. The structure has to be dealt with first, and only secondly or thirdly or fourthly the individual behavior of the tiny minority that will cling to the past no matter how easy it is to relinquish it once the structure of society has changed.

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A Bright Shining Lie
by Neil Sheehan
Vintage Press, 1989
861 pp.

Even though it was written by a reformist liberal and tells the history of the Vietnam War through the experiences of an Amerikan military commander and psy-war operative, Neil Sheehan's "A Bright Shining Lie" is a useful book for anti-imperialists. Sheehan analyzes both broad strategies and small case studies in order to tell how Vietnamese revolutionaries defeated the Amerikan military, despite the latter's immense advantage in technology and sheer firepower.

For example, Sheehan devotes one whole chapter to the battle of Ap Bac, where southern Vietnamese guerrillas with no heavy weapons defeated a force three times their size, shooting down several Amerikan helicopters and routing a column of armored vehicles along the way. Sheehan uses this to illustrate how the guerrillas adapted their tactics to defeat the "invincible" armored vehicles and to contrast the discipline and determination of the guerrillas against the timidity and calculated ineptitude of the south Vietnamese puppet troops - most of whom were mercenaries or conscripts and saw no point to risking their necks for the Saigon government du jour.

Because of battle accounts like this, which detail the heroism and immense sacrifices made by the Vietnamese revolutionary forces, the book is often suspenseful and inspiring.

John Paul Vann, the Amerikan whose life Sheehan follows, was disgusted with the corruption of the south Vietnamese government and the callous disregard the Amerikan military showed for the life of the civilian population. Sheehan documents the brutality of the "strategic hamlet" programs and "free fire zones," which Vann (correctly) thought would make the Vietnamese hate the united $tates. Instead of "bombing Vietnam into the stone age," Vann thought that the u.$. should back a program of land reform and democratization in the countryside, while waging "low intensity warfare" against the guerrillas. This way the people in south Vietnam would come to identify with the puppet regime in Saigon. What Vann never realized was that the revolutionaries were carrying out land reform and combating corruption -- as part of their program to fight for the will of the Vietnamese people. The people of south Vietnam already largely identified with the underground revolutionary government. Attacking the revolutionary movement meant attacking the interests of the people of Vietnam. The Vietnamese did not need Amerikan land reform imposed by military force. Vann's cynicism is demonstrated in the fact that he wanted the Amerikan military in Vietnam to push a program that the Vietnamese revolutionaries were carrying out already.

This why imperialism is bound to be defeated. Vann was right: If the Amerikans were to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese, they had to solve pressing Vietnamese political and social problems and stop massacring them indiscriminately. But the imperialists had created the pressing Vietnamese problems -- directly or indirectly, beginning with imperialist opposition to a truly independent and socialist Vietnam. The imperialist mission was not to solve the problems of their own creation, instead they relied on guns and bombs to try and force the Vietnamese to accept their will.

MIM Theory no. 4: A Sprial Trajectory (available from MIM for $5) includes a detailed discussion of successful imperialist co-optation of the Communist strategy of land-reform as used in China. "The United States and East Asian capitalists jumped on the bandwagon of class struggle at a crucial point at the completion of World War II and the Korean War. ... They copied land reform [from China]. Why did they copy it? Because the communists had just kicked capitalist ass in China and were starting to do the same in Korea and Vietnam."(p. 77)

MT4 goes on to explain why imperialism can only succeed in making such reforms in a few colonies, and how the exceptional countries in which imperialist-sponsored land reform succeeds can only exist within the rule of imperialist exploitation of the majority of nations. The case of Vietnam demonstrates that imperialism is not principally interested in land reform for the interests of the people. Amerika used land reform to achieve control of south Korea and the other Asian Tigers, but spend decades working to destroy the benefits of land reform in Vietnam.

The massive bombing in Vietnam is another example of how the imperialists' nature gets in the way even of their own strategizing. The bombing in north and south Vietnam had little military value and was detrimental politically, but it remained a central part of Amerikan strategy throughout the war. Sheehan hints that this was because aircraft and bomb production was very profitable.

In typical liberal fashion, Sheehan occasionally slanders the Vietnamese revolutionaries. He claims that the revolutionaries ruled the city of Hue through terror and violence when they liberated it during the Tet offensive - but a French reporter in the city at the time remarked at how supportive the population was of the revolutionaries. The revolutionaries did kill a handful of corrupt local officials, but there is no evidence that they killed people on the scale Sheehan and the CIA cite (see Marilyn Young, "The Vietnam Wars").

As long as the reader keeps a critical perspective, "A Bright Shining Lie" can serve as a good introduction to the history of the Vietnam War - which is important, as more and more Amerikans only know of Vietnam through Sylvester Stallone or Chuck Norris movies.

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Censored 1999: The News That Didn't Make the News -- The Year's top 25 Censored Stories
by Peter Phillips and Project Censored
(NY: Seven Stories Press, 1999), 400pp. pb.
reviewed by MC5, September, 1999

MIM gives this book a modest thumbs up. It has attracted a wide range of supporters ranging from progressive to libertarian to anarchist to pseudo-Maoist.

Almost all the stories are ones that the mainstream media did not have the courage to print. They usually do not involve cases of actual government censorship as in the case of MIM Notes. As such, the publication of this book reflects the just complaints of the petty-bourgeoisie, while the government's actions against MIM Notes are repression aimed at preventing the North Amerikan lumpen-proletariat and international proletariat from hooking up.

MIM Notes is the most censored newspaper in North Amerika, but MIM Notes is not mentioned in the book. When we say censored, we mean taken and destroyed or blocked by government officials, usually in the prisons but sometimes by border officials or postal authorities. By now, MIM Notes has been censored thousands of times in its history since 1984. We have extensive documentary proof written to us by U.S. and state prison officials in many cases.

Nonetheless, the evil of monopoly capitalist media concentration is widespread and a book about poorly covered news stories need not mention the most censored newspaper in order to be a legitimate contribution to the struggle. Most of the stories about environment/health and international matters are indeed informative. They are published only in small newspapers.

One example of a story that represents censorship within censorship is the article on Tibet. "China Violates Human Rights in Tibet" is hardly a censored story. It appears in all the bourgeois media all the time. The story purports to be original by focussing on wimmin in Tibet and the book as a whole tries hard to embrace an imperialist pseudo-feminist agenda.

We do not learn in the story that the leaders of the movement in Tibet are defending a system that included slavery. Nor do we learn from the pseudo-feminists that under Mao, the leader of Tibet was a Tibetan womyn, a former slave liberated in civil war there.

Instead, the first line of the story is a fiction, about "China's invasion of Tibet in 1959."(p. 63) These trendy petty-bourgeois scholars and activists simply follow the Ford Foundation grant money making obeisance to pseudo-feminism and not knowing anything very thoroughly. With some effort one can easily investigate the question of Tibet's borders by going to a major library and finding a map from before Mao's liberation of China in 1949.

For example, the Rand McNally map of the world in 1943 shows Tibet as part of China. Hence, how can it be "invaded" by China? What happened was an internal dispute regarding slavery. True, the dominant people of China had to tread carefully to respect the culture of Tibet, but Tibet was not "invaded." Too bad Project Censored does not respect "humyn rights" enough to oppose slavery in Tibet, because that is what Maoists were doing internally in the 1950s. The Chinese communists hardly cared whether a bunch of Western hippie tourists continued their Buddhist fashions. Such hippies are no threat to anyone except as an occasional cover for spies. (For example the recent picking of the Panchen Lama by the Dalai Lama was done with Western film crews, Buddhist volunteers and messengers.)

It's one thing for Tibetans and other Chinese to say Tibet was invaded but it is simple war-mongering chauvinism for Project Censored to say it. When the United $tates had its puppet Chiang Kai-shek in power in China, it regarded Tibet as part of China. When China went communist, suddenly the Amerikans contest Tibet's being part of China. Project Censored simply echoes the mainstream media myopia regarding the Cold War.

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MIA or Mythmaking in America: How and why belief in live POWs has possessed a nation
by H. Bruce Franklin
New York: Lawrence Hill Books
1992
188pp.
(expanded 1993 edition available for sale)
reviewed by MC45

In his Preface to this myth-shattering volume, Bruce Franklin writes: "When I began investigating this belief in live POWs, I intended the results to be only a chapter in a book about how American culture shaped and was reshaped by the Vietnam War. I had little sense of the depth or breadth of the faith, perhaps because it seemed so obviously irrational and related to an issue of such apparently minor significance compared with other effects of the war on both America and the nations of Indochina."(p. xi) From a chapter on Amerikan culture and the war in Vietnam Franklin's project grew into a detailed explosion of the manufactured documentation, trumped up charges of barbarism against the Vietnamese, and mass wishful support for the idea of remaining POWs fed by popular culture of the Rambo variety.

MIA or Mythmaking in America is a fast-paced account of the development and perpetuation of the myth that live u.$. soldiers remain as POWs in Vietnam. Throughout, Franklin puts the POW/MIA myth in the context of Amerika's war against Vietnam. This is not the work of a liberal who argues that the governments of Indochina have done all they can to satisfy the u.$. Franklin consistently argues that many failures of Vietnamese record-keeping (i.e., records on the state of prisoners of war) were a direct result of their country being bombed. It is difficult to retain records and keep prisoners alive when bombs and troops are attacking every day. He also notes repeatedly where Amerikan economic and military interests are served by keeping the POW/MIA myth alive as a lever against the Vietnamese government in negotiations on any topic.

MIM recommends this book highly both for people who are familiar with the war in Vietnam and those who are not. A former anti-war activist who remembers the developing logic of the POW/MIA campaign has told MIM that s/he has never believed in the tens or hundreds of POWs supposedly being held. The logic is simple: why? What could a country already brutalized by the Amerikan military possibly have to gain by hanging on to prisoners-of-war and keeping them secret? For liberals and for others familiar with the war, Mythmaking in America provides the detail to substantiate the apparent logic that the u.$. government has manufactured the POW/MIA myth to serve imperialism.

For younger readers who are new to the history of this country's war against Vietnam, Mythmaking in Amerika is a solid introduction to the war's major events. Because his subject is the united snakes' propaganda machine as it developed around the war, Franklin does a better job explaining the reactionary version of the war's history taught in school or in the movies.

Franklin explains how the myth began, when Richard Nixon's administration collapsed the categories of POW and MIA into one as the war was going badly and protests against the war became larger. Nixon's public relations tactics amounted to lying to the families of Amerikan soldiers. Franklin describes how a soldier who is lost in action can only be found to be presumptively dead after "investigation over a lengthy period of time" and "a complex administrative and legal process."(pp. 16-7) The u.$. government further decided to hold both the Viet Minh and National Liberation Front responsible for a list of individuals who had been lost in the war even if they were known to be dead. The administration complicated this demand by excluding CIA employees from the list (while reserving the right to demand their return), and reporting all on the list as having been lost in Vietnam (even if they were in Laos, Cambodia, or the South China Sea).(pp. 68-9)

The MIA/POW category eventually included more than 1,000 soldiers who were originally designated as Killed in Action/Body not Recovered (KIA/BNR). This was because in spite of direct military witness accounting that these soldiers had been killed, the military changed their classification using the excuse that if the bodies were not in the care of the government or the families they could not be sure.(pp. 11-13) Franklin writes: "Even without subjective elements coming into play, these rigorous definitions lead unavoidably to creating more MIAs than actually exist."(p. 17) There are some rational reasons to expand the MIA classification. Some soldiers whose deaths really are unconfirmed will initially be called MIA. The more difficult it is to find identifiable remains, the longer their MIA status will persist. By turning so many people who were clearly KIA/BNR into MIAs, and the into potential POWs by combining the categories, Nixon's spin doctors purposely gave false hope to soldiers' families in the name of creating a reason to stay in this increasingly questionable war.

Out of Nixon's P.R. machine grew a number of families' and support organizations that were dedicated to the task of spreading a very emotional brand of propaganda about the existence of live POWs. The "You Are Not Forgotten" slogan we still see on bumper stickers shows how bent this movement was on sustaining the belief that Amerikans in Vietnam are only waiting to be rescued. To "forget" these men has become synonymous with telling these families that their 30 years of waiting for the return of their loved ones has been nothing but a service to the Amerikan government's desire to keep an enemy in Vietnam. Nixon could never have developed such a fierce following for his war effort through the state alone.

The POW/MIA Fact Book, first issued in 1982 by the Reagan Administration,(p. 5) has done much to confuse the issue and the facts. Franklin takes a handful of cases from the factbooks of the 1980s and early 1990s and compares the stories of the same supposed POWs from year to year. The Fact Books commit such butchery of history as to count one individual of a crew of six as a POW -- although his five crew members were openly released to the Amerikan government. The Fact Books of later years have resurrected soldiers and spies who had been reported as dead in years past, without explanation of how the prior reporting was incorrect. Yet another Amerikan soldier who died (and whose death was substantiated in writing by a fellow solder) remained in the Fact Books because the government of Vietnam had not reported on his death to the Amerikan government.(pp. 28-32)

Franklin takes time to elaborate the responsibility borne by the Amerikan press and movie industry. He refers to the Pentagon as "using ink as an octopus does, clouding the waters to obscure its own activities."(p. 88) In this effort, the newspapers were complicit -- printing the stories as they came out of the Defense Department rather than doing some basic math to figure out that the day to day reports didn't add up. Cataloging the Hollywood movies that provided explicit imagery for the POW/MIA myth, Franklin details historical falsehoods in The Deer Hunter, POW: The Escape, Uncommon Valor, The Rambo Series and many more. He writes that The Deer Hunter took "images of the war that had become deeply embedded in America's consciousness and transform[ed] them into their opposite."(p. 133) So a scene that could have been the massacre by Amerikan troops at My Lai features Vietnamese soldiers brutalizing a village and an Amerikan stepping in to stop the bloodshed.

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Shenfan, William Hinton, 1984, Vintage Books, 790pages.
from MN 31, July 7, 1987

This is the sequel to Fanshen which was about the liberation of China from landlord and Japanese imperialist rule. Shenfan is primarily about the Great Leap through the Cultural Revolution. There is a sprinkling of material both before and after this time period. William Hinton stands out above other China scholars for the length of time he has spent in China. He has lived in one village called Long Bow at various time periods for years at a time.

The work is dense with empirical detail and insights into everyday concerns of Chinese peasants. Aside from his descriptions, Hinton's interviews and reporting of conversation is excellent. He reports what the peasants say, what the Communist Party says and what the highest government officials say. By asking his questions at different time periods, he manages to obtain different answers from different people for each question. Even within each time period, he shows the lines of controversy.

Hinton is of Marxist inspiration and has some strong words for the current regime. On the other hand, he spends several hundred pages detailing the Cultural Revolution as a merely opportunist power struggle among individuals and ultimately factions of millions of people. This book is not appropriate for special distribution efforts. His analysis of power struggle is rather too simple and does not offer an alternative. Still, Shenfan is very valuable for the reader interested in China.

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The Vietnam War in American Stories, Songs, and Poems
Edited by H. Bruce Franklin
Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1996, 343 pp.
reviewed by MC206

This anthology does not concentrate on the mountain of jingoistic pulp aimed at teenage boys during and after the Vietnam war like "The Green Berets," "Special Forces Trooper," or "Women of the Green Berets." Nor does it concentrate on allegorical pro-imperialist works like "The Ugly American." Instead, it concentrates on literature which, to quote the editor, springs from the discovery, "usually through painful experience, of insights far too valuable to be lost or forgotten."

Most of the works in this volume were written by soldiers, nurses, and journalists who spent time in Vietnam during the war. Simple, moving, and strong themes run through many: The contradiction between Amerika's "just cause" rhetoric and the brutal reality of a genocidal war; the recognition that the Vietnamese men and wimmin killed by Amerikan soldiers were not faceless "gooks" but real people; and the pain of seeing close Amerikan friends die meaningless deaths for an evil cause, to name a few.

Some of the authors are anti-war activists, some are not, and a few pro-war authors are also represented (but that's as it should be, since we should learn to know our enemy). The anthology demonstrates that art can be topical and relevant, appeal directly to the broad masses, and yet have high aesthetic standards. Ultimately, it shows that middle forces can play an important role in the cultural ferment which makes a broad anti-imperialist movement possible. And it illustrates the tragedy that so many Amerikans had to travel through the imperialist military on their journey to becoming middle forces in the struggle against imperialism, as Franklin did.

The writings in this book advertise for themselves, but we do not have permission to quote them for review. Amerikans who wish to write anti-imperialist litrature should thoroughly work with, and critically think through the writings on the Vietnam War, and this book is a good place to start. Those who do not wish to write creatively themselves can learn about the barbarity of the Vietnam War and the split it caused in Amerikan culture, forcing a section of the oppressor nation to ally themselves with the struggles of oppressed peoples abroad.

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Douglas Kinnard The War Managers: American Generals Reflect on Vietnam, NY, NY: A De Capo Paperback, 1991, 216pp. pb

reviewed by MC5, June 2, 2000

Kinnard is an ex-general who was a chief of staff "of the most important field command in Vietnam before his 1970 retirement" according to the book jacket. His book is a report on a survey of U.$. generals that he made before the war ended but after U.$. defeat was assured. MIM reviews the book here for the benefit of our readers studying Vietnam. The overall situation is better studied in ex-Secretary of "Defense" Robert McNamara's book called "Argument without End" reviewed in the MIM bookstore. However, there are some facts that the generals admit in Kinnard's book that readers should find helpful.

Background of the generals

The generals were all white males and mostly Protestants. All were born between 1910 and 1926 and almost all were college graduates. Half were West Point graduates; half were airborne qualified and 60% had served in the infantry.(p. 11) The average general gained a promotion (half a star) by serving in Vietnam.(p. 11) Only one general was not married and all generals had spent a minimum of 25 years climbing the ranks.(p. 14) The uniformity of the generals in their backgrounds makes their disagreements amongst themselves all the more remarkable--an indication of the bind the imperialists were in in Vietnam.

Kinnard proceeds from the view that anyone who disagreed slightly with U.$. strategy in any regard was a critic of the war in Vietnam. Hence, from his perspective, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger under President Richard Nixon was a critic.(p. 9) Kinnard himself expected the generals to be rather uniform in their views given their backgrounds and united in opposition to criticism from the U.$. public.

64% of 173 generals who toured Vietnam from 1965 to 1973 completed Kinnard's questionnaire. He also interviewed some generals in persyn and accepted written comments on his questions.

Lies

Ever since the peace treaty with Vietnam in 1973 and the reunification of Vietnam in 1975, the U.$. media and various experts have spoken of the U.$. "mistake" in Vietnam. We also often hear of Vietnam in the same breath as Watergate.

Watergate was a case of the U.S. President Nixon ordering interference in the campaigns of his bourgeois opponents in the Democratic Party. It also involved lying--a cover-up. Bourgeois pundits mention Vietnam in the same breath for promoting general cynicism in the public toward the government. In the same 1960s era, many youth discovered that taking drugs and having pre-marital sex were not as dire in their impact as adult authority had said. Hence, the 1960s ended up being years in which authority was caught lying.

Kinnard explains in detail the cynicism created by the U.$. involvement in the Vietnam War (1954-1975). It has to do with the fact that the generals and president kept telling the public that they were about to win the war when that was not in fact the case. For example, in the spring of 1964, the outgoing general in Vietnam named Paul Harkins told the incoming military leader William Westmoreland and a civilian official that the United $tates would win in six months.(p. 18) As early as a January 1963 battle at Ap Bac that the media observed, the U.$. media knew that the U.$. government lied about winning a battle that the U.$. puppets lost. President John F. Kennedy tried to get a reporter reassigned for knowing the truth.(p. 126) To its horror, the Amerikan public eventually learned that communism was a popular idea in Vietnam and anti-imperialism motivated the people there to great military achievements.

Some U.$. generals had a career incentive to have a long war in Vietnam and prove themselves there with the most U.$. troops at their disposal possible as Kinnard and other generals have admitted. Other politicians lied because they were desperately wishing to keep fighting the "communists" and felt it necessary to lie to the public. Some politicians also simply erred, not knowing in chauvinist arrogance that the feeble U.$. communist movement was not at all parallel to the one in Vietnam, where there was a genuine proletariat and an exploited peasantry.

The Amerikan public thought the army had to kill a few communists and go home in Vietnam after democratic government established itself. From cruel experience, the U.$. public learned that the politicians either did not know what they were doing in Vietnam or they lied. Once the bubble burst, the public also started to ask whether the war was right in the first place. Many concluded that the system (imperialism) compelled the leaders to lie and go to war. Students and oppressed nationality peoples even started to ask whether communism was what they were told.

To the progressive individual it must seem odd that the Amerikan public did not ask fundamental questions about the war until after a five digit figure of Amerikans and a seven digit figure of Vietnamese died fighting. Yet that is how it happened: there was no automatic ethical review of what was going on in Vietnam. It only occurred because the rulers failed in their goals of subduing Vietnam. The reason for this is simple: the majority of Amerikans benefits from U.$. empire and allows the ruling class to go on its way unless something drastic happens.

Material conditions created U.$. public opinion against the war. There was no U.$. majority opposed to the war until after the major Vietnamese military offensive in 1968 known as "Tet," which killed 6,000 troops on the U.$. side and showed the Amerikan public that the revolution was brewing in hundreds of Vietnamese cities and towns. From 1954 to about 1968, the Amerikan public supported the war and Kinnard admits that the generals did not account for U.$. public opinion in their calculations of how to conduct a war.(pp. 161-2) In November, 1967, Westmoreland was still telling the public that the United $tates was winning, to such an extent that victorious troop withdrawals could start in 1969.(pp. 76, 128) As it actually happened, in 1969 and 1970, opposition to the war hardened and severely limited the capacity of the U.$. imperialists to continue fighting. No more would the public believe stories about a few communists needing to be finished off.

In retrospect, a majority of generals preferred to say in 1974 that they underestimated the enemy rather than saying that they lied to the public about their successes. 56% of the generals agreed that "prior to 1968, the will and determination of the enemy to continue the war was not sufficiently considered."(p. 28) MIM concurs and believes that some politicians, generals and masses were simply ignorant of the situation in Vietnam and did not understand the causation of Vietnamese militancy against U.$. occupation. The United $tates killed millions and still the Vietnamese kept fighting.

The persyn in charge of the U.$. war effort overall, General Westmoreland concluded that lack of knowledge of the enemy's perspective, determination and methods was the "basic error" of the war.(p. 63)

Despite this "error," a majority of generals admitted that at least some lying was going on. The statistic of the "kill ratio" and "body count" presented to the public was inaccurate. 55% of generals used the term "misleading" and 61% said the statistics were "often inflated" to prove success.(pp. 74-5) Some generals admitted that there was a career motivation involved as well; although they did this by blaming other specific generals they did not trust. The question arises that if they knew lying was going on, why did these generals not do anything about it: "The most frequent explanation is that their careers were at stake and they could not afford to make waves."(p. 164)

A U.$. diplomat in Saigon (the capital of U.$. puppet-run Vietnam) also admitted similar problems in diplomatic lying. With regard to an analysis of elections involving the U.$. puppet regime, the diplomat said in 1969: "The result is a totally misleading and unbelievably optimistic view of the local elections. This kind of dangerous diplomatic apologetics is what got us into Vietnam, and will one day make Vietnam an American tragedy. The genre of tragedy no bureaucrat or general will be able to disguise."(p. 145)

As late as 1974, after the peace treaty of 1973, the generals were still saying that the U.$. puppet side would win in Vietnam. 65% said that the chances of the puppet government were better than fifty-fifty.(p. 153) The very next year the puppet regime fell apart without direct U.$. military involvement and the revolution succeeded in reunifying Vietnam. Either the generals did not know what they were talking about or they lied. Kinnard himself concluded that "there was too much tricky optimism from LBJ on down. Furthermore, there was too much concealing of the implications of half-announced decisions."(p. 167)

Although in 1974 they still believed the puppet regime would win thanks to its new Amerikan training, a majority (53%) of generals did conclude that the United $tates never should have sent combat troops to Vietnam.(p. 154) That's something that some reactionaries today still have not figured out.

Contemporary spin

Ever since Ronald Reagan's campaigns for the presidency in 1976 and 1980, conservatives in the United $tates have started rewriting history on Vietnam. They latch on to one belief of generals, that they had their hands tied in Vietnam by politicians and that is why they lost the war.

Kinnard was one of those generals who understood all along that the war in Vietnam would be constrained by the U.$. desire to keep China and the Soviet Union out. The U.$. rulers wanted a fight against Vietnam, not one against Vietnam, China and the Soviet Union combined. Had the generals gone all out without civilian constraints and had they invaded Hanoi, the Chinese would have sent in troops. Kinnard knew this and McNamara knew this. Today, the bragging reactionaries talk like the United $tates should have risked nuclear war and higher conventional casualties in Vietnam. They are counting on historical amnesia in the Amerikan public.

Kinnard also debunks the current view without knowing it. He pointed out that more extreme actions by the United $tates would have provoked the Soviet Union to prove itself to the world. The United $tates delayed mining the harbors of Vietnam because it feared that China (and Mao) would gain in influence in Vietnam at the expense of the Soviet Union according to Kinnard. China borders Vietnam, so if the Yankees cut off the sea, China's overland supply route to Vietnam would become more important and the Soviet Union would have to consider how to bolster its international image as a superpower.(p. 26)

Although a majority of generals say they did not understand the goals of the civilian politicians, (pp. 24-5) they did understand the fact that China and the Soviet social-imperialists were factors that had to be accounted for, not forgotten as some propagandists today like to talk. Westmoreland credited President Johnson for keeping the war limited.

Useful facts on genocide and dialectics

Then Secretary of "Defense," Robert McNamara has already admitted that the United $tates killed more than 3 million Vietnamese in the Vietnam War. Kinnard also admitted earlier some telling facts: "When one considers that the total munitions employed by the United States in Vietnam was greater than tonnages employed worldwide in the 1941-1945 war, some of these side effects on a populated country the size of Vietnam are not difficult to imagine."(p. 46)

As it turns out, even 28% and 30% of the U.$. generals respectively thought the United $tates used too much bombing and artillery.(p. 47) They were able to say that despite the fact that it seems to mean that more Amerikans should die per Vietnamese killed, because the generals realized that extreme use of bombs and artillery created opposition in the Vietnamese people, so there was a trade-off in how much the generals could back U.$. troops with the maximum firepower and how much support from the Vietnamese people the generals could obtain for their war.

Once again, it is a case not where the generals fundamentally opposed the use of bombing and artillery for alleged ethical reasons. It was simply a matter that the more firepower used, the more Vietnamese and global public opinion swung against Uncle Sam, thus causing Uncle Sam to lose the war on the ground in Vietnam. This scientific calculation came into the open and brought forward the more fundamental ethical issues that had been squelched. It's another example demonstrating dialectical materialism's descriptive power. The more bombing, the greater the resistance is.

Conclusion

Kinnard provides historical context and views of the "war managers" as he calls them. McNamara's book is better for overall history, but Kinnard's survey of generals is still useful.

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