Re: china

At 08:27 PM 5/1/2000 -0500, you wrote:
>Even if one accepts Randy McDonald's numbers that "tens of thousands of
>people were imprisoned or murdered" during the Cultural Revolution in 
>China,
>isn't it a bit of exaggeration to then refer to the so-called "human costs"
>as being "immeasurable" as Randy McDonald concludes.  

Perhaps it was a bit of hyperbole. But the human cost was still quite 
severe.

Take the razing of cultural monuments -- the attack on Confucius' ancestral
estate in northeastern China comes to mind, the campaigns against religion
do as well, not to mention the hugely restricted array of cultural
opportunities (the model operas, the fetishization of the Little Red Book).
Why on Earth would those attacks be justified? Sure, it might serve a
superficial role of satisfying people, just like razing French monasteries
and churches complete with their relics and archives did in the radical
phase of the French revolution, but it's just vandalism.

I also think that you discount the psychological effect that ideological
civil war in the major cities of China would have, even on people completely
uninvolved in the Cultural Revolution and passed by entirely. Would seeing
shops vandalized, people taken into custody by angry youths, even full-blown
conflict between different Red Guard factions or between Red Guard factions
and the Red Army, do anything for people's psychological well-being?

>By that definition of
>"immeasurable" what would one say of U.S.-organized situations, such as the
>tens of thousands of civilians murdered in Chile, the 80,000 civilians
>murdered in El Salvador in the 1980's, the 100,000 civilians murdered in
>Guatemala, the half million or so murdered in Indonesia, or the several
>million civilians killed in Vietnam? 

I'd call it horrific, and just as immeasurable as the suffering in China
during the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward. The suffering of
a Mayan or Salvadoran peasant in front of a right-wing death squad, or of an
East Timorese nation that has suffered a veritable genocide, or of a
Cambodian whose family was decimated by  the Khmer Rouge, or of a Vietnamese
woman whose child suffered birth defects due to the lingering effects of
Agent Orange, is just as great, and equally unjustified.

>And why is it assumed that all the
>people imprisoned or killed were innocent? There was something of a civil
>war, 

Really? Can you please provide me with some citations -- I haven't come
across that in my researches.

>and while I don't want to justify the killings of innocent people, one
>has to be somewhat circumspect about much of the reporting.
>
>Just some thoughts,
>
>Alan Spector

Randy McDonald
Charlottetown PE
Canada