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A revolution that is inseparable from terrorism (1927-1946) When, in January of 1928, the inhabitants of a village of the Red Flag saw a troop of soldiers approaching and waving their scarlet banner, they enthusiastically sided up with one of the first Chinese "soviets", the Hailufeng Soviet, which was established by Peng Pai. The communists had a liking for ambiguity, however, they knew how to incite local hatreds, and eventually -by utilizing the cohesion of their message- they misappropriated them in order to serve their own purposes, while at the same time they made concessions which allowed their neophytes to freely satisfy their basest impulses. Thus, forty or fifty years ago, during a few months of 1927-1928, a kind of "foretaste" of the pursuant worst moments of the Agricultural Revolution and the Khmer Rouge was observed.
The movement was prepared from 1922 with the zealous activities that were undertaken (initially) by the agrarian syndicates and later by the Communist Party, and had resulted in a forced polarization between "poor villagers" and "landowners" who were being charged tirelessly when neither their traditional conflicts nor social reality could justify such a segregation. However, the erasure of debts and the rescinding of agricultural leasing secured a broad support for the Soviet. Peng Pai took advantage of this and established a regime of "democratic terrorism": The populace was invited to be present at the public trials of the "counter-revolutionaries" -who happened to be condemned to death in an almost identical manner. They would watch those executions, shouting "Death! Death!" and egging on the Red Guards who were assigned to the slow carving of the victims. They often cooked body parts and ate them, or forced the victim's family to eat them, in front of the condemned person, who was still alive. Everyone was invited to the feasts where they would distribute the heart and liver of the former landowner, and to the assemblies where the speaker would address the people standing in front of a row of poles on which they had impaled recently chopped-off heads. This fascination with vindictive cannibalism, which we find again in Pol_Pot's Cambodia and corresponds to a very old archetype that was broadly prevalent throughout eastern Asia, had often made its appearance during other moments of paroxysm in Chinas' history. Thus, in an era of foreign interventions, in 613, the emperor Yang (of the Sui Dynasty) took his revenge on a certain revolutionary, by persecuting even his most distant relatives: "Those who were more severely punished had to undergo the punishments of being cut into four quarters and their head exposed atop a spear, or they would be cut to pieces, pierced with arrows. The emperor had ordered the high-ranking officers to devour the flesh of the victims, piece by piece." The renowned author Lu_Xun, a sympathizer of Communism, at a moment when he no longer concurred with nationalism and anti-Westernism, wrote: "The Chinese are cannibals..." Even less popular than these bloody orgies were the extremes the Red Guards had gone to in 1927, in temples and on the Taoist priest-mediators: the faithful painted the statues red in an attempt to protect them, and Peng Pai began to savour the first signs of a deification. Fifty thousand people - with many poor among them - abandoned the area during the four months of the Soviet domination... Peng Pai (executed in 1931) was the real ringleader of the agricultural and militarized communism - a solution that was immediately adopted by Mao Zedong (also of rural descent), a member of the somewhat marginal until that the time Chinese Communist Party, who had theorized on him in his famous writing: "Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan" (1927)...
Translation: A. N. |
