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ZorbaTHut  3yr ago (text post)   32801 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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It's a problem I seem to be having a lot of lately around here lately. I used the term founding mythology in an off-hand sort of way to refer to The Long March and the concept of People's War; in the same way that Lexington and Concord form a founding mythology of warfare in the USA. I agree with Dase that The Long March is a myth in the sense both that (Like L and C) it didn't really happen that way, and in the sense that it doesn't reflect some deep seated tendency in the national ethnos.

Deng said of one of the climactic moments of the March:

Well, that's the way it's presented in our propaganda. We needed that to express the fighting spirit of our forces. In fact, it was a very easy military operation. There wasn't really much to it. The other side were just some troops of the warlord who were armed with old muskets and it really wasn't that much of a feat, but we felt we had to dramatize it.

Many have claimed Chiang Kai-Shek made a deal with Mao and more or less escorted the Long March as a kind of Kabuki civil war, which would itself have been a fascinating kind of spiritual Long March for Mao to engage in to preserve ChiCom forces until the eventual success of the revolution. But regardless it does mean something that generations of chinese were taught from the time they could read:

"If you find it hard," they were told: think of the Long March; if you feel tired, think of our revolutionary forebears. The message has been drilled into us so that we can accomplish any goal set before us by the party because nothing compares in difficulty with what they did. Decades after the historical one, we have been spurred on to ever more Long Marches – to industrialize China, to feed the largest population in the world, to catch up with the West, to reform the socialist economy, to send men into space, to engage with the 21st century.

I was mostly just pointing to China as an alternative suspect under the cui bono investigative method, to demonstrate the hollowness of the theory that "The US benefits, so the US probably did it." Conspiratorial traps that require your opponent to make an active move to fall into it, as the culmination of a multi-year plan involving numerous unreliable moving parts, don't seem credible.

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