Kulturrevolusjonens forbrytelser er fortsatt et ikke-tema i Kina. Til tross for at nesten hver eneste familie ble berørt.
I Russland svermer man igjen for Stalin. Så langt har det ikke gått i Kina, men man skyver oppgjøret med fortiden foran seg:
HOward W. French fra Nytimes fant frem til en utstilling over Kulturrevolusjonen, opprettet på privat initiativ. De besøkende later som om de bare er på utflukt, og på direkte spørsmål svarer folk at “all land begår feil”.
Det er ikke bare Kina som burde ta et oppgjør med Kulturrevolusjonen. Det er liten kunnskap om dette tiåret også på våre breddegrader. Liten erkjennelse av hvilken forbrytelse Kulturrevolusjonen var. Fremdeles bader den i skinnet av rødegardistenes glød. les: fanatisme.
China’s decade-long descent into madness, beginning in the mid-1960’s.
There is Mao swimming in the Yangtze River in 1966, giving a bravura demonstration of his vigor at age 72, and a false sign of hope to a country almost religiously devoted to him. The weeks and months ahead would instead reveal that time to be the dawn of a new and terrible era, during which perhaps a half million people were killed, a few of whom are buried in these hills alongside the trails that lead to the exhibits.
“Under heaven, all is chaos,” Mao wrote, announcing the era’s tone exultingly to his wife and co-instigator, Jiang Qing, in a letter quoted on another tablet. From that point, the slate panels function almost like a newsreel as the events, ever more senseless, unfold. There are the huge rallies in Beijing that August, where millions of young people, inspired by Mao’s utopian oratory, waved their Little Red Books in frenzied adulation as he spoke.
Jeg er ved nærmere ettertanke uenig med Kaj Skagen: det var ikke det at folkene i Østblokken ville ha konsumvarer og høyere levestandard som gjorde venstresiden deprimert: det var at utopien hadde vist seg å være et fengsel. Å ta et oppgjør med denne løgnen blir for tungt for de fleste.
“I had to talk to 10 publishing houses before I could get my last novel published,” said Ke Yunlu, a writer who has focused unrelentingly on the Cultural Revolution. “In it, a group of students stoned their teacher to death, and after 10 years, when there is an investigation, nobody admits anything. This is what history is like in China: no stones are ever thrown, but people are dying.”
Recently China has demanded that Japan face up to the brutal history of its conquest of this country between 1937 and 1945, but for the Cultural Revolution, not yet a generation into the past, the country’s archives re2_kommentar closed and academic conferences and seminars banned.
“It is very unhealthy for a nation to forget about its past,” said Zhang Xianliang, one of China’s best known authors, who was arrested at age 20 for a poem deemed counterrevolutionary during another period of ideological fervor, in the late-1950’s. He spent most of the Cultural Revolution in labor camps. “Our history and our memory are full of empty pages. We still can’t talk publicly about Mao’s crimes, but that day will come.”