angus
Atlas Icon
Posts: 17,424
|
 |
« Reply #1 on: February 10, 2012, 11:17:14 AM » |
|
Cambodia's fun to talk about, and Pol Pot was a barrel of laughs, but that country's per-capita GDP is around 2000 dollars and mostly the short-lived regime was marked by paranoia. Did they ever build anything? Did they ever get good at educating their people? Did they ever figure out how to feed a population? The only thing that Khmer Rouge was ever really good at was genocide, having successfully killed off 90% of the ethnic Chinese people living in that country. I guess you could call that a success story, if you were inclined to think of successful ethnic cleansing as a good measure.
But China is a real success story, and the repression of ethnic minorities by the Han usually involves forced relocation and cultural repression, rather than martyrdom. A much smarter strategy. And in a generation, their percapita GDP has gone from, like, a few grains of rice per person per day to something resembling that of Costa Rica. And they're financing all our endeavors, aren't they? Everything we do, eat, learn, and build right now is underwritten by the Chinese. In 20 years or less, they'll have a greater share of the world's aggregate GDP than even the United States.
True, the PRC wasn't faithful to the Communist Manifesto, but what government ever is? You can't use that as a criterion, or you wouldn't have any candidates. Also, it had its own brand of communism, even when it was more properly communist. Anyway, it would have been successful even if Marx had never existed. China was around long before capital-C Communism, and likely it will be around long after capital-C Communism dies. At the height of the Roman Empire, circa AD180, under Marcus Aurelius, Rome had a population of 5 million and a land area of 3 million square miles. So did the Han Empire. They were about the same size, in area and population at that time, but then Rome fell apart. It's language because Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, etc., and it's people miscegenated with the pale, northern barbarians to produce the modern races of Italy, France, and Spain. Not so with the Han. I submit that China is the most successful nation ever, by any criterion you'd care to name. It also just happens to be a capital-C Communist country, so it's the perfect answer to this poll question.
It always bothered me that Chairman Mao and the Communists wanted to stamp out confucianism. It seemed the perfect fit. If you want to impose collectivist authoritarianism on a country that has a long history of collectivism, and one whose prime philosophical directives come from the obedience-driven philosophy of ancestor worship and respect for authority, then it seems like you'd want to play up Confucianism as much as possible. I'd have thought that they would want to do as the Inca did when it conquered new territories, absorbing the local religions and customs into its metaphysics and governmental philosophy in an effort to make the new kings more palatable. It was a remarkably successful strategy, and for years I never really understood why Mao's Cultural Revolution was so down on Kong Fuzi and his teachings, but I've finally had an epiphany that explains that. It was important to stamp out any traces of the old, pre-Red philosophy in order to guarantee fielty to the new cause. Success depended upon replacing all philosophy and religion with the new philosophy and the new religion, which was Chinese-style Communism.
Anyway, China's successes aren't due to Communism, but to a much older collectivism, but that doesn't mean that it can't be considered the most successful of the Communist countries.
|
