Against Serpentza, re: Chairman Mao's Portrait on the Wall.

recorded spontaneously and a
hundred-percent unscripted in front of a pile of boxes as we start to unpack and settle into our new apartment let's let's just disclose my bias let's just get this out of the way in case you think this is gonna be a pro-china video Pro communist government or promo zombie no around here this this is this our third copy of tombstone in this relationship I had a copy of this book before we got together you had a copy you got from the library and now me and my girlfriend have this copy as a couple if you don't know this is one of the kind of groundbreaking works in the history of documenting disclosing and discussing the legacy of Mao Zedong and communism and the number of millions of people who were killed by it um you know what let's let's be a little bit before this book was published people would talk about those issues but they always felt uncertain people felt uncomfortable putting a number when they said millions had died people felt you know there was no easy proven resource to invoke or footnote we could say look these are the facts you know and this brought together I mean as you can see it's a huge book it's even longer in the original Chinese this brought together a mountain of research and put together in a form that was kind of impossible to refute or quibble with I think a lot of people who don't read the book it still serves a kind of psychological function of giving you a sense of certainty okay the facts are there if I ever want to consult exactly how many people starve to death and what province went at what time has this quality of documentary evidence interestingly on a much much smaller scale there's a similar study in the history of Cambodia and I remember for most people they never read it but they know they fell okay that's you know they counted the skulls those are the people who did the research and counted up how many dead bodies and the you know but no matter how imperfect feeling that the math has been done it's been documented it serves this really important purpose we're really important purpose in terms of the the psychology of political history you might say all right so I am going to criticize serpent za not from approach I have perspective not from a Pro Mao Zedong perspective I was asked by a few different viewers in my channel to comment on this other analyst of Chinese politics and what I said in writing was no serpent satay is not someone whom I can respect either for his opinion or his research and that that backhanded statement already discloses internal with the problem is the guy doesn't do research you know he is one of these people who States salacious attention-grabbing opinions on YouTube he makes a lot of money doing it we watched a video of his recently where he opened with saying forget his wording he says like I'm not just saying this to get attention I'm not just saying this to be to be provocative of course what he was saying was just to get attention just to I of course this was claiming the exact opposite of reality you know that's what he does he doesn't do you know the four things I set out in the name of my main channel active research in a formed opinion you know this is not what he's about um and the other light motif I draw attention to again again in my channel is the importance of sympathy as an analytical tool so he had a video recently in which he featured himself burning a portrait of Mao Zedong I guess I'll give the link below this video and currently that video has over 200,000 views so I certainly can't hope to challenge that by reaching a an audience of equal size and you know he's reaching that audience because he's telling people something they already want to hear I'm gonna tell you something maybe you don't want to hear all right even though I am deeply aware of the atrocities Mao Zedong is responsible for even though I am aware of both the features of his ideology and the failings of his ideology if you want to understand why Chinese people still today living in the shadow of those atrocities put up a portrait of Mao Zedong on their wall proudly you have to use sympathy as an analytical tool and I have the humility to read this kind of stuff and know all this stuff and be horrified by this I can remember two different occasions where I was sitting with a professor two deaf professors of Chinese history Chinese boulders and where we both had tears in our eyes you know at me and the professor we didn't weep openly but we're like this stuff gets emotionally overwhelming my own family history is connected to this political estrus and so forth so no it's not a purely dry academic engagement with the fact I can know all these things and yet have the humility to recognize that even though this is the legacy of Mao Zedong it is not the only legacy of Mao Zedong I am not in a position to say to people who put his poster on the wall this is all that Mao Zedong represents this is the only thing it represents and this is what it must mean to you if you are familiar with the history of any of the former British colonies so pleased that were colonized by Britain and then we're liberated one way or another became independent countries whether through revolution or devolution as the history would be if you go to those countries you'll always have the strange experience of meeting elderly people local elderly people indigenous elderly people who are flying the flag of the former British Empire or the British colony and you you can't just start with these ago they must be racist they must be white supremacist they must be fascists or something if you take the time to talk to them and sympathize with them and analyse why it is they're putting up this flag you will understand why it is they're doing it so stereotypically in many of those colonies it may be that they are disappointed with the corruption of the new regime that replaced the British it may be there was a particular civil war in that country and they were on one side rather the other you can get to understand what this symbol means to them for them as a person who was part of colonized you know conquered country that gained its independence and in some sense they're using a symbol that challenges that narrative that they're rejecting the heroic narrative of Independence that wanting to identify with something else right and you have to recognize this flag symbolizing the British Empire it doesn't mean to this person you know what it means to me it doesn't even mean you know what it may mean and it's sort of object two cents if you look it up in an encyclopedia what does this flag symbolize well that's not at significance here and now you have to have the humility to recognize that in China you will meet people who are deeply disappointed with the current government of Si Jinping who don't like the direction the Communist Party is taking now and the way for them to criticize what the Communist Party is doing today is to put up the image of Mao Zedong and if you talk to them and you you can ask you can say well do you really want to go back to having people starving to death they'll say no hate they'll say no that's not what I'm thinking of when I put this up when I put this up when I'm against is the collusion between huge corporations like Samsung and the government of China and Apple and all these foreign corporations to come here this is only one of many possible answers but they may tell you that they are against the profound corruption of the Communist Party where it's become a lackey of Western corporate capital in a capitalist interests and just making the rich richer or they may tell you well yes it's true people starve to death under Mao Zedong but on the other hand the people who ruled over us didn't drive Italian sports cars like Lamborghinis and Ferraris and now they do and that they were against that I attended a political protest against the Communist Party in Kunming China publican could make China and everyone was elderly they were all elderly people at this protest right and the police / military were kind of standing back and observed there was just barely being tolerated this political protest and the the protesters didn't hold the signs I noted there must be some legal reason with us they they hung a very delicate like a like fishing fishing line between the trees and their their political statements were draped over this fishing line and then they stood there silently in the park you know they didn't chant there was no clip of political expression to China especially not in public places like this and you know they were used the symbols of traditional communism to challenge what they saw as the immorality of or corruption of the government in the present day all right it doesn't take a genius to see this it doesn't take a supreme level of detachment and compassion to say okay when I see the portrait of Mao Zedong this is what it means to me and it may it may bring up memories you know from this book that has horrifying descriptions of terrible things happening to people for me this may be associated with oppression in a word but for someone else it may be associated with a kind of healthy challenge to the current political order and a kind of philosophical challenge to the crass materialism of the government of China today because the government of China today says all they care about is getting rich and they say well they feel like socialism and communism and and chineseness itself the idea of the mission and mandate of the Chinese nation going back thousands of years and looking in the future for interviews they felt it was about something more than just money and they want to challenge that if you just talk to people if you're just willing to sympathize with people you're gonna find out what those things are to give just one more example so this isn't Stu I know it's does doesn't sound too terribly optimistic you know another thing that the the portrait of Mao Zedong could could symbolize for them is just racism is just xenophobia you know that there are people you can talk to in China who will complain to you that now China is full of foreigners or it's full of other ethnic groups that they're racist towards or focal towards and then when they when they put up the image of Malzone for them personally it means they want to go back to the more of xenophobic China only way that life was when they were kid or when their grandparents were kids or whatever was they have some memory of that so it could just be nationalism in a very narrow racist even phobic sense but you can't even assume that it's not like you can see that at an assumed it if you know in case you think this is a special problem with the portrait of Mao Zedong when I first started going to Taiwan it was very difficult for me to accept people putting up one images of the old woman Deng regime whoa what are you guys doing aren't you proud that you finally achieve democracy and got rid of the woman dang and all the terrible things associated with the the corn dang as a military dictatorship why would you put up this you know whether it's a flag or a poster you know an image of one of the leaders why would you be celebrating the heritage of the Kuomintang well I had to get over that and understand there are really sophisticated really particular reasons for this now look I'm of Jewish heritage in Taiwan you see the nasty the Nazi swastika being put up in Taiwan you see the Japanese World War 2 era flag the flag of the Japanese Empire that's put up and it's shocking and if you ask people why they put it up we're talking about you know ethnically Chinese people in Taiwan who are putting up these flags they'll give you a lot of different answers but I bet not a single one is gonna tell you that they put that flag up because they're anti-semitic they have their own very peculiar political reasons for what that flag means to them and what the causes are supporting now or what what questions they're they're trying to ask look guys this does not mean that politics is a is a kind of free and boundless garden of neither right nor wrong it's not politics is an incredibly dicey and difficult theater where we're making my new decisions and distinctions between right and wrong all the time but we precisely have to move past the mirror stigmatization of symbols and say oh you have this portrait of Mao Zedong on the wall therefore you support tens of millions of people being killed move forward to a sympathetic analytical approach to politics where you understand that what this symbol means to this person may be radically different from what you feel subjectively as the analyst or even what might be established as being its objective meaning in some kind of historical sense in terms of the sense of what's written down in an encyclopedia [Music]