"Unfortunately he had no way of knowing that Mao was just then readying a major political 'rectification campaign (整风运动)' against 'incorrect thought (错误思想)' that would make self-expression among Communist intelligentsia as taboo in the arts as in politics. In fact, Mao’s 1942 treatise, The Yan’an Forums on Literature and Art, which formed the basis for this movement, has guided the party’s quest for ideological unity ever since its publication. Under its shadow, writes Ai Weiwei, 'everyone sank into an ideological swamp of "criticism" and "self-criticism"' in which the bourgeois tendencies of his father’s art marked him indelibly as being politically unreliable.... Then, like half a million other intellectuals, he was 'sent down (下放)' to the Great Northern Wilderness (北大荒)....
Ai Weiwei, then only two, accompanied him.... He would spend... two decades with his father, in effect a juvenile political prisoner in internal exile.... As China careened toward the Cultural Revolution, Ai Qing found himself under renewed attack. Red Guards put banners outside their shack that read, 'Expose Ai Qing’s True Counter-Revolutionary Colors!' Then the sons and daughters of many other exiled 'literary types' who’d once been regular guests in the Ai home began ransacking their house. 'Now that the political storm had arrived, they were first to trim their sails to the wind, betraying and slandering people around them, in the hope of enhancing their own position,' writes Ai Weiwei...."From "The Uncompromising Ai Weiwei/Ai Weiwei’s memoir is a father-and-son story of devotion to free expression and resistance to state pressure" by Orville Schell (reviewing "1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows")(NYRB).
25 comments:
Mao. The leader of the woke crowd.
The Simpsons, as usual, have the quick summary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lcUHQYhPTE
Incorrect thought? I think CAGW is the biggest scam in the history of the world! The Left wants to send me to the gulag so that I get my mind right.
This is the how to book the democrat party and their GOPe allies have been following.
Police violence Democrats approve of.
I am sure this will be played 24/7 by the "news" media.
Just don’t pretend you would have had the courage to stand up for what is right, Althouse. You believe whatever your milieu tells you to believe, and you do whatever your milieu tells you to do.
Pretty soon the Oligarch tools in Canada will be melting down the gold fillings in teeth.
I worry about this.
I give you art from a short period of time when relaxed government control of art in China allowed the reproduction by Chinese artists of the entire history of Western painting, in about a decade or so: https://aaa.org.hk/en/collections/search/library/beyond-the-open-door-contemporary-paintings-from-the-peoples-republic-of-china
This exhibit of art from the 1980s, before the post-Tiananmen crackdown, contained the most beautiful piece of art I've ever seen in person, Yellow Wall by Wei Luan. Photos don't do it justice at all. It makes you want to join the old man in the sun. https://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2007/contemporary-art-asia-china-korea-japan-n08343/lot.107.html
The upper left corner of the wall has a single missing brick showing blue sky beyond the wall. The birds can make it over the wall. The old man can't. Will the child ever be able to do so? Symbolism as simple as a sledgehammer to the forehead, done as well as anything ever done by anyone on earth.
Big Mike said... Just don’t pretend you would have had the courage to stand up for what is right, Althouse.
A quote on making predictions: The only way to predict the future is to have power to shape the future. Eric Hoffer
Nobody can predict the future. You just have to give your all to the relationship you're in and do your best to take care of your partner, communicate and give them every last drop of love you have.
Link to video
Howard said...
Achilles thinks a knee to the ribs is way worst than a knee to the neck because it is in violation of the unwritten rules of White Privilege.
You are just a filthy disgusting blob of diarrhea. In ten years, no one in your family will acknowledge your pathetical existence.
Hahaha 😂. Just kidding. You'll be dead from CTE accelerated by your IGF-1 and mTOR producing Keto diet.
I see the weight of your positions is finally weighing on your shriveled shitty little soul.
A drug addict swallowed his dealers drugs during a traffic stop and died. Chauvin's knee was not pressed down on his kneck and had nothing to do with the death which was lungs filled with fluid from a massive fentanyl overdose.
And you supported the BLM burning and looting and murder spree for 9 months over a situation that was portrayed wildly out of context.
Murder rates skyrocketed since then and thousands of Black people have lost their lives because of what you supported. BLM founders got rich and are buying mansions. The average black person got screwed.
Typical for Democrats.
Everyone sees you for what you are Howard.
You are a fascist shithead and you will be pretending you didn't support this in 5 years.
The fact that the Zelma protesters were willing and able to peacefully protest was just as important as the message they were trying to convey.
In order to make good predictions we need to have as much information, good and bad, as possible. And the best way to distinguish the good from the bad is to have the bad be able to air as well as the good. If you skip this step believing you know best, the good you have determined for yourself will transform into the stuff of nightmares.
I've been watching Spinoza videos. (if you can't already tell)
This is why web3.0 is the end of their control.
Markets will decentralize.
Biden and Trudeau are just hastening the end of government controlled currency with their fascist bullshit.
One more thing about predictions... My recollection, from the protests to Gov Walker's budget repair bill, is that when the disturbance came to Althouse's doorstep, Madison WI, she accorded herself most valiantly by not only sparingly covering it; Althouse showed up and attempted to communicate with the protesters. You can go back and look at the video. It was stressful.
Althouse's milieu is Madison city, Dane County which is the capital of the state I live in, and the home of my state's leading university. I wish I could think Madison city or Dane County had her dedication to free speech.
We seem to be undergoing a "rectification campaign against incorrect thought" of our own.
Our govt is calling it MDM for misinformation, disinformation and malinformation.
I find the last scariest. It is information that is factually correct but leads people away from believing the narrative.
It is information that Mao, and Lenin before him called [politically] incorrect.
As Lenin or Mao might have put it "it is incorrect to say we are murdering millions. We are, but when you say so you make us look bad. People might doubt the legitimacy of the regime."
This is the kind of "malinformation" our present day fascists think they should prevent.
Fuck them.
John LGBTQBNY Henry
Ai Weiwei too!
Scratch A democrat hard and you find a liberal. Scratch a liberal hard and you find a progressive. Lightly scratch a progressive and you find a communist. Lightly touch a communist and you find a totalitarian.
If Socialist realism art were honest, it would portray the Gulags and killing fields.
Achilles
Don't engage the dishonest broker.
Sub in the name Joe Rogan and the song remains the same.
"his father naively argued with Mao that literature and art cannot be 'a gramophone or a loudspeaker for politics' but must instead find 'expression in their truthfulness.'"
In every generation since 1789 such people have "naively argued" that literature and art, and now media, must find expression in their truthfulness. We've seen it on this very blog, when our hostess declares herself "irked" at some lie or other. They should be better! It's terrible!
And generation after generation, progs have brought down the hammer when they could, and demonstrated that culture consists of megaphones, and that petty-bourgeois sensibilities mean nothing.
But Ai doesn't kowtow. Neither, to her credit, does Althouse.
How did Ai's father miss the careers of Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky, Marx, and every other socialist back to Lycurgus? Ya gotta pay attention, people!!
The Canadians buried their heads in the sand shortly after the Korean War, and now they have Fidel Junior complete with a maple-flavored version of the KGB stomping their society into the ground. The same thing can happen to us at any moment, but at least we know voter fraud is partly responsible. The Canucks, however, have been voting in the Liberals time and again for decades, so they sorta asked for it, didn't they?
Bill, Republic of Texas said...
Ai Weiwei too!
***********
Hey! Don't get all Weiwei'ed up!
Interesting that Mao (assuming this translation is correct) used the term 'rectification'. There is a Confucian principle called "The Rectification of Names". Confucius considered this the main responsibility of the Emperor. It means, ensuring that the words used by those in charge correspond with reality.
An Emperor rules only by the grace of Heaven, and an Emperor who fails to "rectify the names", i.e. allows (or even promotes) the corruption of words and meaning by his ministers, loses the Mandate of Heaven. Social harmony will collapse, government operations will seize up as bureaucrats get lost in an endless tangle of disputation over words, and his realm will fail, deservedly so.
Mao was a bad emperor, and his realm required a drastic overhaul after he died to avert a collapse.
Socialist realism in the visual art tends to be cliched and predictable. However, some soviet era landscape paintings were skillfully painted and designed. Soviet realist fiction was usually bland, tedious, and propagandistic, and had a very small readership outside the Soviet Union. Moreover, contemporary American fiction is now in the throes of it own political orthodoxy. New authors must please woke critics and editors, and major publishers avoid publishing anything that might displease the woke left. Writers like Flannery O’Connor, Hemingway, or Faulkner would probably have difficulty getting published today.
In the 1980’s, I had a Chinese exchange student whose father was brutalized by the red guards during the cultural revolution. He was reviled and paraded around while wearing signs labeling him as a class enemy. He was seriously demoralized and psychologically damaged by the
experience, but he was later rehabilitated. She was fortunately able to study in the U.S. after the regime loosened restrictions.
Post a Comment