China

Che comparing his infant daughter to Mao Tse-tung has been on my mind all day

Mao Tse tung baby.

A soldier in the Al Alqsa Martyr's Brigades holds a picture of China's leader Mao Zedong.

Memento Mao

Andy Warhol, 15 Blue-Green Maos (Reversal Series), 1979

Andy Warhol, Twenty Fuchsia Maos, 1979

Andy Warhol, 20 Pink Maos, 1979

Usually, when refugees flee an oppressive regime, they know what they’re leaving behind; they can taste the freedom they’re searching for. But part of the story “Beyond Utopia” tells is that the citizens of North Korea don’t fully understand how oppressed they are. They can’t; they’ve never seen any other way of being.

In that sense, apart from Nazi Germany, the country that North Korea most resembles is Mao’s China during the insanity of the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward. Tens of millions of people died in China from famine, due to Mao’s disastrously unhinged economic policies. In the aftermath, partly to cover all that up, China became the first National Propaganda Media State, subjecting its vast populace to a daily brainwashing, with Mao held up as a living deity.

The North Korean regime, in many ways a depraved outgrowth of Maoism, goes even further. As the film shows us, it has taken its made-up theology from the Bible, with Kim Jong-un portrayed as a Christ figure, and we see footage of the great mass stadium exhibitions that the citizens, including thousands of schoolchildren, rehearse for a year at a time — displays that look like the opening ceremony of the Olympics staged on a mile-wide electronic billboard in which every LED light is a choreographed human being. All of this loony-tunes spectacle is meant to celebrate the “utopia” of North Korea, with the outside world, especially America, portrayed as such a demonic place that the only word used to refer to someone in the U.S. is “American-bastard.”

The joyless suppression of life in North Korea prompts at least some citizens to suspect that a better life must lay on the other side. The family of defectors in “Beyond Utopia” are like that; they’re ordinary people who have put themselves on a moving mission.

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Written in 1970 by the extraordinary filmmaker and revolutionary Jean Luc Godard.

Blackhawk #11

Celebrating New Year in Costumes, 1955.

“Despite the threat of a Communist invasion of the islands North of Formosa, the Nationalist Chinese held their usual rip roaring celebration of Chinese New Year. During a parade through the streets of Taipei, Nationalist wore rubber masks and carried placards in Chinese characters saying "Traitor Mao Tse-Tung" and "King of The Killers, Malenkov." The parade also celebrated Freedom Day, the day the anti-Communist Chinese were released from South Korean prison camps, and allowed to join the Nationalists on Formosa.“

source: getty

Manifestantes protestam contra a intervenção militar dos EUA no Vietnã. Pequim, China, 1965.

Foto por Marc Riboud

Chinese Culture Museum - Chinese side of Khorgos Free Trade Zone ( Kazakhstan - China border )

“My prison experience is a good example of revolutionary suicide in action, for prison is a microcosm of the outside world. From the beginning of my sentence I defied the authorities by refusing to cooperate; as a result, I was confined to ‘lock up’, a solitary cell. As the months passed and I remained steadfast, they came to regard my behavior as suicidal. I was told that I would crack and break under the strain. I did not break, nor did I retreat from my position. I grew strong.

If I had submitted to their exploitation and done their will, it would have killed my spirit and condemned me to a living death. To cooperate in prison meant reactionary suicide to me. While solitary confinement can be physically and mentally destructive, my actions were taken with an understanding of the risk. I had to suffer through a certain situation; by doing so, my resistance told them that I rejected all their stood for. Even though my struggle might have harmed my health, even killed me, I looked upon it as a way of raising the consciousness of the other inmates, as a contribution to the ongoing revolution. Only resistance can destroy the pressures that cause reactionary suicide.

The concept of revolutionary suicide is not defeatist or fatalistic. On the contrary, it conveys an awareness of reality in combination with the possibility of hope - reality because the revolutionary must always be prepared to face death, and hope because it symbolizes a resolute determination to bring about change. Above all, it demands that the revolutionary see his death an his life as one piece. Chairman Mao says that death comes for us all, but it varies in its significance: to die for the reactionary is lighter than a feather; to die for the revolution is heavier than Mount Tai.”

- Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide

Yu Youhan (Chinese, 1943 - 2023), Mao Series: Chairman Mao, silkscreen print on paper, 95 × 68 cm.

The Russian trolls are about discrediting stuff like this.