The Infernal Library by Daniel Kalder

Author:Daniel Kalder
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

PHASE II

TYRANNY AND MUTATION

1

Small Demons

Lin Biao’s description of Quotations from Chairman Mao as a “spiritual atom bomb of infinite power” was apposite not only in light of the book’s devastating impact upon Chinese culture but also in terms of the position it holds in the history of dictator literature. To extend the metaphor further: if Marx and Engels represent the “big bang” at the dawn of time, and Lenin and his rivals the formation of the stars and planets following that inaugural blast, then the advent of Mao represents a swift acceleration to the age of Einstein and Oppenheimer, when it became possible to harness that textual power to engineer a massively destructive word weapon that could wreak havoc upon all that had been created.

In fact, it was a spiritual atom bomb in another sense: as ephemeral and elusive as the spirit, it exploded but then faded from memory quite quickly. In 1969 it was all looking so final: Lin Biao was officially named Mao’s successor, the victory of the Cultural Revolution was declared, and “Mao Zedong Thought” was restored to the constitution after a thirteen-year absence. But Lin Biao turned against his master and “died in a plane crash” while attempting to defect with his family to the USSR in 1971. Then, in 1976, Mao himself became yet another dead thing in a glass box at the heart of a communist country, despite the fact that he and his fellow CCP leaders had signed an anti-embalming pact decades earlier. Now that he was dead, he could be tamed, and his words brought to heel.

And so although dead Mao, like Lenin, enjoyed and continues to enjoy the status of a fetish object, the status of his writings was not so enduring. The fifth volume of his Selected Works covering the years 1949 through 1976 was withdrawn as “too revolutionary,” with the result that the official canon stopped in 1949, before the Hundred Flowers Campaign, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution. In 1979 the Little Red Book was denounced for distorting Mao’s thought, withdrawn from the shelves and pulped. Two years later, Mao’s successor Deng Xiaoping echoed the party’s earlier verdict on Stalin, declaring that Mao was 70 percent correct and 30 percent wrong. The party, in short, went out of its way to pretend the Mao bomb had never gone off, and before too long it was chasing investment and opening up trade, and the country’s elite was getting fantastically wealthy.

Meanwhile, for all the destruction that Mao’s bomb had wrought upon China, and although it had its adherents in the jungles of Latin America, and in Nepal and India, and among overeducated imbeciles on the campuses of Western universities, many other dictators carried on as if it had never detonated. Some came after Mao, some were his peers. For many, it was enough that in their own realms they were supreme, although even then, some of them were subjugated to more powerful dictators.

In this section we take a

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