What would Chairman Mao think?

The following was an internet resource on the website of an education non-profit whose mission is to “introduce global content,” and “change the way students learn.” Their motto is "Educating for Global Understanding."

This form of painting, which in the West would be categorized as folk or naive painting, became popular during the Cultural Revolution in China (1966-1976). Images depicting peoples' every day lives in the fields, performing productive agricultural and labor routines became a natural focus under the regime of Chairman Mao. Artists in places like Hu County in Shaanxi Province (near Xi'an), where these painting were made, were discovered and became popular.

Hu County is rich with painters working in this style. Think about skills and practices being passed down through generations of families living in a fertile art community.

While this art form gained broad acceptance in the late 1960s and 1970s, these paintings were done in the late 1990's. Are there any aspects of these Peasant Paintings that could be read as images that promote or represent Cultural Revolution ideals? How do these paintings differ in style from "traditional" Chinese painting? How are they similar? Would Mao Zedong like them? If so, what would he like about them?

My problem with the material is not what is taught. It’s nice to have students think about folk paintings from modern China. It’s what is not taught. To begin with, introducing the Cultural Revolution while studying art is likely to give the impression that Chairman Mao was concerned about improving his country’s arts and culture. Sadly, the Cultural Revolution’s main contribution to Chinese art was the destruction of countless priceless works of art because they represented “old ways of thinking.” I have been in Buddhist caves where ancient frescoes with thousands of Buddha faces were methodically scratched out by Red Guard soldiers.

Secondly, the passage gives the impression of wealth during the Cultural Revolution; agriculture is described as “productive”; Hu County is “a fertile art community,” “rich with painters.” Unsaid is the unfortunate fact that the Cultural Revolution and its predecessor, the Great Leap Forward, were times of enormous famine. Tens of millions of farmers were moved arbitrarily to work on industrial projects to force China’s Great Leap Forward into the industrial age, which led to massive starvation and widespread cannibalism--in many cases, parents eating their own children. Statistics are hard to verify, but estimates range as high as 30 million dead.

Consider this sentence again: "Images depicting peoples' every day lives in the fields, performing productive agricultural and labor routines became a natural focus under the regime of Chairman Mao." A natural focus? The author seems oblivious about the purpose of state-sponsored art in a totalitarian country: that it paints a completely unrealistic vision to cover up the horrors of terror and famine. This would be an interesting start of a discussion, to ask students if they believe the happy scenes depicted reflect life in Communist China.

In addition to famine, the Cultural Revolution was a time of brutal repression, with an additional 2-7 million murdered by execution or overwork in labor camps.

The total murdered by Mao comes to somewhere between 44-72 million people, with 20 million in labor camps over his 26 year reign.

Given these ghoulish statistics, it is perverse in the extreme to ask third graders questions like, “Are there any aspects of these Peasant Paintings that could be read as images that promote or represent Cultural Revolution ideals? Would Mao Zedong like them?”

Which ideals would those be? Cannibalism, famine and mass internment?

Would Mao Zedong approve of the paintings? Should we defer to the aesthetic judgment of a man who murdered 50 million people?

Imagine asking if the paintings promoted Nazi ideals, and whether Adolf Hitler (himself a painter) would like them, without any accompanying criticism of the Nazi regime.

This is what is called “global understanding”?

Winner of the idiotic sentence of the week, pro division

It’s only Monday, but this one from professional idiot James Carroll will be hard to surpass:

The American belief in the righteousness of mass killing for the sake of abstract values like "freedom" springs not from the Revolution, where the killing was relatively slight and the freedom limited to a merchant class, but from the Civil War, where a spirit of total killing was justified by a professed commitment to racial equality that simply did not exist.

It has it all: racism, pacifism, class warfare, anti-Americanism. Plus bonus points for these idiotic points:
--War = mass killing. Take that, D-Day veterans. (At least he's not trying to claim that he supports the troops.)
--Freedom is an “abstract value.” Explain this to the inmates of Treblinka.
--The American Revolution only benefited the merchant class.
--Lincoln’s sham Emancipation Proclamation was a cover for his mass murdering blood lust.

The breadth of idiocy packed into one sentence could only come from a pro.

Angkor Wat proves that Al Gore is right

On my way back from a carbon burning orgy weekend--seven hours of driving to carbon powered ski lifts, wearing petroleum-based clothing and swimming in a heated outdoor pool--I tuned into a National Geographic radio program on Angkor Wat. After some praise of the brilliance of the temple engineers, the Australian archeologist turned the discussion to, naturally, global warming. It appears that the decline of the Khmer kingdom in the 13th century was likely tied to the clear-cutting of the forests around the temples to build rice paddies, which led to a climate change--which, as we know, destroys empires. The parallels with the today's climate change are disturbing: these Khmer temple builders had put all their faith in a technology that led to their downfall, much like the modern western world's dependence on carbon-based technologies.

So the SUV of the 12th century Cambodia was the rice paddy. It all makes sense.

Talking about the weather, 2

Mark Twain once said, "Everyone's talking about the weather but nobody's doing anything about it."

It's funny because the idea of doing something about the weather used to be absurd. But that was before Al Gore started saying things like, “climate crisis…demands immediate action to sharply reduce carbon dioxide emissions worldwide in order to turn down the world’s thermostat.”

Talking about the weather

Talking about the weather used to be the safest of safe conversation openers—a subject so dull and non-controversial because everyone shared the same experience and could hardly be expected to have a different interpretation (with the exception of the grouch who when asked to reply to, “Nice day,” answers, “What’s so nice about it?”)

One side effect of global warming hysteria is the politicization of talking about the weather. The most common word I hear these days is, “crazy.”

On a cold winter day:
“It’s so cold today.”
“It’s crazy.”

Or, on a seasonably warm day:
“Nice day.”
“I know, it’s crazy.”

In New England we used to say that if you don’t like the weather, wait a couple hours. Unusual weather was usual. If pushed, global warming alarmists will concede that weather isn’t the same as climate. One warm day doesn’t prove that the globe is warming. But in practice every weather condition is pressed into service to support the theory of wildly erratic weather.

Crazy.

Good Times, Bad Times

A story on the front page of the Globe today reports: “Greenhouse gas emissions from Northeast power plants were about 10 percent lower than predicted during the last two years…But the decrease may have some unanticipated consequences for efforts to combat global warming.”

Imagine the headlines if emissions had risen 10 percent.

In The God that Failed Arthur Koestler describes how his Communist Party leaders taught him to think dialectically, a useful strategy that allowed him to ignore obvious facts by placing them in the context of revolutionary class struggle. Once you have convinced yourself that you are on the right side of history, no mere fact can intrude. More emissions are bad for global warming. Less emissions are bad for global warming. Warmer weather is proof of global warming. Colder weather is proof of…climate change.

Markey: SUV's Cause Chikungunya

Letter to Globe:
It is surprising that Rep. Edward Markey continues to repeat the inaccurate statement from An Inconvenient Truth that "before climate change, mosquitoes were not present in Nairobi,”and that the Globe published it without the most elemental fact checking (“Bad microbes on the move, “1/1/08). The claim is easily refuted; a CDC report by Snow et. al. (1999), for instance, documents numerous malaria epidemics in Nairobi in the 1920s, 30s and 40s.

Markey apparently repeats this fabrication indiscriminately as justification for global warming legislation. He is quoted again in your more balanced article, “Scientists tussle over link between global warming, disease.” (Globe, 12/5/07)

Your editorial reports that the disease chikungunya is spread by tiger mosquitoes, which exist “as far north as Germany in Europe.” It is unclear how global warming can be responsible for an outbreak in coastal Ravenna, Italy, 500 miles south of Germany.