The power of starvation and propaganda: mango worship

JGeropoulas

The Living Force
Here's the backdrop for the following incident: Chinese Communist revolutionary, Mao Zedong first came to prominence leading his troops in a "Long March" retreat from Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's forces in 1934. This forced march traversed 5,600 miles of the harshest terrain in China for 370 days, resulting in the deaths of 90% of his soldiers.

From 1959-62, Mao Zedong allowed 40 million people to starve to death as a result of his "Great Leap Forward" plan. After the harvest of 1959, several ministers expressed concern that the Great Leap Forward had not proved as successful as planned. The most direct of these was Minister of Defense, General Peng Dehuai.

Following Peng's criticism of the Great Leap Forward, Mao orchestrated a purge of Peng and his supporters, stifling criticism of his Great Leap Forward policies. Senior officials who reported the truth of the famine to Mao were branded as "right opportunists." A campaign against right-wing opportunism was launched and resulted in 6 million party members and ordinary peasants being unjustly sent to prison labor camps, where many died of starvation.

From 1966-69, during the "Cultural Revolution", hundreds of thousands of political dissidents were executed by Mao, or by his proxy young revolutionaries, the "Red Guard", who "resisted at all levels of society and even set up their own tribunals" [think: Antifa]

What follows reads like a scene from the movie, "The Gods Must Be Crazy", which is not far from the truth that our "leaders must be psychopaths".

"Mango fever"

On August 4, 1968, Mao was presented with some mangoes by the Pakistani foreign minister, Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada, in an apparent diplomatic gesture.[221] Mao called the mangoes a "spiritual time bomb"[222] and shortly afterwards, Mao had his aide divide them up and send them to Mao Zedong Propaganda Teams across Beijing, starting with one started at Tsinghua University on August 5.[223] On August 7, an article was published in the People's Daily saying:

In the afternoon of the fifth, when the great happy news of Chairman Mao giving mangoes to the Capital Worker and Peasant Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team reached the Tsinghua University campus, people immediately gathered around the gift given by the Great Leader Chairman Mao. They cried out enthusiastically and sang with wild abandonment. Tears swelled up in their eyes, and they again and again sincerely wished that our most beloved Great Leader lived then thousand years without bounds ... They all made phone calls to their own work units to spread this happy news; and they also organised all kinds of celebratory activities all night long, and arrived at [the national leadership compound] Zhongnanhai despite the rain to report the good news, and to express their loyalty to the Great Leader Chairman Mao.[223]

Subsequent articles were also written by government officials propagandizing the reception of the mangoes,[224] and another poem in the People's Daily said: "Seeing that golden mango/Was as if seeing the great leader Chairman Mao ... Again and again touching that golden mango/the golden mango was so warm".[225] Few people at this time in China had ever seen a mango before, and a mango was seen as "a fruit of extreme rarity, like Mushrooms of Immortality".[225]

One of the mangoes was sent to the Beijing Textile Factory,[223] whose revolutionary committee organised a rally in the mangoes' honour.[224] Workers read out quotations from Mao and celebrated the gift. Altars were erected to prominently display the fruit; when the mango peel began to rot after a few days, the fruit was peeled and boiled in a pot of water. Workers then filed by and each was given a spoonful of mango water. The revolutionary committee also made a wax replica of the mango, and displayed this as a centrepiece in the factory. There followed several months of "mango fever", as the fruit became a focus of a "boundless loyalty" campaign for Chairman Mao. More replica mangoes were created and the replicas were sent on tour around Beijing and elsewhere in China. Many revolutionary committees visited the mangoes in Beijing from outlying provinces; approximately half a million people greeted the replicas when they arrived in Chengdu. Badges and wall posters featuring the mangoes and Mao were produced in the millions.[223] The fruit was shared among all institutions that had been a part of the propaganda team, and large processions were organised in support of the zhengui lipin ("precious gift"), as the mangoes were known as.[226] One dentist in a small village compared a mango to a sweet potato; he was put on trial for malicious slander and executed.[225]

It has been claimed that Mao used the mangoes to express support for the workers who would go to whatever lengths necessary to end the factional fighting among students, and a "prime example of Mao's strategy of symbolic support".[224] Even up until early 1969, participants of Mao Zedong Thought study classes in Beijing would return with mass-produced mango facsimiles and still gain media attention in the provinces.[226]
 
Amazing.

And recent!

The new Chinese empire rapidly establishing itself in the world today is going to be one ka-razy global power if it retains the kind of capacity described above for such an intense universal 'agreeableness' trait. I mean, if people collectively go nuts to the point of executing a doctor for speaking the wrong way about a simple fruit, think what kind of butcher's shop they'd make of some of today's incendiary SJW notions!

Where did that text come from? I'd be fascinated to read more.

-And have you read "The Three Body Problem" by Cixin Liu? -It's a brilliant Sci-Fi book about an alien invasion, written from a Chinese perspective. One of it's main villains decides to help the invaders overthrow humanity after being disgusted by the fascist Cultural Revolution. She figured humanity no longer deserved to exist.
 
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