Did Mao Really Kill Millions in the Great Leap Forward? by Joseph Ball

Over the last 25 years the reputation of Mao Zedong has been seriously undermined by ever more extreme estimates of the numbers of deaths he was supposedly responsible for. In his lifetime, Mao Zedong was hugely respected for the way that his socialist policies improved the welfare of the Chinese people, slashing the level of poverty and hunger in China and providing free health care and education. Mao's theories also gave great inspiration to those fighting imperialism around the world. It is probably this factor that explains a great deal of the hostility towards him from the Right. This is a tendency that is likely to grow more acute with the apparent growth in strength of Maoist movements in India and Nepal in recent years, as well as the continuing influence of Maoist movements in other parts of the world.

Most of the attempts to undermine Mao's reputation centre around the Great Leap Forward that began in 1958. It is this period that this article is primarily concerned with. The peasants had already started farming the land co- operatively in the 1950s. During the Great Leap Forward they joined large communes consisting of thousands or tens of thousands of people. Large-scale irrigation schemes were undertaken to improve agricultural productivity. Mao's plan was to massively increase both agricultural and industrial production. It is argued that these policies led to a famine in the years 1959-61 (although some believe the famine began in 1958). A variety of reasons are cited for the famine. For example, excessive grain procurement by the state or food being wasted due to free distribution in communal kitchens. It has also been claimed that peasants neglected agriculture to work on the irrigation schemes or in the famous 'backyard steel furnaces' (small-scale steel furnaces built in rural areas).

Mao admitted that problems had occurred in this period. However, he blamed the majority of these difficulties on bad weather and natural disasters. He admitted that there had been policy errors too, which he took responsibility for.

Official Chinese sources, released after Mao's death, suggest that 16.5 million people died in the Great Leap Forward. These figures were released during a ideological campaign by the governement of Deng Xiaoping against the legacy of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. However, there seems to be no way of independently, authenticating these figures due to the great mystery about how they were gathered and preserved for twenty years before being released to the general public. American researchers managed to increase this figure to around 30 million by combining the Chinese evidence with extrapolations of their own from China's censuses in 1953 and 1964. Recently, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday in their book Mao: the Unknown Story reported 70 million killed by Mao, including 38 million in the Great Leap Forward.

Western writers on the subject have taken a completely disproportionate view of the period, mesmerised, as they are, by massive death toll figures from dubious sources . They concentrate only on policy excesses and it is likely that their views on the damage that these did are greatly exaggerated. There has been a failure to understand how some of the policies developed in the Great Leap Forward actually benefited the Chinese people, once the initial disruption was over.

US state agencies have provided assistance to those with a negative attitude to Maoism (and communism in general) throughout the post-war period. For example, the veteran historian of Maoism Roderick MacFarquhar edited The China Quarterly) in the 1960s. This magazine published allegations about massive famine deaths that have been quoted ever since. It later emerged that this journal received money from a CIA front organisation, as MacFarquhar admitted in a recent letter to The London Review of Books. (Roderick MacFarquhar states that he did not know the money was coming from the CIA while he was editing The China Quarterly.

Those who have provided qualitative evidence, such as eyewitness accounts cited by Jasper Becker in his famous account of the period Hungry Ghosts , have not provided enough accompanying evidence to authenticate these accounts. Important documentary evidence quoted by Chang and Halliday concerning the Great Leap Forward is presented in a demonstrably misleading way.

Evidence from the Deng Xiaoping regime Mao that millions died during the Great Leap Forward is not reliable. Evidence from peasants contradicts the claim that Mao was mainly to blame for the deaths that did occur during the Great Leap Forward period.

US demographers have tried to use death rate evidence and other demographic evidence from official Chinese sources to prove the hypothesis that there was a 'massive death toll' in the Great Leap Forward (i.e. a hypothesis that the 'largest famine of all time' or 'one of the largest famines of all time' took place during the Great Leap Forward). However, inconsistencies in the evidence and overall doubts about the source of their evidence undermines this 'massive death toll' hypothesis.

The More Likely Truth About The Great Leap Forward

The idea that 'Mao was responsible for genocide' has been used as a springboard to rubbish everything that the Chinese people achieved during Mao's rule. However, even someone like the demographer Judith Banister, one of the most prominent advocates of the 'massive death toll' hypothesis has to admit the successes of the Mao era. She writes how in 1973-5 life expectancy in China was higher than in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and many countries in Latin America (1). In 1981 she co-wrote an article where she described the People's Republic of China as a 'super-achiever' in terms of mortality reduction, with life expectancy increasing by approximately 1.5 years per calendar year since the start of communist rule in 1949 (2). Life expectancy increased from 35 in 1949 to 65 in the 1970s when Mao's rule came to an end (3).

To read many modern commentators on Mao's China (4), you would get the impression that Mao's agricultural and industrial policies led to absolute economic disaster. Even more restrained commentators, such as the economist Peter Nolan (5) claim that living standards did not rise in China, during the post-revolutionary period, until Deng Xiaoping took power. Of course, increases in living standards are not the sole reason for increases in life expectancy. However, it is absurd to claim that life expectancy could have increased so much during the Mao era with no increase in living standards.

For example, it is claimed by many who have studied figures released by Deng Xiaoping after Mao's death that per capita grain production did not increase at all during the Mao period (6). But how is it possible to reconcile such statistics with the figures on life expectancy that the same authors quote? Besides which these figures are contradicted by other figures. Guo Shutian, a Former Director of Policy and Law in the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture, in the post-Mao era, gives a very different view of China's overall agricultural performance during the period before Deng's 'reforms'. It is true that he writes that agricultural production decreased in five years between 1949-1978 due to 'natural calamities and mistakes in the work'. However he states that during 1949-1978 the per hectare yield of land sown with food crops increased by 145.9% and total food production rose 169.6%. During this period China's population grew by 77.7%. On these figures, China's per capita food production grew from 204 kilograms to 328 kilograms in the period in question (7).

Even according to figures released by the Deng Xiaoping regime, industrial production increased by 11.2% per year from 1952-1976 (by 10% a year during the alleged catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution). In 1952 industry was 36% of gross value of national output in China. By 1975 industry was 72% and agriculture was 28%. It is quite obvious that Mao's supposedly disastrous socialist economic policies paved the way for the rapid (but inegalitarian and unbalanced) economic development of the post-Mao era (8).

There is a good argument to suggest that the policies of the Great Leap Forward actually did much to sustain China's overall economic growth, after an initial period of disruption. At the end of the 1950s, it was clear that China was going to have to develop using its own resources and without being able to use a large amount of machinery and technological know-how imported from the Soviet Union.

In the late '50's China and the USSR were heading for a schism. Partly, this was the ideological fall-out that occurred following the death of Stalin. There had been differences between Stalin and Mao. Among other things, Mao believed that Stalin mistrusted the peasants and over-emphasized the development of heavy industry. It is important not to exaggerate the nature of these differences, however. Mao vehemently opposed the way Khruschev denounced Stalin in 1956. Mao believed that Khruschev was using his denunciation of 'Stalinism' as a cover for the progressive ditching of socialist ideology and practice in the USSR.

The split was due to the tendency of Khruschev to try and impose the Soviet Union's own ways of doing things on its allies. Khruschev acted not in the spirit of socialist internationalism but rather in the spirit of treating economically less developed nations like client states. For a country like China, that had fought so bitterly for its freedom from foreign domination, such a relationship could never have been acceptable. Mao could not have sold it to his people, even if he had wanted to.

In 1960 the conflict between the two nations came to a head. The Soviets had been providing a great deal of assistance for China's industrialization program. In 1960, all Soviet technical advisers left the country. They took with them the blueprints of the various industrial plants they had been planning to build.

Mao made clear that , from the start, the policies of the Great Leap Forward were about China developing a more independent economic policy. China's alternative to reliance on the USSR was a program for developing agriculture alongside the development of industry. In so doing, Mao wanted to use the resources that China could muster in abundance-labour and popular enthusiasm. The use of these resources would make up for the lack of capital and advanced technology.

Although problems and reversals occurred in the Great Leap Forward, it is fair to say that it had a very important role in the ongoing development of agriculture. Measures such as water conservancy and irrigation allowed for sustained increases in agricultural production, once the period of bad harvests was over. They also helped the countryside to deal with the problem of drought. Flood defenses were also developed. Terracing helped gradually increase the amount of cultivated area (9).

Industrial development was carried out under the slogan of 'walking on two legs'. This meant the development of small and medium scale rural industry alongside the development of heavy industry. As well as the steel furnaces, many other workshops and factories were opened in the countryside. The idea was that rural industry would meet the needs of the local population. Rural workshops supported efforts by the communes to modernize agricultural work methods. Rural workshops were very effective in providing the communes with fertilizer, tools, other agricultural equipment and cement (needed for water conservation schemes) (10).

Compared to the rigid, centralized economic system that tended to prevail in the Soviet Union, the Great Leap Forward was a supreme act of lateral thinking. Normally, cement and fertilizer, for example, would be produced in large factories in urban areas away from the rural areas that needed them. In a poor country there would be the problem of obtaining the capital and machinery necessary to produce industrial products such as these, using the most modern technique. An infrastructure linking the cities to the towns would then be needed to transport such products once they were made. This in itself would involve vast expense. As a result of problems like these, development in many poorer countries is either very slow or does not occur at all.

Rural industry established during the Great Leap Forward used labour- intensive rather than capital-intensive methods. As they were serving local needs, they were not dependent on the development of an expensive nation-wide infrastructure of road and rail to transport the finished goods.

In fact the supposedly wild, chaotic policies of the Great Leap Forward meshed together quite well, after the problems of the first few years. Local cement production allowed water conservancy schemes to be undertaken. Greater irrigation made it possible to spread more fertilizer. This fertilizer was, in turn, provided by the local factories. Greater agricultural productivity would free up more agricultural labour for the industrial manufacturing sector, facilitating the overall development of the country (11). This approach is often cited as an example of Mao's economic illiteracy (what about the division of labour and the gains from regional specialization etc). However, it was right for China as the positive effects of Mao's policies in terms of human welfare and economic development show.

Agriculture and small scale rural industry were not the only sector to grow during China's socialist period. Heavy industry grew a great deal in this period too. Developments such as the establishment of the Taching oil field during the Great Leap Forward provided a great boost to the development of heavy industry. A massive oil field was developed in China (12) This was developed after 1960 using indigenous techniques, rather than Soviet or western techniques. (Specifically the workers used pressure from below to help extract the oil. They did not rely on constructing a multitude of derricks, as is the usual practice in oil fields).

The arguments about production figures belie the fact that the Great Leap Forward was at least as much about changing the way of thinking of the Chinese people as it was about industrial production. The so-called 'backyard steel furnaces', where peasants tried to produce steel in small rural foundries, became infamous for the low quality of the steel they produced. But they were as much about training the peasants in the ways of industrial production as they were about generating steel for China's industry. It's worth remembering that the 'leaps' Mao used to talk about the most were not leaps in the quantities of goods being produced but leaps in people's consciousness and understanding. Mistakes were made and many must have been demoralized when they realized that some of the results of the Leap had been disappointing. But the success of the Chinese economy in years to come shows that not all its lessons were wasted.

Great Leap Forward and Qualitative Evidence

Of course, to make such points is to go against the mainstream western view that the Great Leap Forward was an disaster of world historical proportions. But what is the basis for this view? One way those who believe in the 'massive death toll' thesis could prove their case would be to find credible qualitative evidence such as eye-witness or documentary evidence. The qualitative evidence that does exist is not convincing however.

Chinese history scholar Carl Riskin,believes that a very serious famine took place but states 'In general, it appears that the indications of hunger and hardship did not approach the kinds of qualitative evidence of mass famine that have accompanied other famines of comparable (if not equal) scale, including earlier famines in China.' He points out that much of the contemporary evidence presented in the West tended to be discounted at the time as it emanated from right-wing sources and was hardly conclusive. He considers whether repressive policies by the Chinese governement prevented information about the famine getting out but states 'whether it is a sufficient explanation is doubtful. There remains something of a mystery here.' (13).

There are authors such as Roderick MacFarquhar, Jasper Becker and Jung Chang who certainly do assert that the evidence they have seen proves the massive famine thesis. It is true that their main works on these issues (14) ,do cite sources for this evidence. However, they do not make it sufficiently clear, in these books, why they believe these sources are authentic.

It therefore remains an open question why the accounts presented by these authors should be treated as certain fact in the west. In his famous 1965 book on China, A Curtain of Ignorance, Felix Greene says that he traveled through areas of China in 1960 where food rationing was very tight but he did not see mass starvation. He also cites other eyewitnesses who say the same kind of thing. It is likely, that in fact, famine did occur in some areas. However Greene's observations indicate that it was not a nation-wide phenomenon on the apocalyptic scale suggested by Jasper Becker and others. Mass hunger was not occurring in the areas he traveled through, although famine may have been occurring elsewhere. Why are the accounts of people like Becker believed so readily when the account of Felix Greene and the others he cites is discounted? Of course, the sympathy of Greene for Mao's regime may be raised in connection with this and it might be suggested he distorted the truth for political reasons. But Becker, MacFarquhar and Jung Chang have their own perspectives on the issue too. Could anyone seriously doubt that these authors are not fairly staunch anti-communists?

Before addressing the question of the authentication of sources, the context for the discussion of these issues needs to be set. Communism is a movement that generates a massive amount of opposition. Western countries waged an intensive propaganda war against communism. In power, communist governments dispossessed large numbers of people of their capital and land. The whole landlord and business class was robbed of its social power and status across much of Asia and Europe. Unsurprisingly, this generated much bitterness. A large number of well-educated people who were born in these countries had and still have the motivation to discredit communism. It is not 'paranoia' to ask that those who write about the communist era take pains to ensure that their sources are reporting fact and are not providing testimony that has been distorted or slanted by anti-communist bias.

In addition, the US government did have an interest in putting out negative propaganda about Chinese communism and communism in general. Too often discussion of this is dismissed as 'conspiracy theories' and the evidence about what really happened does not get discussed very widely.

However, covert attempts by the US to discredit communism are a matter of record. US intelligence agencies often sought a connection with those who published work about communist regimes. It must not be thought that those people they sought this connection with were simply hacks paid to churn out cheap sensationalism. Far from it. For example, The China Quarterly published many articles in the 1960s which are still frequently cited as evidence of living conditions in China and the success or otherwise of government policies in that country. In 1962 it published an article by Joseph Alsop that alleged that Mao was attempting to wipe out a third of his population through starvation to facilitate his economic plans! (15) This article is cited, in all seriousness, to provide contemporary evidence of the 'massive death toll' hypothesis in many later works on the subject (for example in the article 'Famine in China' that is discussed below).

The editor of The China Quarterly was Roderick MacFarquhar who went on to write many important works on China's communist government. MacFarquhar edited Volume 14 of the Cambridge History of China which covered the period 1949-1965. He wrote The Origins of the Cultural Revolution which includes a volume on the events of 1956 and 1957 as well as a volume on the Great Leap Forward, which puts forward the 'massive death toll' thesis. He also edited Mao's Secret Speeches . Printed in the pages of The China Quarterly is a statement that it was published by Information Bulletin Ltd on behalf of The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). On 13 May 1967 The CCF issued a press release admitting that it was funded by the CIA, following an expose in Ramparts magazine (16)

MacFarquhar stated when questioned by me that:

'When I was asked to be the founder editor of the CQ [China Quarterly], it was explained to me that the mission of the CCF was to encourage Western intellectuals to form a community committed to the free exchange of ideas. The aim was to provide some kind of an organisational counter to Soviet efforts to attract Western intellectuals into various front organisations...All I was told about funding was that the CCF was backed by a wide range of foundations, including notably Ford, and the fact that, of these, the Farfield Foundation was a CIA front was not disclosed.'

In the 26 January 2006 edition of The London Review of Books MacFarquhar writes of 'the 1960 inaugural issues of the China Quarterly, of which I was then the editor'

He also writes that 'secret moneys from the CIA (from the Farfield Foundation via the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the parent of the CQ, Encounter and many other magazines) provided part of the funding for the CQ - something I did not know until the public revelations of the late 1960s.'

The issue goes beyond those, like MacFarquhar, who worked for periodicals connected with the CCF. It is also alleged that other magazines received funding that emanated from the CIA more generally. For example, Victor Marchetti, a former staff officer in the Office of the Director of the CIA, wrote that the CIA set up the Asia Foundation and subsidized it to the tune of $8 million a year to support the work of 'anti-communist academicians in various Asian countries, to disseminate throughout Asia a negative vision of mainland China, North Vietnam and North Korea' (17).

Of course, the issue is not black and white. For example, MacFarquhar also states that he allowed a wide range of views from different sides of the political spectrum to be aired in his journal. He argues that Alsop's article would have been published elsewhere, even if he had rejected it and that he did publish replies to it which were negative about Alsop's thesis.

This may be true. However, those like MacFarquhar were publishing the kind of things the CIA might be thought to, in general, look favourably upon. (Otherwise why would the CIA have put up money for it?) The key point is that these people had a source of western state funding that others with a different viewpoint lacked.

In the last few years a new generation of writers has published alleged eyewitness and documentary evidence for the 'massive death toll' hypothesis. The key issue with this evidence is the authentication of sources. These authors do not present sufficient evidence in the works cited in this article to show that the sources are authentic.

Jasper Becker in his book on the Great Leap Forward, Hungry Ghosts, cites a great deal of evidence of mass starvation and cannibalism in China during the Great Leap Forward. It should be noted that this is evidence that only emerged in the 1990s. Certainly the more lurid stories of cannibalism are not corroborated by any source that appeared at the actual time of the Great Leap Forward, or indeed for many years later. Many of the accounts of mass starvation and cannibalism that Becker uses come from a 600 page document 'Thirty Years in the Countryside'. Becker says it was a secret official document that was smuggled out of China in 1989. Becker writes that his sources for Hungry Ghosts include documents smuggled out of China in 1989 by intellectuals going into exile. The reader needs to be told how people who were apparently dissidents fleeing the country during a crack-down were able to smuggle out official documents regarding events thirty years before.

Also, Becker should have discussed more generally why he believes 'Thirty Years in the Countryside' and the other texts are authentic. In 2001 Becker reviewed the Tiananmen Papers in the London Review of Books (18). The Tiananmen Papers are purportedly inner party documents which were smuggled out of the country by a dissident. They supposedly shed light on the Party leaderships thinking at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre. In his review Becker seriously discusses the possibility that these papers might be forgeries. In Hungry Ghosts, Becker needed to say why he thought the documents he was citing in his own book were genuine, despite believing that other smuggled official documents might be inauthentic.

Similarly, Becker cites a purported internal Chinese army journal from 1961 as evidence of a massive humanitarian disaster during the Great Leap Forward. The reports in this journal do indeed allude to a fairly significant disaster which is effecting the morale of Chinese troops. However, is this journal a genuine document? The journals were released by US Department of State in 1963 and was published in a collection by the Hoover Institution entitled The Politics of the Chinese Red Army in 1966. According to the British Daily Telegraph newspaper (19) 'They [the journals] have been in American hands for some time, although nobody will disclose how they were acquired.' Becker and the many other writers on the Great Leap Forward who have cited these journals need to state why they regard them as authentic.

Becker's book also uses eyewitness accounts of hunger in the Great Leap Forward. During the mid-nineties, he interviewed people in mainland China as well as Hong Kong and Chinese immigrants in the west. He states in his book that in mainland China he was 'rarely if ever, allowed to speak freely to the peasants'. Local officials 'coached' the peasants before the interview, sat with them during it and answered some of the questions for them. Given that there is a good chance that these officials were trying to slant evidence in favour of the negative Deng Xiaoping line on the Great Leap Forward it is surely important that the reader is told which of the interviews cited in the book were conducted under these conditions and which were not. Becker does not do this in Hungry Ghosts. Nowhere in this book does he go into sufficient detail to demonstrate to the reader that the accounts he cites in his book are authentic.

For a few years, Hungry Ghosts, was the pre-eminent text, as far as critics of Mao were concerned. However, in 2005 Mao: the Unknown Story was published and very heavily promoted in the West. It's allegations are, if anything, even more extreme than Becker's book. Of the 70 million deaths the book ascribes to Mao, 38 million are meant to have taken place during the Great Leap Forward. The book relies very heavily on an unofficial collection of Mao's speeches and statements which were supposedly recorded by his followers and which found their way to the west by means that are unclear. The authors often use materials from this collection to try and demonstrate Mao's fanaticism and lack of concern for human life. They are a group of texts that became newly available in the 1980s courtesy of the Center of Chinese Research Materials (CCRM) in the US. Some of these texts were translated into English and published in Mao's Secret Speeches (20).

In this volume, Timothy Cheek writes an essay assessing the authenticity of the texts. He writes 'The precise provenance of these volumes, which have arrived through various channels, cannot be documented...' Timothy Cheek argues that the texts are likely to be authentic for two reasons. Firstly, because some of the texts that the CCRM received were previously published in mainland China in other editions. Secondly, because texts that appear in one volume received by the CCRM also appear in at least one other volume received by the CCRM. It is not obvious to me why these two facts provide strong evidence of The general authenticity of the texts.

Perhaps more importantly Chang and Halliday quote passages from these texts in a misleading way in their chapter on the Great Leap Forward. Chang claims that in 1958 Mao clamped down on 'what he called 'people roaming the countryside uncontrolled.' In the next sentence the authors claim that 'The traditional possibility of escaping a famine by fleeing to a place where there was food was now blocked off.' But the part of the 'secret' speech in which Mao supposedly complains about people 'roaming around uncontrolled' has nothing to do with preventing population movement in China. When the full passage which the authors selectively quote from is read, it can be seen that the authors are being misleading. What Mao is actually meant to have said is as follows.

'[Someone] from an APC [an Agricultural Producers' Co-operative-Joseph Ball] in Handan [Hebei] drove a cart to the Anshan steel [mill] and wouldn't leave until given some iron. In every place [there are ] so many people roaming around uncontrolled; this must be banned completely. [We] must work out an equilibrium between levels, with each level reporting to the next higher level- APCs to the counties, counties to the prefectures, prefectures to the provinces- this is called socialist order.' (21)

What Mao is talking about here is the campaign to increase steel production, partly through the use of small-scale rural production. Someone without authority was demanding iron from Anshan to help their co-operative meet their steel production quota. Mao seems to be saying that this spontaneous approach is wrong. He seems to be advocating a more hierarchical socialist planning system where people have to apply to higher authorities to get the raw materials they need to fulfil production targets. (This sounds very unlike Mao-but that is by the by.) He is clearly not advocating a general ban on all Chinese people traveling around the country here!

A second, seriously misleading, quotation comes at the end of the chapter on the Great Leap Forward. First Chang and Halliday write 'We can now say with assurance how many people Mao was ready to dispense with.' The paragraph then gives some examples of alleged quotes by Mao on how many Chinese deaths would be acceptable in time of war. The next paragraph begins 'Nor was Mao just thinking about a war situation.' They then quote Mao at the Wuchang Conference as saying 'Working like this, with all these projects, half of China may well have to die.' This quotation appears in the heading of Chang and Hallidays chapter on the Great Leap Forward. The way the authors present this quotation it looks as if Mao was saying that it might indeed be necessary for half of China to die to realize his plans to increase industrial production. But it is obvious from the actual text of the speech that what Mao is doing is warning of the dangers of overwork and over-enthusiasm in the Great Leap Forward, while using a fair bit of hyperbole. Mao is making it clear that he does not want anyone to die as a result of his industrialization drive. In this part of the discussion, Mao talks about the idea of developing all the major industries and agriculture in one fell swoop. The full text of the passage that the authors selectively quote from is as follows.

'In this kind of situation, I think if we do [all these things simultaneously] half of China's population unquestionably will die; and if it's not a half, it'll be a third or ten percent, a death toll of 50 million. When people died in Guangxi [in 1955-Joseph Ball], wasn't Chen Manyuan dismissed? If with a death toll of 50 million, you didn't lose your jobs, I at least should lose mine; [whether I would lose my] head would be open to question. Anhui wants to do so many things, it's quite all right to do a lot, but make it a principle to have no deaths.' (22)

Then in a few sentences later Mao says: 'As to 30 million tons of steel, do we really need that much? Are we able to produce [that much]? How many people do we mobilize? Could it lead to deaths?'

It is very important that a full examination of the sources Chang and Halliday have used for their book is made. This is a call that has been made elsewhere. Nicholas D. Kristof's review of the book in The New York Times brought up some interesting questions. Kristof talks about Mao's English teacher Zhang Hanzhi (Mao attempted to learn English in adult life) who Chang and Halliday cite as one of the people they interviewed for the book. However, Zhang told Kristof (who is one of her friends) that though she met the two authors she declined to be interviewed and provided them with no substantial information (23). Kristof calls for the authors to publish their sources on the web so they can be assessed for fairness.

Deng's Campaign Against Mao's Legacy

There were some proponents of the 'massive death toll' story in the 1960s. However, as Felix Greene pointed out in A Curtain of Ignorance anti- communists in the 1950s and early 1960s made allegations about massive famines in China virtually every year. The story about the Great Leap Forward was only really taken seriously in the 1980s when the new Chinese leadership began to back the idea. It was this that has really given credibility in the west to those such as Becker and Jung Chang.

The Chinese leadership began its attack on the Great Leap Forward in 1979. Deng moved against Mao supporters directing the official press to attack them (24). This took the form of an ideological campaign against 'ultraleftism'. As Meissner, says in his study of the Deng Xiaoping era, 'multitudes of scholars and theoreticians were brought forth to expound on the 'petty bourgeois" social and ideological roots of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution" (25).

The reason for this vilification of the Great Leap Forward had much to do with post-Mao power struggles and the struggle to roll back the socialist policies of 1949-76. Ater Mao's death in 1976 Hua Guofeng had come to power on a platform of 'upholding every word and policy made by Mao'. Deng Xiaoping badly needed a political justification for his usurpation of Hua in 1978 and his assumption of leadership. Deng's stated stance of Mao being '70% right and 30% wrong' was a way of distinguishing his own 'pragmatic' approach to history and ideology from his predecessors. (The pro-market policies Deng implemented suggested that he actually believed that Mao was about 80% wrong.)

The Chinese party did everything it could to promote the notion that the Great Leap Forward was an catastrophe caused by ultra-leftist policies. Marshal Ye Jian ying, in an important speech in 1979 talked of disasters caused by leftist errors in the Great Leap Forward (26). In 1981 the Chinese Communist Party's 'Resolution on Party History' spoke of 'serious losses to our country and people between 1959 and 1961'. Academics joined in the attack. In 1981 Professor Liu Zeng, Director of the Institute of Population Research at the People's University gave selected death rate figures for 1954-78. These figures were given at a public academic gathering which drew much attention in the West. The figures he gave for 1958-1961 indicated that 16.5 million excess deaths had occurred in this period (27). At the same time Sun Yefang, a prominent Chinese economist publicly drew attention to these figures stating that 'a high price was paid in blood' for the mistakes of the Great Leap Forward (28).

As well as the internal party struggle Deng wanted to reverse virtually all of Mao's positive achievements in the name of introducing capitalism or 'socialism with Chinese characteristics' as he described it. Attacking the Great Leap Forward, helped provide the ideological justification for reversing Mao's 'leftist' policies. Deng dissolved the agricultural communes in the early 1980s. In the years following the Great Leap Forward the communes had begun to provide welfare services like free health care and education. The break up of the Commune meant this ended. In an article about the Great Leap Forward, Han Dongping, an Assistant Professor at Warren Wilson College, described a 'humorous' report in the New York based Chinese newspaper The World Journal about a farmer from Henan province who was unable to pay medical bills to get his infected testicles treated. Tortured by pain he cut them off with a knife and almost killed himself (29). This kind of incident is the real legacy of Deng's 'reforms' in the countryside.

It is often said that Deng's agricultural reforms improved the welfare of the peasantry. It is true that breaking up the communes led to a 5 year period of accelerated agricultural production. But this was followed by years of decline in per capita food production (30). Despite this decline, western commentators tend to describe the break-up of the communes as an unqualified economic success.

In fact, breaking up the peasant communes created sources of real hardship for the peasants. By encouraging the Chinese ruling class to describe the Great Leap Forward as a disaster that killed millions, Deng was able to develop a political line that made his regressive policies in the countryside seem legitimate.

Deng Xiaoping Blames Mao for Famine Deaths

For Deng's line to prevail he needed to prove not only that mass deaths happened from 1959-61 but also that these were mainly the result of policy errors. After the Great Leap Forward the official Chinese government line on the famine was that it was 70% due to natural disasters and 30% due to human error. This verdict was reversed by the Deng Xiaoping regime. In the 1980s they claimed the problems were caused 30% by natural disasters and 70% by human error . But surely if Mao's actions had led to the deaths of millions of peasants, the peasants would have realized what was going on. However, the evidence is that they did not blame Mao for most of the problems that occurred during the Great Leap Forward.

Long after Mao's death, Professor Han Dongping traveled to Shandong and Henan, where the worst famine conditions appeared in 1959-1961.

Han Dongping found that most of the farmers he questioned favoured the first interpretation of events, rather than the second, that is to say they did not think Mao was mainly to blame for the problems they suffered during the Great Leap Forward (31). This is not to say that tragic errors did not occur. Dongping wrote of the introduction of communal eating in the rural communes. To begin with, this was a very popular policy among the peasants. Indeed, in 1958 many farmers report that they had never eaten so well in their lives before. The problem was that this new, seeming abundance led to carelessness in the harvesting and consumption of food. People seemed to have started assuming that the government could guarantee food supplies and that they did not have responsibility themselves for food security.

Given the poverty of China in the late '50's this was an error that was bound to lead to serious problems and the Communist leadership should have taken quicker steps to rectify it. Three years of awful natural disasters made things much worse. Solidarity between commune members in the worst effected regions broke down as individuals tried to seize crops before they were harvested. Again, this practice made a bad situation worse. However, it must be stressed that the farmers themselves did not tell Han Dongping that errors in the organisation of communal eating were the main cause of the famine they suffered. Han Dongping, himself, severely criticizes Mao for the consequences of his 'hasty' policies during the Great Leap Forward. However he also writes 'I have interviewed numerous workers and farmers in Shandong, Henan, and I never met one farmer or worker who said that Mao was bad. I also talked to one scholar in Anhui [where the famine is alleged to have been most serious-Joseph Ball] who happened to grow up in rural areas and had been doing research in the Anhui, he never met one farmer that said Mao was bad nor a farmer who said Deng [Xiaoping] was good.' (32).

It may be argued that Han Dongping's, at least partial, sympathy for Mao might have coloured his interpretation of what he heard from the peasants. However, it must also be noted that two of his grandparents died of hunger related diseases during the Great Leap Forward and Han Dongping often sounds more critical of Mao's policies in this period than the peasants he is interviewing.

Massive Deaths? The Demographic Evidence.

The relative sympathy of the peasants for Mao when recalling the Great Leap Forward must call into question the demographic evidence that indicates that tens of millions of them starved to death at this time. Western academics seem united on the validity of this evidence. Even those who query it, like Carl Riskin, always end up insisting that all the 'available evidence' indicates that a famine of huge proportions occurred in this period.

In fact, there is certainly evidence from a number of sources that a famine occurred in this period but the key question is was it a famine that killed 30 million people? This really would have been unprecedented. Although we are used to reading newspaper headlines like 'tens of millions face starvation in African famine' it is unheard of for tens of millions to actually die in a famine. For example, the Bangladesh famine of 1974-75 is remembered as a deeply tragic event in that nation's history. However, the official death toll for the Bangladesh famine was 30,000 (out of a single-year population of 76 million), although unofficial sources put the death toll at 100,000 (33). Compare this to an alleged death toll of 30 million out of a single-year population calculated at around 660-670 million for the Great Leap Forward period. Proportionally speaking, the death toll in the Great Leap Forward is meant to be approximately 35 times higher than the higher estimated death toll for the Bangladesh famine!

It is rather misleading to say that all 'available evidence' demonstrates the validity of the massive deaths thesis. The real truth is that all estimates of tens of millions of Great Leap Forward deaths rely on figures for death rates for the late 1950s and early 1960s. There is only very uncertain corroboration for these figures from other statistics for the period.

The problem is that death rate figures for the period 1940-82, like most Chinese demographic information, were regarded as a state secret by China's government until the early 1980s. As we shall see, uncertainty about how these were gathered seriously undermines their status as concrete evidence. It was only in 1982 that death rate figures for the 1950s and 1960s were released (see Table 1).

They purportedly showed that the death rate rose from 10.8 per thousand in 1957 to 25.4 per thousand in 1960, dropping to 14.2 per thousand in 1961 and 10 per thousand in 1962. These figures appear to show approximately 15 million excess deaths due to famine from 1958-1961 (34).

Table 1. Official Death Rates for China 1955-1962
Year Death Rate(per thousand)
1955 12.3
1956 11.4
1957 10.8
1958 12.0
1959 14.6
1960 25.4
1961 14.2
1962 10.0
1963 10.0
1964 11.5
(Source Statistical Yearbook of China 1983)
US Demographers and the Chinese Statistics

Chinese data on famine deaths was used by a group of US demographers in their own work on the subject. These demographers were Ansley Coale, John Aird and Judith Banister. They can be said to be the three people that first popularized the 'massive death toll' hypothesis in the West. Ansley Coale was a very influential figure in American demography. He was employed by the Office of Population Research which was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1980s when he was publishing his work on China. John Aird was a research specialist on China at the US Bureau Of The Census. In 1990, he wrote a book published by the American Enterprise Institute, which is a body that promotes neo-liberal policies. This book was called Slaughter of the Innocents and was a critique of China's one-child birth control policy. Judith Banister was another worker at the US Bureau of the Census. She was given time off from her employment there to write a book that included a discussion of the Great Leap Forward deaths (35). John Aird read her book pre-publication and gave her advice.

Judith Banister produced figures that appear to show 30 million excess deaths in the Great Leap Forward. This is nearly twice the figure indicated by official Chinese statistics. She believes the official statistics under-estimate the total mortality because of under-reporting of deaths by the Chinese population during the period in question.

Banister calculates the total number of under-reported deaths in this period by first calculating the total number of births between the two censuses of 1953 and 1964. She does this using data derived from the census and data from a retrospective fertility survey carried out in 1982. (Participants in the survey were asked to describe the number of babies they had given birth to between 1940 and 1981). Once the population of 1953 and 1964 is known, and the total number of births between these two years is known, it is possible to calculate the number of deaths that would have occurred during this period. She uses this information to calculate a total number of deaths for the eleven year period that is much higher than official death rates show.

To estimate how many of these deaths occurred in the Great Leap Forward, Banister returns to the official Chinese death rate statistics. She assumes that these figures indicate the actual trend of deaths in China in this period, even though they were too low in absolute terms. For example, she assumes that the official death rate of 25 per thousand in 1960 does indeed indicate that a huge increase in the death rate occurred in 1960. However, she combines this with her estimates of under-reporting of deaths in the period 1953-1964 to come up with a figure of 45 deaths per thousand in 1960. In years in which no famine is alleged the death toll also increases using this method. In 1957, for example, she increases the death rate from the official figure of 10.8 per thousand to 18 per thousand. Banister then compares the revised death rates in good years with the revised death rates in alleged famine years. Banister is then able to come up with her estimate of 30 million deaths excess deaths during the Great Leap Forward (36).

Questions Over the Chinese Statistics

A variety of Chinese figures are quoted to back up this thesis that a massive famine occurred. Statistics that purport to show that Mao was to blame for it are also quoted. They include figures supposedly giving a provincial break-down of the increased death rates in the Great Leap Forward (37), figures showing a massive decrease in grain production during the Great Leap Forward (38) and also figures that apparently showed that bad weather was not to blame for the famine (39). These figures were all released in the early 1980s at the time of Deng's 'reforms'.

But how trustworthy are any of these figures? As we have seen they were released during the early 1980s at a time of acute criticism of the Great Leap Forward and the People's Communes. China under Deng was a dictatorship that tried to rigorously control the flow of information to its people. It would be reasonable to assume that a government that continually interfered in the reporting of public affairs by the media would also interfere in the production of statistics when it suited them. John Aird writing in 1982 stated that

'The main reason so few national population data appear in Chinese sources, however, is central censorship. No national population figures can be made public without prior authorization by the State Council. Even officials of the SSB [State Statistical Bureau] cannot use such figures until they have been cleared. ' (40)

Of particular interest is the question of the circumstances under which the death rate figures were arrived at by the State Statistical Bureau. The figures given for total deaths during the Great Leap Forward by US and Chinese academics all depend on the key death rate statistic for the years in question.

Of course, if we knew in detail how information about death rates was gathered during the Great Leap Forward we might be able to be more certain that it is accurate. The problem is that this information is not available. We have to just take the Chinese governments word for it that their figures are true. Moreover, statements provided by Aird and Banister indicates that they believe that death rate figures were estimates and not based on an actual count of reported deaths.

Aird states that 'The official vital rates [birth and death rates] of the crisis years [of the Great Leap Forward] must be estimates, but their basis is not known.' (41).

Banister writes that China did try to start vital registration in 1954 but it was very incomplete. She writes 'If the system of death registration was used as a basis for any of the estimated death rates for 1955 through 1957, the rates were derived from only those localities that had set up the system, which would tend to be more advanced or more urbanized locations.' (42).

Banister suggests that the situation did not improve very much during or after the Great Leap Forward. She writes:

'In the late 1960's and most prior years, the permanent population registration and reporting system may have been so incomplete and uneven that national or provincial statistical personnel had to estimate all or part of their totals. In particular, in the 1950's the permanent population registration and reporting system was only beginning to be set up, and at first it did not cover the entire population. All the national population totals for the 1950's except the census total, were probably based on incomplete local reports supplemented by estimates. ' (43)

She also writes that 'In all years prior to 1973-75 the PRC's data on crude death rates, infant mortality rates, expectation of life at birth, and causes of death were nonexistent, useless, or, at best, underestimates of actual mortality.' (44)

The reader searches the work of Aird, Coale and Banister in vain for some indication as to why they can so confidently assert figures for tens of millions of deaths in the Great Leap Forward based on official death rate figures. These authors do not know how these figures were gathered and especially in Banister's case, they appear to have little faith in them.

Alleged Deaths Among the Young in the Great Leap Forward

Some demographers have tried to calculate infant death rates to provide evidence for the 'massive death toll' hypothesis. However, the evidence they come up with tends to muddy the picture rather than providing corroboration for the evidence from death rates.

One calculation of deaths made by this method appears in the 1984 article 'Famine in China' (45). This article reviewed the previous work of Aird, Coale and Banister. It accepted the contention of these latter authors that a massive level of deaths had occurred, overall, during the Great Leap Forward. However, the authors also try to calculate separate figures for child and adult deaths in this period. The evidence this latter article tries to put together is very frequently quoted by those writing about the era.

The authors of 'Famine in China' calculate infant deaths using the 1982 Retrospective Fertility Survey. They use this survey to calculate the number of births in each year of the Great Leap Forward. Once the number of births is estimated for each year it is possible to calculate how many of those born in the years 1958-1962 survived to be counted in the census of 1964. This can be compared with survivorship rates of babies born in years when no famine was alleged.

They use model life tables to calculate how many of the babies dying before the census died in each famine year. They then convert this figure into a figure for the number of deaths of those aged under ten in each of the famine years. This final figure is arrived at by using life tables and period mortality levels.

The authors of this article argue that the famine began in 1958-9. They calculate that 4,268,000 excess deaths for those aged under 10 occurred in this period which represents a doubling of the death rate for this age group (see Table 2). Yet at the same time there was an excess death figure of only 216000 for those over 10 (in a country of over 600 million this figure is surely well within any reasonable margin of error). The explanation is that in the absence of effective rationing, children were left to starve in this period. But in famines, it is traditionally both the very young and the very old who both suffer. But in this year only the young suffer. Then in 1960-1961 the number of excess deaths for under 10s is reduced to 553,000 whereas the number for over 10s shoots up to 9 million. Even more bizarrely, 4,424,000 excess child deaths are calculated for 1961-62 but no excess deaths for those over 10 are calculated to have occurred in this period.

Table 2. Estimated Excess Deaths Due to Famine
Fiscal Year Estimated deaths under age 10 ('000s) Estimated deaths under age 10 and over ('000s)
1958-59 4,268 216
1959-60 2,291 7,991
1960-61 553 9,096
1961-62 4,424 0
(source Aston et al 1984)

There is clearly a paradox here. According to the death rate provided by the Chinese, 1960 was the worst calendar year of the famine. The death rate increased from 10.8 per thousand before the famine to 25.4 per thousand in 1960 which was by far and away the peak year for famine deaths. If this was true, then we would expect 1959-60 and 1960-61 to be the worst fiscal years in terms of numbers of child deaths. Yet according to the authors only 24.6% of excess child deaths occurred in these fiscal years as opposed to 98.75% of the excess deaths of those aged ten or over!

It is hard to understand why there would have been such a large infant mortality rate in 1958-59. Everyone agrees that 1958 was a bumper harvest year even if grain production figures were exaggerated. The bulk of the Chinese crop is harvested in Autumn (46) so it's difficult to see why massive deaths would have begun at the end of 1958 or even why so many deaths would have all occurred in the first three months of 1959. As we have seen, Han Dongping, Assistant Professor in Political Science at Warren Wilson College, questioned peasants in Shandong and Henan where the worst effects of the problems in the 1959-1961 period were felt. They stated that they had never eaten so well as they had after the bumper harvest of 1958 (47). Official death rate figures show a slight increase from 10.8 per thousand in 1957 to 12 per thousand in 1958. Why were infant deaths so much worse in the fiscal year 1958-59 according to the figures that are presented by demographers? Why did the situation improve in the year of alleged black famine?

This, it is claimed by the authors of 'Famine in China', is because a rationing system was introduced that assisted all those of working age and below but left the old to die. Certainly, there is some evidence that the young of working age received higher rations than the old because the young were performing manual labour (48).

However, in 1961-2, when the authors allege the famine was still occurring, the death rate for under 10s shoots up to 4,424, 000 and the death rate for over 10s reduces to zero. It is alleged that rationing was relaxed during this period allowing the young to die. It is not explained why no old people died during this period as well. Are the authors claiming that in famines, Chinese families would let their children die but not old people? The authors provide no evidence for this counter-intuitive implication of their analysis.

They try to back up their thesis with figures that claim to show a reduction in the numbers of those in older age groups between the two censuses of 1953 and 1964. The argument is that in a country that was developing in a healthy way the numbers of old people in the population should grow rather than fall. They argue that the figures for China in this period show a decline in the numbers of old people due to the way in which they were denied rations during the Great Leap Forward.

But the figures they quote are not consistent with mass deaths caused by a shortfall in rations for all people over a certain age. The authors state that age specific growth rates fall for males aged over 45 and for females aged over 65 between the two censuses. What kind of a rationing system would have led to such a disparity? One that provided sustenance to women aged 45-65 but not men of the same age? Besides even after the age of 65 the figures for women are not consistent. The number of those aged 75-79 grew by 0.51% on the figures presented. This figure compares well with the growth rates of age groups under 65. For example, the numbers of 20-24 years old grew by 0.57% and the numbers of 45-49 year olds by 0.55%. The figures for women do not show a pattern consistent with a rationing system that discriminated against the old. Faulty source statistics are a far more plausible explanation for the confusing figures the authors present, than their own difficult to swallow hypotheses about rationing.

Table 3. Intercensal age- and sex- specific growth rates in population 1953-64
Age Male growth rate (%) Female growth rate (%)
10-14 3.83 4.58
15-19 1.30 1.61
20-24 0.66 0.57
25-29 1.42 1.13
30-34 2.07 1.47
35-39 1.13 0.91
40-44 0.90 1.02
45-49 0.48 0.55
50-54 0.47 0.83
55-59 0.16 1.27
60-64 0.00 0.96
65-69 -0.64 0.11
70-74 -1.02 -0.37
75-79 -0.08 0.51
80+ -0.54 -0.22
(source ibid)

This article does not dispel doubts about massive famine deaths. It is true the authors of the article can point to some corroboration in the evidence they present. For example there is a reasonable correlation between the number of births given by the Fertility Census of 1982 and birth rate figures allegedly gathered in the years 1953-1964. Also there is reasonable correlation between the survivorships of birth cohorts born in the famine to the 1964 census and their survivorship to the 1982 census.

If different pieces of evidence, supposedly gathered independently of each other, correlate, then this provides some evidence that the authors hypothesis is true. In which case there might seem to be a stalemate. On the one hand there is the correlation between this evidence, on the other there is the huge mismatch between child mortality and adult mortality in alleged famine years.

However, we must remember the concerns that exist about the general validity of population statistics released by the Chinese government after the death of Mao. In the light of these uncertainties, the correlations between the birth rate figures and the Fertility Survey figures are not really decisive. Correlations between Chinese population figures occur elsewhere and have been considered by demographers. Banister speaks in another connection of the possibility of 'mutual interdependence' of Chinese demographic surveys that were supposedly conducted independently of each other. She notes that the census figure for 1982 and population figures derived from vital registration in 1982 were supposedly gathered independently. However, there is an extremely great correlation between the two figures (49). The possibility of such 'mutual interdependence' between the Fertility Survey figures and the birth rate figures should not be ruled out.

In addition it must be said that the authors of 'Famine in China' only present one estimate of the survivorship of babies born during the Great Leap Forward. Ansley Coale's article, published in the same year (50) shows a reasonably significant but much smaller dip in survivorship in the years 1958-59 to the 1982 census than that shown in 'Famine in China'. This would indicate far less 'excess' infant deaths in the years in question. In addition Coale's figures show no dip in survivorship of babies born in 1961-2 to the 1982 census, in contrast to the figures presented in 'Famine in China'.

Doubts about the survivorship evidence combined with doubts about the death rate evidence greatly undermine established beliefs about what happened in the Great Leap Forward. Overall, a review of the literature leaves the impression that a not very well substantiated hypothesis of a massive death toll has been transformed into an absolute certainty without any real justification.

Questions About Chinese Census Information

A final piece of evidence for the 'massive death toll' thesis comes from raw census data. That is to say we can just look at how large the number of those born in 1959-1961 and surviving to subsequent censuses is compared to surrounding years in which no famine has been alleged. We can get this evidence from the various censuses taken since the Great Leap Forward. These indeed show large shortfalls in the size of cohorts of those born in famine years, compared to other years.

Even, if it was granted that such shortfalls did occur they do not necessarily indicate massive numbers of deaths. Birthrate figures released by the Deng Xiaoping regime show massive decreases in fertility during the Great Leap Forward. It is possible to hypothesise that there was a very large shortfall in births without this necessarily indicating that millions died as well. Of course, there had to be some reason why fertility dropped off so rapidly, if this is indeed what did happen. Clearly hunger would have played a large part in this. People would have postponed having children because of worries about having another mouth to feed until food availability improved. Clearly, if people were having such concerns this would have indicated an increase in malnutrition which would have lead to some increase in child mortality. However, this is in no way proves that the 'worst famine in world history' occurred under Mao. The Dutch famine of 1944-1945 led to a fertility decline of 50%. The Bangladesh famine of 1974-1975 also led to a near 50% decrease in the birth rate (51). This is similar to figures released in the Deng Xiaoping era for the decline in fertility in the Great Leap Forward. Although, both the Bangladesh and the Dutch famines were deeply tragic they did not give rise to the kind of wild mortality figures bandied about in reference to the Great Leap Forward, as was noted above. In Bangladesh tens of thousands died, not tens of millions.

However, we should not automatically assume that evidence from the single year age distributions are correct. There is a general problem with all efforts to derive information from single-year age distributions from the 1953 and 1964 censuses. These figure only appeared in the early 80s (52) when all the other figures that blamed Mao for killing millions emerged. Censuses afterwards (e.g. in 1982, 1990 etc.) continue to show shortfalls but again caution should be exercised. Banister speaks of consistency in the age-sex structures between the three censuses of 1953, 1964 and 1982 with very plausible survival patterns for each age group from census to census.. She writes 'It is surprising that China's three censuses appear to be almost equally complete. One would have expected that the first two counts missed many people since they were conducted in less than ideal circumstances. The 1953 enumeration was China's first modern census taken with only six months of preparation soon after the State Statistical Bureau was established....The 1964 census was taken in great secrecy...and included a question on people's class origins...that might have prompted some to avoid being counted.' (53).

Ping-ti Ho of the University of British Colombia wrote that the 1953 census was based, at least in part, on estimates not the counting of population and 'was not a census in the technical definition of the term' (54). Yet the age- structure of this census correlates extremely well with all the subsequent censuses.

Adding to the muddle, John Aird received evidence about the age-sex distribution in the 1953 census from Chinese, non-official academic sources in the 1960s. He found the figures unreliable, stating that the numbers for 5-24 year olds are lower than would be expected and the figures for those aged over 75 are much too high. He proposed substituting a hypothetical age-sex structure for these figures for the purposes of academic debate (55).

Given such doubts, it is surely possible that the consistent age-sex structures in successive structures may be effected by a certain amount of 'mutual interdependence' between records.

A trawl through the evidence reveals decisively that absolute certainty in any, politically controversial, historical question should never be derived from 'academic research' or 'official statistics'. Politics always effects the presentation of statistics and the history of any period tends to be written by the winners. In relation to China, admirers of Mao's socialist policies clearly were not the winners.

Conclusion

The approach of modern writers to the Great Leap Forward is absurdly one- sided. They are unable to grasp the relationship between its failures and successes. They can only grasp that serious problems occurred during the years 1959-1961. They cannot grasp that the work that was done in these years also laid the groundwork for the continuing overall success of Chinese socialism in improving the lives of its people. They fail to seriously consider evidence that indicates that most of the deaths that occurred in the Great Leap Forward were due to natural disasters not policy errors. Besides, the deaths that occurred in the Great Leap Forward have to be set against the Chinese people's success in preventing many other deaths throughout the Maoist period. Improvements in life expectancy saved the lives of many millions.

We must also consider what would have happened if there had been no Leap and no adoption of the policies of self-reliance once the breach with the Soviet Union occurred. China was too poor to allow its agricultural and industrial development to stagnate simply because the Soviets were refusing to help. This is not an argument that things might not have been done better. Perhaps with better planning, less over-optimism and more care some deaths might have been avoided. This is a difficult question. It is hard to pass judgement what others did in difficult circumstances many years ago.

Of course it is also important that we do learn from the mistakes of the past to avoid them in the future. We should note that Mao to criticized himself for errors made during this period. But this self-criticism should in no way be allowed to give ammunition to those who insist on the truth of ridiculous figures for the numbers that died in this time. Hopefully, there will come a time when a sensible debate about the issues will take place.

If India's rate of improvement in life expectancy had been as great as China's after 1949, then millions of deaths could have been prevented. Even Mao's critics acknowledge this. Perhaps this means that we should accuse Nehru and those who came after him of being 'worse than Hitler' for adopting non- Maoist policies that 'led to the deaths of millions'. Or perhaps this would be a childish and fatuous way of assessing India's post-independence history. As foolish as the charges that have been leveled against Mao for the last 25 years, maybe.

Bibliography

(1) J. Banister, China's Changing Population, Stanford University Press 1987, p.92-95.
(2) J. Banister and S. Preston 'Mortality in China' in Population and Development Review Volume 7, No. 1, 1981, p. 108.
(3) M. Meissner, The Deng Xiaoping Era. An Inquiry into the Fate of Chinese Socialism, 1978-1994, Hill and Way 1996, p.194.
(4) For example see-J. Becker, Hungry Ghosts. China's Secret Famine, Murray 1996.
(5) see J. Eatwell, M. Milgate, P. Newman (eds) Problems of the Planned Economy, Macmillan Reference Books 1990.
(6) ibid
(7) see Guo Shutian 'China's Food Supply and Demand Situation and International Trade' in Can China Feed Itself? Chinese Scholars on China's Food Issue. Beijing Foreign Languages Press 2004, p.159.
(8) M. Meissner, The Deng Xiaoping Era. An Enquiry into the Fate of Chinese Socialism, 1978-1994, Hill and Wray 1996, p189-191.
(9) see for example the report of the American Rural Small-Scale Industry Delegation, Chair Dwight Perkins, Rural Small-Scale Industry in the People's Republic of China, University of California Press 1977 and E.. Wheelwright and B. McFarlane The Chinese Road to Socialism, Penguin 1973.
(10) ibid
(11) ibid
(12) see W. Burchett with R. Alley China: the Quality of Life. Penguin, 1976.
(13) C. Riskin. 'Seven Questions About the Chinese Famine of 1959-61' China Economic Review, vol 9, no.2. 1998, p121.
(14) see R. MacFarquhar The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, Oxford University Press, 3 vols, 1974, 1983, 1997, J. Becker 1996 and J. Chang and J. Halliday Mao :The Unknown Story, Johnathan Cape, 2005.
(15) J. Alsop 'On China's Descending Spiral' in The China Quarterly, No. 11, (July-September 1962), p21-22, p.33.
(16) F. Saunders Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War. Granta, 1999, p.393-4.
(17) V. Marchetti, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, Johnathan Cape, 1974, p.172.
(18) London Review of Books, Volume 23, no. 10, 24 May 2001.
(19) Daily Telegraph 06/08/63.
(20) R. MacFarquhar, T. Cheek and E. Wu (eds) The Secret Speeches of Chairman Mao. From the Hundred Flowers to the Great Leap Forward. The Council on East Asian Studies/Harvard University Press, 1989, p.75-76.
(21) ibid, p.407.
(22) ibid, p.494-5.
(23) New York Times 23.10.05.
(24) M. Meissner, 1996, p.138.
(25) ibid
(26) ibid.
(27) A. Coale, 'Population Trends, Population Policy and Population Studies in China.' in Population and Development Review, Volume 7, No. 1, 1981, p89.
(28) J. Aird 'Population Studies and Population Policies in China.' In Population and Development Review, Volume 8, No.2, 1982, p.273.
(29) H. Dongping, 'The Great Leap Famine, the Cultural Revolution and Post- Mao Rural Reform: the Lessons of Rural Development in Contemporary China.'' http://www.chinastudygroup.org/article/26. 2003
(30) M. Meissner, 1996, p.238-242.
(31) H. Dongping, 2003.
(32) ibid.
(33) R. Sobhan 'Politics of Food and Famine in Bangladesh' in E. Ahmad (ed) Bangladesh Politics, Centre of Social Studies, Dacca University, 1980, p.175.
(34) B. Ashton, K. Hill, A. Piazza, R. Zeitz 'Famine in China 1958-1961' in Population and Development Review volume 10, no. 4, 1984, p.615.
(35) J. Banister China's Changing Population Stanford University Press, 1987, p.vii-viii.
(36) ibid, p.114-119.
(37) P. Xizhe 'Demographic Consequences of the Great Leap Forward in China's Province' in Population and Development Review Vol 13, no. 4, 1987, p.647.
(38) ibid, p.650.
(39) ibid, p.651.
(40) J. Aird 1982, p.271.
(41) ibid, p.278.
(42) J. Banister 1987, p.81.
(43) ibid, p.41.
(44) ibi, p.87-88.
(45) B. Ashton et al 1984.
(46) see C. Riskin 1998.
(47) H. Dongping 2003.
(48) ibid.
(49) J. Banister, 1987, p.47.
(50) A. Coale, Rapid Population Change in China 1952-1982. Committee on Population and Demography Report no. 27, 1984, p.35.
(51) J. Bongaarts, 'Does Malnutrition Affect Fecundity?' in Science 9 May, 1980, p.568.
(52) B. Ashton et al 1984, p.613.
(53) J. Banister, An Analysis of Recent Data on the Population of China, Indian Institute of Asian Studies, 1983, p.6-7.
(54) Ping-ti Ho. Studies on the Population of China 1368-1953. Harvard East Asian Studies 4, University of British Colombia, 1959. P.93.
(55) J. Aird, 'Population Growth and Distribution in Mainland China.' in Joint Committee of the U.S. Congress. An Economic Profile of Mainland China. Praeger, 1968, p.357. 1

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The Myth of Scarcity

“There will no longer be nationality, no longer fatherland, in the political sense of the words: they will mean only places of birth. Man, of whatever race or colour he may be, is an inhabitant of the universe; citizenship is everywhere an acquired right.”
- Proudhon (General Idea of the Revolution, p. 283)

Spinoza wrote on religion, "... since they find within themselves and outside themselves a considerable number of means very convenient for the pursuit of their own advantage - as for instance, eyes for seeing, teeth for chewing, cereals and living creatures for food, the sun for giving light, the sea for breeding fish - the result is that they look on all the things of Nature as means to their own advantage. And realizing that these were found, not produced by them, they come to believe that there is someone else who produced these means for their use." This is the capitalist/monotheist interpretation of Nature. It is something to be exploited. Genesis 1 says, "28 And God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth." 29 And God said, "Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. 30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food." " So in this paradigm we see everything as a gift for us, and thus we see ourselves as outside Nature, when in reality we are just as much a part of nature as anyone or anything else. We depend on things outside our bodies for sustenance and shelter, but these things are not given to us to exploit in any way we see fit. I don't subscribe to Spinoza's Pantheism. Rather, I believe in animism, the belief that there are spirits in everything and that we should worship and have reverence for all things. I agree that things in Nature are gifts, but they're not gifts given exclusively to us. We need to share these gifts with other species who need them. Hell, we can't even share within our own species!

I am a vegetarian, but I don't begrudge those who eat meat. I just wish people would have respect for the animals they are killing. Bow hunting or having your own organic farm are two ways to get meat that are both respectful and ecologically sound. When you kill the animal yourself, you see the suffering it goes through and it makes you revere the animal more. You can say a prayer to the animal thanking it for the sustenance you are about to receive. When you alienate the death aspect of meat from the eating aspect you have dishonored the animal. Factory farms are extremely disrespectful as they make animals into products, commodities to be bought and sold and ultimately to die long before their time. Forty million cows and calves are killed annually. Cows have a life span of 20-25 years, but a factory-farmed cow is used up by the time it is 3 to 4 years old and sent to the slaughterhouse.

The canines of Ardipithecus ramidus indicate that there was a significantly decreased level of dimorphism when compared with that of our closest relative, the chimpanzee. Chimpanzees have what is called a honing-complex, which means that their canines are used to rip apart tough meats. Homo sapiens and Ar. ramidus do not have a honing complex. Also, the canines of Ar. ramidus are significantly "feminized," meaning they are not sexually dimorphic. This could possibly indicate a decreased level of male-male aggression, when compared with primates we know like chimpanzees. It could also mean a greater amount of equality between the sexes. Suwa et al write, "The dental evidence leads to the hypothesis that the last common ancestors of African apes and hominids were characterized by relatively low levels of canine, postcanine, and body size dimorphism. These were probably the anatomical correlates of comparatively weak amounts of male-male competition, perhaps associated with male philopatry and a tendency for male-female codominance as seen in P. paniscus and ateline species." I believe this says something about human nature. We are not aggressive creatures and domination of one over another is not in our genes. I could be wrong here. If yr reading this and you're an anthropologist feel free to make a comment. I'm still doing my research and there is more to come!

Is Man an “Aggressive Ape”?

Source: International Socialist Review, November 1970, Vol. 31, No. 8, pp. 27-31, 40-42;
Transcribed: by Daniel Gaido;
Proofed: and corrected by Chris Clayton;
Public Domain: this text is free of copyright.

NB. Ever since written history began a few thousand years ago male historians and other scholars have used the term “man” or “mankind” as equivalent to “human” or “humankind,"’ which left “woman” or “womankind” entirely out of the picture. Other women in the liberation movement besides myself recognize the impossibility of eradicating the sexist terminology all at once and particularly under our capitalist system. Consequently the term “man” in this article is used in the generic sense following the general usage of this term throughout the history of class society.— Note by Evelyn Reed

A currently fashionable school of writers claims that the study of animals proves that humans are innately aggressive, and that war is a biological necessity. This pseudoscientific theory attempts to legitimize war, and disorient the opponents of war.

Since the early 1960s the United States, the most powerfully-armed nation on earth, has been conducting an onslaught against Vietnam, a tiny nation far from its shores. This long drawn-out, genocidal war has produced wave upon wave of revulsion among the American people.

Massive, unprecedented antiwar demonstrations have been accompanied by an intense interest in the root causes of military conflict. Many Americans who once trusted the word of the capitalist Establishment that it waged wars only to “safeguard democracy” rightly suspect that they have been hoodwinked. They are coming to see that the only gainers from such conflicts are the monopolists who seek to safeguard their empire and expand their power, profits and privileges through them. Under the impact of the most hated war in our nation’s history, a political awakening is taking place with regard to the real causes of imperialist aggression which are embedded in the drives and decline of the capitalist system.

In the same time period a set of writers has come to the fore whose books present a wholly different view of the causes of organized warfare. They claim that man’s biological heritage and his “killer” instincts are responsible for wars, absolving the predatory capitalist system of all responsibility. Their paperbacks are bought by the hundreds of thousands and have been high on the best-seller lists. They obviously influence the thinking of many readers who are anxiously searching for answers to the problems of war and other social evils.

The principal figures among these apologists for the crimes of capitalism have produced six such books in the decade. The pacesetter is Robert Ardrey who brought out African Genesis in 1961 and its sequel, The Territorial Imperative, five years later. A third, The Social Contract, has just been published. Konrad Lorenz published On Aggression in 1963 which was translated into English in 1966. In 1967 The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris appeared, followed two years later by its companion, The Human Zoo.

The authors come from different countries and have dissimilar backgrounds. Ardrey was an unsuccessful playwright who became a dabbler in anthropology. Lorenz is an Austrian naturalist, sometimes called the “father of ethology” — the science of animal behavior in the wild - who specializes in the study of the greylag goose and certain other bird and fish species. The Englishman Morris was formerly curator of mammals in the London zoo.

However much these writers differ in background, training and temperament, they agree that modern wars are not brought about for economic and social reasons but stem from the biological aggressiveness of human nature.

Their method consists in obliterating the essential distinctions that separate humans from animals and identifying the behavior of both through gross exaggerations and misrepresentations of the part played by instincts in human life. They argue that since mankind came out of the animal world, people are at bottom no better than animals; they are inescapably creatures of their biological impulses. Thus modern warfare is explained by man’s “innate” aggression.

This extension of animal aggressiveness to account for imperialism and its military interventions is absurd on the face of it. No animal has ever manufactured an atom bomb and there are no apes standing ready to hurl them and blow up the planet. The small group of aggressive men who control the nuclear warheads are not in the zoos or the forests but in the White House and Pentagon.

To equate animal behavior with imperialist war-making is to slander not only animals but the vast majority of humans who wish only to live in peace. The Vietnamese have not threatened or invaded the territory of the United States; the opposite is the case. And the average GI has so little warlike spirit against these distant “enemies” that it requires heavy pressure and unremitting patriotic indoctrination to convince him that he must be come aggressive against them.

To the new school of writers, however, wars are not made by big business and its agents in Washington; the real culprit is the ape nature of man. With this biological fig leaf, they attempt to cover up the criminal course of the imperialists, and dump responsibility for their aggressions upon “man” in general.

These writers refuse to recognize that, while mankind has grown out of the animal world, we are a unique species which has outgrown animality. A whole series of distinctive attributes divides us from all lower species. Humans alone have the capacity to produce the necessities and comforts of life, humans alone possess speech and cultures; humans, therefore, have their own history. The laws of social evolution, applicable to mankind alone, are fundamentally distinct from the laws of organic evolution applicable in nature.

This point is made by the eminent paleontologist, George Gaylord Simpson, as follows:

“The establishment of the fact that man is a primate with all its evolutionary implications, early gave rise to fallacies for which there is no longer any excuse (and never was much) ... These fallacies arise from what Julian Huxley calls the “nothing but” school. It was felt or said that because man is an animal, a primate, and so on he is nothing but an animal, or nothing but an ape with a few extra tricks. It is a fact that man is an animal, but it is not a fact that he is nothing but an animal ... Such statements are not only untrue but also vicious for they deliberately lead astray enquiry as to what man really is and so distort our whole comprehension of ourselves and our proper values.

“To say that man is nothing but an animal is to deny, by implication, that he has essential attributes other than those of all animals ... His unique nature lies precisely in those characteristics that are not shared with any other animal. His place in nature and its supreme significance to man are not defined by his animality but by his humanity.[1]

According to Dr. Simpson, man represents “an absolute difference in kind and not only a relative difference in degree” from all animals. Ardrey, Lorenz and Morris are clearly at odds with these statements on the qualitative distinctions between humans and animals.

The crudest of the three is Robert Ardrey who reduces science to fiction writing. An adroit name-dropper, he sprinkles his books with references to prestigious scientists, to endow his work with their unction. He does this, for example, with Simpson, who is far from sharing Ardrey’s views about mankind.

Man is only a “fraction of the animal world,” says Ardrey, and human history no more than an “afterthought” of natural history. We are not, therefore, “so unique as we should like to believe.”[2] This is exactly the opposite of the views expressed by Simpson on the subject.
Killers and capitalists

Ardrey’s books are designed to demonstrate not only that man is a born killer, a “legacy” bequeathed by our killer-ape ancestors, but that animal nature is also at the bottom of the capitalist nature and the lust for private property. He takes exception to Darwin’s observation that male animals compete and fight for sexual access to females in the mating season. According to Ardrey, animals, like people, compete and fight for the private ownership of property which begins with one’s own territory. This is the central theme behind his “territorial imperative.”

To substantiate his thesis he cites a bird specialist who “observed throughout a lifetime of bird watching, that male birds quarrel seldom over females; what they quarrel over is real-estate.” The females, for their part, are sexually attracted only to males possessing property. “In most but not all territorial species,” we are told, “the female is sexually unresponsive to an unpropertied male.” [3] A mockingbird, it seems, can only get a mate after having fought for and won sufficient holdings in property.

Highlighting this absurdity, Ardrey further assures us in The Territorial Imperative that “many animals,” such as lions, eagles and wolves, “form land-owning groups.” He makes no distinction between the use of land, sea or air by creatures in nature for their habitats, and the exclusive private ownership of land and other resources by rent-collectors. Thus he concludes, “Ownership of land is scarcely a human invention, as our territorial propensity is something less than a human distinction.”

According to Ardrey, man has inherited his capitalistic proclivities from his ape ancestors and this legacy explains human “killer” instincts in defense of possessions and territory. This justifies not only the capitalist way of life but also the imperialist aggressions that are waged by the U.S. to maintain its system. Ardrey thereupon appeals for a less negative attitude on the part of Americans today toward war, urging them not to imitate those who despise wars and war-makers.

“Generals in the time of growing up were something to be hidden under history’s bed, along with the chamber pots,” he complains. “Anyone who chose the army for a career was a fool or a failure.” Indeed, after the First World War, “certain words almost vanished from the American vocabulary, among them such fine patriotic words as “honor” and “glory.” And he sorrowfully adds, “Patriotism, naturally, was the last refuge of the scoundrel.”

Bent on changing this attitude, Ardrey warns that the same “territorial imperative” that is embedded in our instincts likewise motivates the “enemy.” So if we are to save ourselves and our property we must fight, fight, fight. He writes:

“The territorial imperative is as blind as a cave fish, as consuming as a furnace and it commands beyond logic, opposes all reason, suborns all moralities, strives for no goal more sublime than survival ... But today’s American must also bear in mind that the territorial principle motivates all of the human species. It is not some thing that Americans thought up, like the skyscraper or the Chevrolet. Whether we approve or we disapprove, whether we like it or we do not, it is a power as much an ally of our enemies as it is of ourselves and our friends. [4]

What are we to say to this most unnatural history? It is obvious that living creatures congregate in specific habitats on the land or in the sea which provide them with food and mating grounds. But these habitats are not “territories” in the sense of landed estates that they permanently own. It is also true that animals may be come aggressive in the struggle to satisfy their basic needs. But they are just as capable of tolerating one another’s presence in a common habitat as they are of squabbling over any given spot at any particular time.

Aggressiveness in defense of a habitat is imposed upon animals because for survival each species is adapted to the particular food and climate of specific areas. Thus trooping animals may defend the region occupied by the group; solitary animals defend only the particular spot each occupies at any given time. In all cases, the “imperative” is not for “territory” but for satisfying the moat basic needs of the animal within the restricted framework of its particular living space.

Conditions of life are entirely different in the human world, however, where mankind is not chained to any special food or climate and can produce what is needed anywhere on the globe. Unlike the polar bear which cannot live in tropical Africa or the tropical ape that cannot survive in icy Newfoundland, human beings can roam and inhabit the whole planet, together producing and sharing the necessities of life. Humans can act consciously and collectively to eradicate war once they become aware of its causes.

More to the point, the capitalists are not so much interested in protecting “their” territory, as such, from alleged enemies; what they want to maintain at all costs is “their” system of exploitation. That is why the United States, whose current war is against the “enemy” in Southeast Asia, also has military bases on other peoples’ territories all around the globe. A capitalist ruling class will even temporarily yield sovereignty over its territory, if need be, as the French moneyed men did to Hitler during the Second World War, to preserve their properties from the insurgent masses.

The American people do not decide who their enemies are; they are singled out for them by the shifting needs of the capitalists. During the Second World War the Germans and Japanese were the enemies whereas the Soviet and Chinese allies were friends. Since then these respective nations have been switched as friend and foe. What has changed is not the territorial relations but the diplomatic and strategic aims of American imperialism. Its propaganda machine tells the country who is to be hated and who is to be liked at any given time. Contrary to Ardrey, there is nothing instinctual in these attitudes; all of it is learned behavior, instilled by the capitalist ruling class.

Lorenz and Morris, who, unlike Ardrey, have some claim to the title of scientists, go as completely wrong when they try to biologize history. This is as great an error as it would be to reduce biology and botany to chemistry and physics, even though animal and vegetable life have a physico-chemical origin and basis. In the case of human life it produces grotesque distortions of the truth.

Desmond Morris, who has less of a scientific reputation than Lorenz, is particularly crude in this respect. “I am a zoologist and the naked ape is an animal. He is therefore fair game for my pen,” he declares in his first book, The Naked Ape. To this zoo-keeper, man differs from the ape by virtue of two amplified biological organs, a bigger penis and a bigger brain, and because our species is “naked” while apes are hairy. Nothing essential has been altered by humans either in themselves or their society; they were and still remain the creature of their ape instincts: “So there he stands, our vertical, hunting weapon-toting, territorial, neotenous, brainy, Naked Ape, a primate by ancestry, and a carnivore by adoption, ready to conquer the world ... for all his environment-moulding achievements, he is still at heart a very naked ape.” [5]

These writers who see no qualitative distinction between man and ape ignore the extent to which man himself has changed in the course of his million-year history. People today, who are only now becoming aware of the social jungle that has been foisted upon them by the capitalists, are not the same as the people of pre-civilized society who conquered their animal heritage and conditions of life, reconstituting themselves into the tribal brotherhood of men. Indeed, the very existence of that primitive system of collectivism and their cooperative relations testify to how profoundly men were emancipated from their earlier brute instincts.
Instincts or learned behavior

The proposition upon which Ardrey, Lorenz and Morris build their case for the innate aggressiveness of mankind, i.e., that humans are governed by irrepressible, unmodified, inherited instincts, is today rejected by most authoritative scientists. Let us examine this aspect of the matter.

The degree to which humans have shed their original instincts is so great that most of them have already vanished. A child, for example, must today be taught the dangers of fire which animals flee from by instinct. According to anthropologist Ralph Linton, instincts or “unlearned reactions” have been reduced to “such things as the digestive processes, adaptation of the eye to light intensity and similar involuntary responses.” He adds:

“The fewer instincts a species possesses, the greater the range of behaviors it can develop, and this fact, coupled with the enormous capacity for learning which characterizes humans, has resulted in a richness and variety of learned behavior which is completely without parallel in other species.” [6]

Except for reactions in infants to sudden withdrawals of support and sudden loud noises, Ashley Montagu likewise denies that any significant aspect of human behavior is purely instinctive; all of it is conditioned by life experiences. Furthermore, as animal experiments and domestication disclose, many of the reactions of living creatures below the level of mankind, which have been conventionally classified as instinctive, can be considerably modeled by mankind and environmental conditioning.

Lorenz, who is far more prudent and scholarly than Morris, is embarrassed by his colleague’s crudity. Although he upholds the thesis that man is subject to his animal instincts, he acknowledges that people are set apart from the animals by their possession of culture and language. “That’s why,” he commented in an interview in the July 5, 1970, New York Times Magazine, “I don’t like my friend Desmond Morris’ title, The Naked Ape.” Morris, he says, disregards the fact that man is “an ape with a cumulative tradition.” But the mere existence and weight of such a tradition in social development proves that mankind is human, not ape!

Unable to grasp the full import of this fact, Lorenz sides with Morris in the matter of the innate aggressiveness of humans. To him there is no essential difference between a cockfight and a nuclear war; the one follows in a continuous evolutionary sequence from the other. There is, he says,

“the alarming progression of aggressive actions ranging from cocks fighting in the barnyard to dogs biting each other, boys thrashing each other, young men throwing beer mugs at each other’s heads, and so on to barroom brawls about politics, and finally to wars and atom bombs.” [7]

Note how Lorenz leaps from animal fights to human quarrels, disregarding the decisive differences between them. Then, on the human level, he refuses to distinguish between the petty personal encounters of people and the massive military operations conducted by governments in which men are ordered to kill in cold blood other men they have never even seen before, much less had any personal quarrel with.

Animal fights, personal squabbles and imperialist wars are all dumped into the same sack to substantiate the falsification that humans are nothing but animals and have never passed beyond that stage of development. This theme is only a variation of the tiresome old argument that “you can’t change human nature” - another piece of capitalist propaganda designed to avert revolutionary change in our social system. Their special twist is that “you can’t change animal nature” since in their view humans are nothing but animals. History, however, demonstrates that just as the ape became man, so did man radically transform his ape nature and convert it into human nature.

Furthermore even this human nature has changed drastically in the course of social history, and will continue to acquire new and different traits as humanity begins to emancipate itself from capitalist thralldom. What man needs to throw off today is not animal nature - which he shed a million years ago - rather, he must throw off the capitalist nature which has been imprinted into his a conduct and psychology by this society.

This is precisely the point that the “instinctual” school of theoreticians seeks to gloss over or cover up. They fear that an acknowledgement of a changing human nature logically clears the way for a radical change in our social system. Thus Lorenz, who is most forthright in this respect, is careful to dissociate himself from the position of Marx and Engels.

In the Times interview he said,

“Marx was very aware of the need to conserve the whole heritage of culture. Everything he said in Capital is right, but he always made the error of forgetting the instincts. For Marx the territorial instinct was only a cultural phenomenon.”

But the founders of socialism were completely right in rejecting the “instinctual” approach to social history. As they pointed out, the main motor forces in human progress are not biological but social. Humans possess that crucial characteristic which no other species possesses: the capacity to labor and develop the forces of production. Laboring humanity has the ability to anticipate, imagine, reason, pursue goals and advance the whole sphere of culture. All this not only gives humans increasing control over their own lives and destinies, but also constantly modifies their own human nature. The renowned archaeologist V. Gordon Childe wrote on this point:

“In human history, clothing, tools, weapons, and traditions take the place of fur, claws, tusks, and instincts in the quest for food and shelter. Customs and prohibitions, embodying centuries of accumulated experience and handed on by social tradition, take the place of inherited instincts in facilitating the survival of our species ... it is essential not to lose sight of the significant distinctions between historical program and organic evolution, between human culture and the animal’s bodily equipment, between the social heritage and the biological inheritances.” [8]

The irreconcilable differences between the two schools of thought on the nature of aggression in history have more than an academic or literary interest. To say that man is governed by its ape nature and that humans are born mass murderers has important political consequences. It diverts attention from the real instigators of war, the capitalist magnates, and leads people to blame themselves for their “evil” instincts. This self-blame feeds a despairing, apathetic attitude and produces a fatalistic outlook. It tends to dissipate the social anger of masses of people who can band together in revolutionary action against those who are really to blame - the dangerous war-makers.

This mood is explicit in both Morris and Lorenz, who, seeing no revolutionary solution to capitalist-made problems, present prophecies of doom. Morris believes “there is a strong chance that we shall have exterminated ourselves by the end of the century.” Lorenz is equally pessimistic and says in On Aggression:

“An unprejudiced observer from another planet, looking upon man as he is today, in his hand the atom bomb, the product of his intelligence, in his heart the aggression drive inherited from his anthropoid ancestors, which this same intelligence cannot control, would not prophesy long life for the species.”

Marxists do not deny that all humanity is threatened with extermination by the nuclear arsenal and other death devices controlled by the over-killers in Washington. But we believe that working men and women and their allies can be aroused and organized to take economic, military and political power away from the capitalist atom-maniacs and thereby eradicate the causes of war. This conviction that a socialist revolution can and will put a permanent end to imperialist slaughters is the basis for Marxist optimism - as against the prophets of doom of the “instinctual” school.

There has been no lack of competent critics to challenge Ardrey, Lorenz and Morris for drawing sweeping and reactionary conclusions about humans on the basis of limited, specialized, specious and erroneous data about animal life. These scholars reject the premise that mankind is the blind creature of instincts. Most of them agree that instincts have long been supplanted by learned behavior as the dominant factor in social and cultural life. For those who may be unaware of the broad scope of the criticisms, here is a brief summary of the views of many well-known naturalists, anthropologists and sociologists who have taken issue with these writers.

The pacesetter was Marshall Sahlins, University of Michigan anthropologist who reviewed African Genesis in the July 1962 Scientific American. “Ignoring the million years in historical development of cultural forms,” he wrote, “Ardrey typically takes as human the conditions he finds at hand, reads them into vertebrate sociology and so accounts biologically for human behavior.”

Indeed, Ardrey makes a double error in methodology without knowing that he is doing so: First he takes the behavior of human beings in capitalist society as natural and falsely applies it to animal behavior. Then he illegitimately projects this invalid interpretation of animal behavior back on to “man” in general. This enables him to obliterate the crucial distinctions between the natural animal and social mankind.
The critics speak out

Following Sahlins, many other criticisms were published in The New York Times Magazine, scientific journals and other media, bearing down heavily on the falsification that wars are virtually implanted in man’s genes. In 1968 Columbia professor M. F. Ashley Montagu compiled fifteen articles specifically directed against Lorenz and Ardrey in the anthology Man and Aggression. [9]

These critics conduct their polemics along two lines. First they assail and expose the dubious and misleading data offered in the name of science by Lorenz and Ardrey which they regard as more fictional than factual. Second, they are incensed by the thesis that wars are unavoidable because of the innate depravity of man as an instinctual killer. They point out that animals which kill for food act simply to satisfy their hunger; they are not war-makers. Nor were primitive peoples war-makers.

“Organized warfare between states is, of course, a very modern human invention,” says the British anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer. The raids and skirmishes of pre-civilized peoples cannot be compared either in quantity or quality with the massive wars between nation-states in our times. Gorer summarizes Ardrey’s “oversimplifications, questionable statements, omissions and plain inaccuracies” in stinging terms:

“Ardrey shows only the most superficial knowledge of contemporary events, practically no knowledge of the history of the old world or of contemporary sociology and social anthropology. His categories and preferences are bound to give comfort and provide ammunition for the radical Right, for the Birchites and the Empire Loyalists, and their analogues elsewhere... The Territorial Imperative demands a wrapper: “Handle carefully; Read with critical skepticism.” [10]

Some of the critics are gentler with Lorenz, who has made certain contributions to natural science. But they do not exculpate him for resorting to pseudoscientific arguments to buttress the myth that war-making is innate. Further, they question his qualifications as an authority on either primate or human behavior.

Lorenz is not a student of anthropoids that stand in the direct line of human ascent, nor even of the mammalian species. He has studied only birds and some fish-creatures which are far removed from mankind in the sequence of evolution. J. P. Scott, of Bowling Green (Ohio) University, says that Lorenz knows little outside his limited field; that he is “a very narrow specialist who primarily knows the behavior of birds and particularly that of ducks and geese on which his book has an excellent chapter.” [11]

Similar criticisms were made at an international meeting held in Paris in May 1970 under the auspices of UNESCO (The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) where a score of scientists discussed the problem of aggression and war for a week. According to a report in the May 23, 1970, New York Times, they unanimously opposed the views of Lorenz and Morris that aggression is innate, inevitable and even beneficial. They state that aggressive behavior is learned. People act violently because they have been taught to do so or are made to do so, not because they are born or ordained to be aggressive toward their fellow men.

Dr. Adeoye Lambo, director of the Behavior Science Research Institute at Ibadan, Nigeria, gave several examples of societies where aggressiveness in young children is consistently rewarded, to illustrate how aggressiveness is learned rather than instinctive. Several other participants pointed out that a murder or some other act of violence takes place on American television screens every eight seconds. Television also shows daily news reels of the violence committed by the colossal United States military machine in Southeast Asia.

Professor Robert A. Hinde, Director of Animal Behavior Studies at the University of Cambridge, said that both Lorenz and Morris are “very ignorant of the major chunk of literature about both animals and man.” He said Lorenz reads nothing outside his specialty, and “his emphasis upon the inevitability of aggression is a gross exaggeration.” He branded Morris’ two books as a “dangerous intertwining of fact and fiction.”

These scholars and scientists are especially concerned about the damaging effect such ignorant and irresponsible assertions can have upon the millions of people who accept them as scientific gospel. As Sally Carrighar, the British naturalist, says in Man and Aggression, a social evil can only be eradicated if its true causes are recognized. But “the incentive to do it is lacking while people believe that aggression is innate and instinctive with us.” [12] And the economist Kenneth E. Boulding correctly stresses that “human aggression and human territoriality are products of social systems, not of biological systems. They must be treated as such.” [13]

A number of these critics recall that there is nothing new in this “tooth and claw” approach to human history. The ideas propounded by Ardrey, Lorenz and Morris are a re-edition in modern dress of the Social Darwinism that was propagated in conservative circles in the last part of the nineteenth century and up to the end of the first world war, when it faded away.

Ralph Holloway notes that the phrase “Social Darwinism” never appears in The Territorial Imperative. “Too bad,” he remarks, “for that is essentially the message of the book. Ardrey is uninformed if he thinks that there have never been attempts to reduce human group behavior to a few animal instincts.” [14]
Neo Social Darwinism

Every epoch-making discovery can be perverted by the masters of class society and their spokesmen servants. The capitalists, for instance, misuse machinery which is designed to lighten man’s work by making humans into sweating appendages of the machine. Darwin’s findings on the origin of species and the theory of evolution, which revolutionized the study of biology and threw light on the genesis of mankind, have been similarly perverted. Conservative ideologues misapplied them to the nineteenth-century social scene as a rationale for capitalist competitiveness, greed and inequalities.

The catchwords of “struggle for existence,” “natural selection,” and “survival of the fittest” were invoked to uphold the practices of laissez-faire - let things run their course as they are, and the fittest will survive. This gave the sanctity of natural law to the social jungle created by capitalism at home and to its wars and territorial conquests in foreign lands.

T. K. Penniman, the British historian of anthropology, described this gospel as follows:

“Imperial developments appeared to show that ‘the lesser breeds without the law’ were bound to go to the wall, and that such events were but the working of the law of nature... . The idea that one nation subdues another or annexes territory because it is superior, or that a man who gains more ease and money for less work than another, is therefore the fitter to survive and progress are ideas begotten not of Darwin but of the competition for mechanical efficiency ... people reduced to fighting for a living wage or those who contemplated the struggle must give the palm not to those who could take pride in what they made, or did, but to those who most successfully exploited their fellows.” [15]

The new Social Darwinists have refurbished these discredited doctrines to again eternalize bourgeois relationships and justify imperialist violence. Montagu says, “There is nothing new in all this. We have heard it before... . As General von Bernhardi put it in 1912, ‘War is a biological necessity ...’” [16]

One example from Lorenz should suffice to show how they revive Social Darwinism. He equates the intra-species competition among animals for food and mates with the socioeconomic competition of men today. Competition is indeed the hallmark of capitalism. The big aggregations of capital push the weaker to the wall and workers are forced to bid against one another for the available jobs. But Lorenz views this capitalist-made competition as the remit of inborn animal attributes.

“All social animals are ‘status seekers,’” he informs us in On Aggression. Birds, like men, compete with one another for status and possessions and the “stronger” or fittest wins out over the “weaker” or less fit. Thus there are “high-ranking” jackdaws who have more status and wield “authority” over the lowly jackdaws who lack both status and authority.

To Lorenz there is great “survival value” in this “pecking order” of man, bird and beast, providing the weaker submit to the stronger. “Under this rule every individual in the society knows which one is stronger and which weaker than itself, so that everyone can retreat from the stronger and expect submission from the weaker, if they should get in each other’s way.” Every boss today would certainly like to establish this rule with regard to the workers. Unfortunately for him, they are not birds or beasts - but men who can organize and fight back.

It is true that a wasteful method of species survival and development prevails in nature where, under conditions of limited food and space, competition prevails and the less fit are eliminated to the benefit of the fittest. But such wasteful methods are unnecessary in human society today where people can plan their lives and control their own destiny - once they get rid of the exploitation and anarchy of capitalism. As Engels commented, “Darwin did not know what a bitter satire he wrote on mankind, and especially on his countrymen, when he showed that free competition, the struggle for existence, which the economists celebrate as the highest historical achievement, is the normal state of the animal kingdom.” [17]
Racist and sexist

Prejudices of a feather flock together. So it should come as no surprise that those who degrade humanity to the animal level are also racist and sexist in their outlook. Whereas Ardrey denies that male birds or animals fight over anything unimportant as females but rather fight over real-estate, Lorenz takes a different tack. He says that females are “no less aggressive than the males,” and in particular display hostility toward members of their own sex - presumably just as women do in competitive capitalist society.

This generalization is based on observations of certain rare fish, such as the East Indian yellow cichlids and Brazilian mother-of-pearl fish, where not only are males hostile to males, but females are apparently unfriendly to females.

It is well known that in many species, above all the mammals, females will fight in defense of their offspring. Males, on the other hand, fight one another for sexual access to females. This trait is not duplicated in the female sex. A female fighting another female for access to males is conspicuous by its absence in the animal world. In herding species, one bull is quite sufficient for a herd of females, and a “pride of lions” is composed of a pack of lionesses to which usually only a solitary adult male is attached. Lorenz does not make clear the considerable differences involved in these types of aggression on the part of the animal sexes.

What is worse, he uses certain exceptional phenomena in nature as the basis for drawing sweeping conclusions about women in our society. Because certain female cichlids eat the male at their “marriage feast” and some show unfriendliness to other females, Lorenz draws from this a pattern of human behavior. He offers the following illustration:

While there was still a Hapsburg monarchy and well-to-do women had servants, his widowed aunt never kept a maid longer than ten months. To be sure, his aunt did not attack or eat the maids; she merely fired one and hired another. Her conduct, however, presumably testifies to the everlasting, innate aggressiveness of females toward other females.

Lorenz mistakes the class-conditioned temper and capriciousness of a woman with her servants in capitalist society for female aggression in nature, which is exceedingly rare. Desmond Morris displays a much more profound animosity toward women than does the paternalistic Lorenz. He informs us that the beauty aids purchased by women are only modern adaptations of the “sexual signaling” of our animal ancestresses. By implication all females, both animal and human, are unattractive and ugly to males and therefore must resort to sexual lures.

As a zoo-man, Morris must know that while humans can mate all year round, animal mating is restricted to the oestrous or sexual seasons. Both males and females are quiescent in the non-oestrous seasons. It is only when the next sexual season opens that males are again reactivated sexually, and this occurs in response to the “sexual signaling” of the females. For it is the females who determine the opening of the sexual season. But Morris equates this natural phenomenon with the multibillion dollar cosmetic and fashion industries in capitalist society by which the human female is assisted in the competitive struggle to snag her man.

He spells this out in considerable detail. From the “padded brassiere” to improve “sagging breasts” and the “bottom-falsies” for “skinny females” to the lipstick, rouge and perfume - these and other devices enable women to entice the men they are after. And he pumps sex into his sexist book by devoting many pages to spicy accounts of the private parts and private lives of primate females and the kind of erotic stimuli that move naked apes into their body-to-body contacts, with added tidbits on voyeurism and prostitution.

Ardrey, the outspoken jingo, is likewise the least disguised racist and sexist. In the title of his first book, African Genesis, he popularizes the fact established by scientists that mankind had its origin a million years ago not in Asia as previously thought but in Africa. This highly significant fact could be used to help shatter the myth of African inferiority which has been peddled by white supremacists. If mankind had a single point of origin in Africa, it follows that, regardless of race or nation, we are all ultimately descendants of the Africans, who were the creators of the first social organization of mankind.

But this is not Ardrey’s interpretation of our African genesis. According to him, it is precisely this heritage which taints us with the “killer-ape” instincts from which “man” has never recovered. This is the same old racist slander in a somewhat different form. It is reinforced when he refers to “a troop of brown lemurs in a Madagascar forest” in the same context as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, implying that non-Caucasians are not quite human.

Ardrey loves white South Africa where, despite a tiny “degree of tyranny,” the country has attained “peaks of affluence, order, security and internal solidarity rivaled by few long-established nations.” By contrast, he states in The Territorial Imperative, the Black African states “stagger along on one side or the other of the narrow line between order and chaos, solvency and bankruptcy, peace and blood.”

Ardrey’s male supremacist matches his white supremacist. He wants women to stay in their place which, for him, is the middle-class white home and family. He cannot understand why these favored house wives are discontented. Why, he complains querulously, does she have a “rowdy approach to the boudoir which will bring her nothing but rein”; why does she “downgrade the care of children as insufficient focus for feminine activity,” and why does she desire “masculine expression” in social life for which she possesses no “instinctual equipment?”

His answer to these questions is most revealing:

“According to every American ideal ... she lives in a feminine Utopia. She is educated. She has been freed of the dust-mop cage. No social privilege is denied her. She has the vote, the bank account and her entire family’s destiny gripped in her beautifully manicured hands. Yet she is the unhappiest female that the primate world has ever seen and the most treasured objective in her heart of hearts is the psychological castration of husbands and sons.” [18]

There it is, spread out for everyone to see. Man is a killer-ape and woman is a sneaky, nasty primate that castrates men.

These neo-Social Darwinians are pushing the most pernicious prejudices of class society under the label of biological and anthropological “science.” The enterprise is highly lucrative for them and their publishers. But unwary readers should be warned that they are receiving large doses of poison in the same package with few facts.
Footnotes

1. George Gaylord Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution (New Haven, Con.: Yale University Press, 1969), pp. 282-83.

2. Robert Ardrey, African Genesis (New York: Dell Publishers, 1963), p. 9.

3. Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative (New York: Dell Publishers, 1966), p. 3.

4. Ibid., p. 236.

5. Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), p. 48.

6. Ralph Linton, The Tree of Culture (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1955), p. 8.

7. Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966), p. 29.

8. Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself (New York: New American Library, 1951), p. 16.

9. M. F. Ashley Montagu, ed., Man and Aggression (Oxford: Oxford University press, 1969).

10. Geoffrey Corer, “Ardrey on Human Nature: Animals, Nations, Imperatives,” in Man and Aggression, p. 82.

11. J.P. Scott, “That Old-Time Aggression,” in Man and Aggression, p. 52.

12. Sally Carrighar, “War Is Not in Our Genes,” in Man and Aggression, p. 50.

13. Kenneth E. Boulding, “Am I A Man or A Mouse - Or Both?” in Man and Aggression, p. 88.

14. Ralph Holloway, “Territory and Aggression in Man: A Look at Ardrey’s Territorial Imperative,” in Man and Aggression, pp. 97-98.

15. T. K. Penniman, A Hundred Years of Anthropology (New York: Humanities Press), pp. 94-95.

16. Ashley Montagu, “The New Litany of “Innate Depravity,” in Man and Aggression, p. 10.

17. Frederick Engels, Dialectics of Nature (New York: International Publishers, 1940), p. 19.

18. On Aggression, p. 165.

One of them songs. One of them songs is a gonna be sung.

The sun burns at 5,778 K (5,505 °C). Hottern’ hell. When the sun rises the birds start chirping. Then light slowly seeps through the trees. I’m awake!

Panic! Panic! Panic grips the steel! Panic makes the day! Panic goes on by! Panic is my name! Panic is the wind! Panic is the sky! Panic is the day, I gently go to die. Panic is the seed. Panic is the root. Panic is the pajamas. Panic is the fruit. Panic is glorious and wondrous. Panic just walks on by. Panic is in a whirlpool. Panic is having fun. I believe in Panic!

The Panic Movement was a performance art collective in Paris in 1962. They did various things such as a dressing in motorcyclist leather, slitting the throats of two geese, taping two snakes to their chest and having themselves stripped and whipped. Other scenes included a staged murder of a rabbi, a crucified chicken, a giant vagina giving birth to a grown man, naked women covered in honey and the throwing of live turtles into the audience.
The Ya̧nomamö of Brazil are a very warlike people. They believe that through ingestion of a substance known as ebene (also known as yopo) they can activate and embody the spirits that live in their chests. When a shaman is under mystical intoxication he is able to travel as a spirit does: swiftly and without being seen. He may travel to an enemy village where he will eat the souls of the enemy villagers. This is called magical death. Just about every death that happens in Ya̧nomamö culture is a magical death. What happens is that the soul is eaten by the enemy shaman and soon after the flesh dies too.

The Kwakwaka'wakw participate in the potlatch described by Marcel Mauss in his book The Gift, which is about gift-based economy amongst indigenous peoples. The potlatch is a ceremony by which the host gives many of his goods up for the guests. The guests are in turn expected to hold a follow up potlatch, which presumably would be even bigger than the last one. And the attendee’s of that potlatch would be obliged to hold a potlatch that is even bigger, until the potlatch gets so big that the whole world is in the potlatch and everything is free. At least, that’s an idealistic interpretation. The Kwakwaka'wakw are also a warlike people, but not to the same extent as the Ya̧nomamö. The Kwakwaka'wakw get most of their violence out through what is called the cannibal dance. The dance may or may not have involved the actual eating of human flesh in the past. It’s hard to know. But now it is a healthy way to channel feelings of anger and hostility into dancing. There is also evidence that the Kwakwaka’wakw actually did practice cannibalism.

So tired. So long. So so. Welcome to the longest day. The last day. The judgment day. The day of reckoning. Where you will be fed the longest poison meal. Until you vomit blood. You will cry and put tears in your libations. Whine all you want, the pain is not over. Then you will be stuck with needles all over. Then you will be strung together with other lost souls on a string like Christmas decorations made from popcorn. Ultimately you will die, but not for a long time. This is existence. A classic staged play of pain and suffering. A tragedy. Where everyone dies at the end. I am not sad, though. I live each day to the fullest, as the cliché goes. I take on the day. I fill my lungs with air. I break wind and begin. Society for the greater part carries on its own organization. Each man pursues his proper occupation, and there are few individuals that feel the propensity to interrupt the pursuits of their neighbours by personal violence. When we observe the quiet manner in which the inhabitants of a great city, and, in the country, the frequenters of the fields, the high roads, and the heaths, pass along, each engrossed by his private contemplations, feeling no disposition to molest the strangers he encounters, but on the contrary prepared to afford them every courteous assistance, we cannot in equity do less than admire the innocence of our species, and fancy that, like the patriarchs of old, we have fallen in with "angels unawares."
– William Godwin

The Christian Children of Oblivion. Follow the leader. Why do we feel the need to follow? Hitler, Manson, Jesus, Koresh, Jones? No Gods, No Masters! God is dead as Nietzsche said. And we killed Him. Nihilistic Catholics. Is it worth it to care anymore? Nothing is true! Everything is permitted! Some philosophers are just skeptical of everything, but for someone who’s supposedly agnostic about anything, they sure seem to think they know everything. Even Buddha is worshipped. Jesus said he didn’t want to be king. “My kingdom is not of this world,” he said. And they labeled him “King of the Jews” anyway. Rasputin, the mad Russian, was a puppet master. He controlled the Czar with his magic powers. Is magic behind every door? Some say the Illuminati controls things, and they’re an esoteric cult that practices witchcraft. I’m ambivalent toward this view. Some will tell you that lizard aliens are the rulers. Still others will tell you it’s demiurges, or Yaldabaoth. “Now the archon (ruler) who is weak has three names. The first name is Yaltabaoth, the second is Saklas (“fool”), and the third is Samael. And he is impious in his arrogance which is in him. For he said, ‘I am God and there is no other God beside me,’ for he is ignorant of his strength, the place from which he had come.” - Apocryphon of John
Yaldabaoth is the half-maker of the corporeal, or tangible, or material universe. He is a deceiver, much like the evil genius talked about by Descartes. This Gnostic account refutes Descartes’ belief in a perfect God, and instead speaks of an imperfect archon who fucked up the world with his clumsiness. We are all clowns of the underworld. We are all waterboarders. We are guilty, we are sinners. Repent and you shall be forgiven. The dollar is a sin. The bible says you must not be a usurer or commit usury. “If he has exacted usury Or taken increase -- Shall he then live? He shall not live! If he has done any of these abominations, He shall surely die; His blood shall be upon him.” (Ezekiel 18:13) Landlords and bankers, you will die. Jesus overturned the tables of the money changers and drove them out with a whip. Read what he told the rich: Matthew 19:24, Mark 10:25, Luke 18:25 The Jerome Biblical Commentary is a standard reference work found in many libraries, written by Catholic scholars. Its commentary on Matthew 19:24 states bluntly, "the figure of the camel and the eye of the needle means exactly what is said; it does not refer to a cable or a small gate of Jerusalem." Dada hurts. Dada does not jest, for the reason that it was experienced by revolutionary men and not by philistines who demand that art be a decoration for the mendacity of their own emotions. … I am firmly convinced that all art will become dadaistic in the course of time, because from Dada proceeds the perpetual urge for its renovation. - Richard Huelsenbeck

Cognitive Dissonance (examples): Anti-abortion/pro-war. Skepticism/believing in science as absolute truth. Ben Franklin said of a political opponent, “I did not ... aim at gaining his favour by paying any servile respect to him but, after some time, took this other method. Having heard that he had in his library a certain very scarce and curious book I wrote a note to him expressing my desire of perusing that book and requesting he would do me the favour of lending it to me for a few days. He sent it immediately and I returned it in about a week with another note expressing strongly my sense of the favour. When we next met in the House he spoke to me (which he had never done before), and with great civility; and he ever after manifested a readiness to serve me on all occasions, so that we became great friends and our friendship continued to his death. This is another instance of the truth of an old maxim I had learned, which says, ‘He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged.’” Many religious people experience cognitive dissonance as well. They believe in the Universality of God’s love, yet believe in eternal torture in hell. They also condemn people when Jesus said to love your enemy. Ben Franklin was a deist, NOT a Puritan or a fundamentalist as some who insist that the US was built on Christian principles may think. Deism holds that the existence of God can be proved by reason, but that God does not intervene in human affairs. There is also a belief that organized religion is unnecessary, and that no particular religion is any more desirable that another. Franklin himself seemed to have a bit of cognitive dissonance regarding slavery. The Declaration of Independence held that all men are created equal, but the Constitution of the United States, on the other hand the original Constitution contained four provisions tacitly allowing slavery to continue for the next 20 years. Section 9 of Article I allowed the continued "importation" of such persons, Section 2 of Article IV prohibited the provision of assistance to escaping persons and required their return if successful and Section 2 of Article I defined other persons as "three-fifths" of a person for calculations of each state's official population for representation and federal taxation. Article V prohibited any amendments or legislation changing the provision regarding slave importation until 1808, thereby giving the States then existing 20 years to resolve this issue. The failure to do so contributed to the Civil War. Ben Franklin's views on slavery changed over time. When he was a young man he bought and sold slaves in his shop. Later on he became a staunch opponent of the practice and founded an early anti-slavery society known as The Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery.

http://zeroanthropology.net/about/

In the esoteric ectoplasm the ghost wades. That lonely spirit. Waiting for god. Time to meet yr maker sinner. The truth cannot be known. That is, there is no truth. It’s a subjective thing, a vibrant thing and above all an esoteric thing. The ghost waits at the door wanting love objects. The object of affection. The ghost is patient, and good things come to those who wait. The zephyr blows in from the west. With the tempests the ghost does play. With the playthings of time. Under the weeping willow tree I shot him. I shot him down and the ghost still haunts me. I wish I was someone. I wish I was famous. I wish I wasn’t a ghost.Or else I wish I wasn’t the last man alive. In my private struggle I quietly sit. This is the war inside my brain. I cannot achieve in death what I want to in life. Therefore I must live as though I am alive. As though I am being born for the first time. That way I will remember the things I forgot. I can advance to the next phase.

In Greek mythology, Lethe (λήθη; Classical Greek [ˈlεːt̪ʰεː], modern Greek: [ˈliθi]) was one of the five rivers of Hades. Also known as the Ameles potamos (river of unmindfulness), the Lethe flowed around the cave of Hypnos and through the Underworld, where all those who drank from it experienced complete forgetfulness. Lethe was also the name of the Greek spirit of forgetfulness and oblivion, with whom the river was often identified.
In Classical Greek, the word Lethe literally means "oblivion," "forgetfulness," or "concealment". It is related to the Greek word for "truth", aletheia (αλήθεια), meaning "un-forgetfulness" or "un-concealment".
Was I bound in chains by a demiurge? Did I walk too close to the ebb and flow of Lethe? Did I deface the bust of Goethe? Did I turn lead to gold? Did I find the philosopher’s stone? Did I fart too loud? Was my fart too pungent? Oh my god why did you break the mold? Was my face torn by the steel tongs? Were my knees weak and did I need them for long?

One of them songs. One of them songs is a gonna be sung.

Georges Sorel was once an anarchist who turned to the darkside, supporting monarchist and right-wing fascist politics later in his life. However, his contributions on the virtue of revolutionary violence and his remarks on the power of the “energizing myth” remain important concepts in anarchist thought. Contrast this to the anarcho-Christian pacifism of Leo Tolstoy who felt that violence was an inevitable result of the dialectical relationship between the state and the oppressed. So what is the anarchist discourse on violence all about? Well, it’s a slippery slope. The man who shot McKinley claimed he was inspired by Emma Goldman, a onetime Rochester resident. What were Goldman’s reactions to this action? Well, she didn’t want to advocate such outright acts of violence, but she also didn’t want to condemn them. The classic slogan “Propaganda by the deed” had become synonymous with anarchism at the time, giving anarchism a bad name. This lead to the scapegoating of many anarchists during the first red scare. Sacco and Vanzetti are examples of this. Goldman herself was deported to the icy tundra of what then became known as the USSR. Individualist anarchists deplored violence by their anarcho-communist cousins and used the bad name that anarcho-terrorists had given anarcho-communism to denounce it. 27 February 1933, the Reichstag building in the German capital was set on fire. Hitler blamed this on communists and used it to further persecuted communists and anarchists. Later anarchists would make an assassination attempt on Hitler. Many pacifists are foiled when the subject of WWII comes up. Militant self-defense, of course, is very different from “propaganda by the deed.” The Black Panther Party in the United States advocated violent self-defense in the spirit of Rob Williams, author of “Negros with Guns.” Martin Luther King denounced these tactics, taking the more masochistic stance of Ghandian non-violence. Today the debate over violence is odd. There are those who advocate violent revolution, however assassination and terrorism are no longer part of the discourse, especially post-9/11. “Diversity of tactics” and “Direct Action” are the slogans of anarchists today. Direct action can include breaking store windows, as they did in Seattle in 1999, or it can include confrontations with the police. The purpose of these actions is never to hurt anybody, just to express the anger that the system has created. Despite the fact that many pacifists see these tactics as violence, they appear to me to be no less masochistic than Ghandian tactics. Playing cat and mouse with the police may be a good way to get out some anger, but it results in injury to activists, and almost never to cops. Self-defense appears to be the only legitimate use of violence. However, the definition of self defense is also a slippery slope. Is the violence inherent in the system enough to warrant acts of terrorism? The Weather Underground had the slogan “Bring the war home,” referring to the Vietnam war. They engaged in property destruction, but were very careful to make sure no individuals got hurt. In the late 1990s and early 2000s the ELF and ALF used similar tactics. These are symbolic acts, “propaganda by the deed” and many dedicated activists have gone to jail as a result of the “Green Scare.” When considering the use of militant tactics it is important to do a cost-benefit analysis.

In fresh blood I did walk.

We tried to get to Heaven but ended up in Space from Sarah Ellissa Marquee on Vimeo.

some poems by people other than me:

A Boy in Church

“Gabble-gabble,… brethren,… gabble-gabble!”
My window frames forest and heather.
I hardly hear the tuneful babble,
Not knowing nor much caring whether
The text is praise or exhortation,
Prayer or thanksgiving, or damnation.

Outside it blows wetter and wetter,
The tossing trees never stay still.
I shift my elbows to catch better
The full round sweep of heathered hill.
The tortured copse bends to and fro
In silence like a shadow-show.

The parson’s voice runs like a river
Over smooth rocks. I like this church:
The pews are staid, they never shiver,
They never bend or sway or lurch.
“Prayer,” says the kind voice, “is a chain
That draws down Grace from Heaven again.”

I add the hymns up, over and over,
Until there’s not the least mistake.
Seven-seventy-one. (Look! there’s a plover!
It’s gone!) Who’s that Saint by the lake?
The red light from his mantle passes
Across the broad memorial brasses.

It’s pleasant here for dreams and thinking,
Lolling and letting reason nod,
With ugly serious people linking
Sad prayers to a forgiving God….
But a dumb blast sets the trees swaying
With furious zeal like madmen praying.

Robert Graves
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Haiku (Never Published)

Drinking my tea
Without sugar-
No difference.

The sparrow shits
upside down
--ah! my brain & eggs

Mayan head in a
Pacific driftwood bole
--Someday I'll live in N.Y.

Looking over my shoulder
my behind was covered
with cherry blossoms.

Winter Haiku
I didn't know the names
of the flowers--now
my garden is gone.

I slapped the mosquito
and missed.
What made me do that?

Reading haiku
I am unhappy,
longing for the Nameless.

A frog floating
in the drugstore jar:
summer rain on grey pavements.
(after Shiki)

On the porch
in my shorts;
auto lights in the rain.

Another year
has past-the world
is no different.

The first thing I looked for
in my old garden was
The Cherry Tree.

My old desk:
the first thing I looked for
in my house.

My early journal:
the first thing I found
in my old desk.

My mother's ghost:
the first thing I found
in the living room.

I quit shaving
but the eyes that glanced at me
remained in the mirror.

The madman
emerges from the movies:
the street
at lunchtime.

Cities of boys
are in their graves,
and in this town...

Lying on my side
in the void:
the breath in my nose.

On the fifteenth floor
the dog chews a bone-
Screech of taxicabs.

A hardon in New York,
a boy
in San Fransisco.

The moon over the roof,
worms in the garden.
I rent this house.


[Haiku composed in the backyard cottage at 1624
Milvia Street, Berkeley 1955, while reading R.H.
Blyth's 4 volumes, "Haiku."]

Allen Ginsberg

Because I could not stop for Death (712) by Emily Dickinson
Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility –

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –

Or rather – He passed us –
The Dews drew quivering and chill –
For only Gossamer, my Gown –
My Tippet – only Tulle –

We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground –
The Roof was scarcely visible –
The Cornice – in the Ground –

Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity –

part II:
and I was biting my tongue
never did lose the soft grip
gold came from lead
and I basked in the glory of the kingdom of god
but the snakes were drinking the wine
but i felt fine
broken sunset obscured by clouds
the fish flapping at my feet
two fish and four loaves
the esoteric ectoplasm
a cryptic crypt
the death of memory
and going into the ground

There are snakes in my rain water
Evolving like children
Never thought it could be so strange
Going over it over and over in my head
Never forget and don't cry for it
Don't waste time and settle down
Be confident and be bold
Judge not for the kingdom of god is within you
Broken chairs on the children's work
Glassy dream
Foggy glass
Down and dirty
Flag the ship down
The silver challis awaits
To make the pain go away
Taking little pills with the water from the rain
A broken dream, an assassin of consciousness
Don't go down, stay with me
Remember a day before today
Never did lose the soft grip