సమాజం వసుదైకకుటుంబం నమూన. తాత్వికులు సమాజం తో మమేకమై వారి కాలచక్రపరిధిని దాటి ఆలోచించారు . సమాజాన
నూతనమార్గాన్ని నిర్దేశించారు .
Chinta Ramamohan
"There are no facts, only interpretations."- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
 |
అజ్ఞానపు టంధయుగంలొ ఆకలిలొ,ఆవేశంలో తెలియని ఏ
తీవ్రశక్తులో నడిపిస్తే నడిచి మనుష్యులు అంతా తమప్రయోజకత్వం
తామేభువికధినాధులమని స్థాపించిన సామ్రాజ్యాలునిర్మించిన క్రుత్రిమ చట్టాలు
ఇతరేతర శక్తులు లేస్తే పడిపోయెను పెకమేడలై పరస్పరం సంఘర్షించినశక్తులతో
చరిత్ర పుట్టెను.
***
నేను సైతం ప్రపంచానికి సమిధనొక్కటి ఆహుతిచ్చాను
నేను సైతం విశ్వ వ్రుష్టికి అశృఉవొక్కటి ధారవోసాను
నేను సైతం భువన ఘోషకు వెర్రి గొంతుక పిచ్చి మొసానూ
|
2.సోక్రటీస్ - నిన్నునీవు తెలుసుకో (469 - 399) BC* (method of arriving at truth )
3.స్పొర్టకస్ - (71 BC) తిరుగుబాటు * ( the first revolutionist in the history )
4.జీసస్ - మానవసంబంధాలు * (human relations )
5.వేమన - (1650 రాయలసీమ ) భావవిప్లవం * ( socialist )
6.కారల్ మార్క్స్ - (1818 - 1883) కమ్యూనిజం (చారిత్రిక గతి తార్కిక భౌతిక వాదం)
* (historicl dilectical meterialisom}
7.ఫ్రౌయిడ్ - (1856 - 1939) మనోవిశ్లేషణ (psychoanalysis)
8.లెనిన్ - కమ్యూనిజం (1872 - 1924) * పెట్టుబడిదారి విధానం యొక్క అంత్యదశ సామ్రాజ్యవాదం
* (the last refuge of capitalisum is imperialisom )
9.స్టాలిన్ - కమ్యూనిజం (1879 - 1953) *రాజ్యరహిత సమాజం( stateless country concept )
10.మావొ - (1893 - 1976) *కమ్యూనిజం( సాంస్కృతిక విప్లవం ) (cultural revolution)
All things appear and disappear because of the concurrence of causes and conditions.
Nothing ever exists entirely alone; everything is in relation to everything else.
2.Socrates
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/s/socrates.html
3.స్పొర్టకస్ ( 71 BC )
అతడు ఓడిపోయాడు చనిపొయాడు క్రీస్తు కి పూర్వమే పుట్టాడు గిట్టాడు . కాని అతని పేరు చెప్తే దోపిడీదారులందరికీ బెదురు. ఎందుకా ? వారు శ్రామికవర్గాల జనాన్ని పందులకంటే హీనంగా చూస్తారు . కాని ఆజనాలు ఉగ్రనరసింహులు గా మారి విజృంభించగలరన్న సత్యాన్ని చరిత్రలో మొదటిసారిగా చెప్పినవాడు స్పోర్టకస్.
అతడు ఓడిపోయాడు చనిపొయాడు క్రీస్తు కి పూర్వమే పుట్టాడు గిట్టాడు . కాని అతని పేరు చెప్తే దోపిడీదారులందరికీ బెదురు. ఎందుకా ? వారు శ్రామికవర్గాల జనాన్ని పందులకంటే హీనంగా చూస్తారు . కాని ఆజనాలు ఉగ్రనరసింహులు గా మారి విజృంభించగలరన్న సత్యాన్ని చరిత్రలో మొదటిసారిగా చెప్పినవాడు స్పోర్టకస్.
34 యేసు తండ్రీ, వీరేమి చేయుచున్నారో వీరెరుగరు గనుక వీరిని క్షమించుమని చెప్పెను.
లూకా - Luke
23
16ఎవడును పాత బట్టకు
క్రొత్తబట్ట మాసిక వేయడు; వేసినయెడల ఆ మాసిక బట్టను
వెలితిపర చును చినుగు మరి ఎక్కువగును. 17మరియు పాత తిత్తు లలో క్రొత్త ద్రాక్షారసము పోయరు; పోసినయెడల తిత్తులు పిగిలి, ద్రాక్షారసము కారిపోవును, తిత్తులు పాడగును. అయితే క్రొత్త ద్రాక్షారసము క్రొత్త తిత్తులలో పోయుదురు, అప్పుడు ఆ రెండును చెడిపోక యుండునని చెప్పెను. మత్తయి - Matthew 9
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/jesus_christ.html#K5bBRYdoqVAHSzdj.99
5.వేమన ( 1650 రాయలసీమ ) - భావ విప్లవం
తనకాలపు పరిధిలోనైనా సామాజిక చైతన్య దృష్టితో కవిత్వం చెప్పిన తొలి తెలుగు కవి వేమన్న. అదే దృష్టితో రచన చేస్తున్న ఈనాటి కవులు తమకన్నా పూర్వుల సంప్రదాయాన్ని తెలుసుకోటం ఆరోగ్యకరమే గాక అవసరమని కూడా భావిస్తున్నాం. వెనకటి మంచిని జీర్ణించుకొని కొత్త పరిస్థితులను గుర్తించి ముందు చూపుతో రచనలు చేయటం ఈనాటి రచయితల కర్తవ్యం.తన కాలాన్ని మించి కొన్ని విషయాల్లో ముందుకు చూడగలిగిన కవిగా వేమన్నను మనం గౌరవించాలి. విగ్రహారాధనను వ్యతిరేకించాడు. శైవ వైష్ణవ మతాలవారి ఆర్భాటాలను, వారి దురాచారాలను, మోసాలను బట్టబయలు చేశాడు. చిలుక పలుకుల చదువులను విమర్శించాడు. కాకులకు పిండాలు పెట్టటం వంటి మూర్ఖాచారాలను తీవ్రంగా ఖండించాడు. శ్రమశక్తిలోనే సర్వమూ ఉన్నది అనేంత నిశిత పరిశీలన చెయ్యగలిగిన వేమన్న మామూలు కవికాడు, తనకాలపు చట్రంలో ఇమడని గొప్ప కవి.వేమన్న రచనా మార్గంలో మూడు అంశాలు గుర్తించవచ్చు. 1.ప్రజలభాషలో ప్రచారంగా ఉన్న పదాలను, మాండలికాలను ప్రయోగించి ప్రజలకు సన్నిహితమైన రచన చెయ్యటం. 2.చెప్పదలచుకున్న భావాన్ని తగిన విస్తీర్ణంలోనే క్లుప్తంగా చెప్పటం. 3.ఊహలోనుంచికాక జీవితం నుంచి ఉపమానాలను ఏరుకోవటం. కవితా దృక్పథం విషయంలో మాత్రమే కాక రచనా విధానంలో కూడా వేమన్న ఆదర్శం నుంచి ఈనాటి కవులు నేర్చుకోవలసింది చాలా ఉందని దృఢంగా భావిస్తున్నాం.- చేకూరి రామారావు
కుండ కుంభమన్న కొండ పర్వతమన్న
నుప్పు లవణమన్న నొకటి కాదె
భాష లిట్టె వేరు పరతత్వమొకటె
విశ్వదాభిరామ వినురవేమ!
కుండ-కుంభము, కొండ-పర్వతం, ఉప్పు-లవణం అర్థమొకటే, భాషలు వేరైన పరతత్వమొకటే కదా!
భూమి నాది యనిన భూమి ఫక్కున నవ్వు
దాన హీనుఁ జూచి ధనము నవ్వు
కదన భీతుఁ జూచి కాలుఁడు నవ్వును
విశ్వదాభిరామ వినురవేమ
భూమిలోన బుట్టు భూసారమెల్లను
తనువులోన బుట్టు తత్త్వమెల్ల
శ్రమలోన బుట్టు సర్వంబు తానౌను
విశ్వదాభిరామ వినురవేమ
చంపదగిన శతృవు తనచేత చిక్కెనేని కీడు చేయరాదు పొసగ మేలు చేసి పొమ్మనుటే మేలు విశ్వదాభిరామ వినురవేమ
"తత్వవేత్తలు ప్రపంచాన్ని పరిపరి విధాల నిర్వచించారు. కావలసింది దాన్ని మార్చడం " .సోషలిస్టు విప్లవం తీసుకురాగలిగింది కార్మికవర్గం మాత్రమే.నడచిన చరిత్ర యావత్తు వర్గ పోరాటాల చరిత్రే.మానవాళిని దోపిడీనుండి విముక్తి చేసే కర్తవ్యానికి శ్రామికవర్గాన్ని సమాయత్తం చేయాలి ! పీడనను , ఆకలిమంటలను , యుధ్దాన్ని నిర్మూలించాలి .శతాబ్దాల క్రమంలో "పెట్టుబడి" ఎలాగుపడిందీ,పెంపొందిందీ కారల్ మార్క్స్వవర్ణించాడు. "నఖశిఖ పర్యంతం,దాని ప్రతి అణువు రుధిరంతో తడిసి " పుట్టిందన్నాడు .( దాస్ క్యాపిటల్ ) వ్యక్తిగత ఆస్తి ప్రసక్తిలేని సమాజంలో మాత్రమే దారిద్ర నిర్మూలన సాధ్యమని ఎంగెల్స్ సూత్రీకరించాడు.ఈనాటి పెట్టుబడిదారులు సమకూర్చుకున్న సంపదలు - బానిసలు యజమానులు లేదా ఫ్యూడల్ ప్రభువులు అర్ధబానిసల శ్రమను దోచుకొని గడించినదానికన్నా భిన్నమేంకాదు . ఈ రకరకాల దోపిడీల మధ్య వ్యత్యాసం తిఫలమివ్వకుండా శ్రమను కొల్లగొట్టే విధానంలో తేడా మాత్రమే .ఈనాటి బూర్జువా సమాజం లోగడ వున్న వాటికన్నా మెరుగైందేమీకాదు .అపార జనసందోహాన్ని అత్యల్పసంఖ్యాకులు దోచుకునేందుకు అవకాశమిస్తున్న మహా భీకర వ్యవస్థ ఇది .
7.ఫ్రౌయిడ్ - (1856 - 1939) మనోవిశ్లేషణ(psychoanalysis)
- NAME: Vladimir Lenin
- OCCUPATION: Political Leader, Political Scientist, Journalist
- BIRTH DATE: April 10, 1870
- DEATH DATE: January 21, 1924
- EDUCATION: Kazan University
- PLACE OF BIRTH: Simbirsk, Russia
- PLACE OF DEATH: Gorki, Russia
- ORIGINALLY: Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov Vladimir Lenin founded the Russian Communist Party, led the Bolshevik Revolution and was the architect of the Soviet state. He was the posthumous source of “Leninism,” the doctrine codified and conjoined with Marx’s works by Lenin’s successors to form Marxism-Leninism, which became the Communist worldview. He has been regarded as the greatest revolutionary leader and thinker since Marx.
Thu, 19/03/2009 - 01:51
9.STALIN
More than half a million children have died in Iraq since 1990 as a result of United Nations' sanctions. Millions are dying in Africa because of a lack of drugs to fight AIDS. Pro-independence supporters are shot dead in the streets in East Timor with arms sold to Indonesia under New Labour's ethical foreign policy. This is the world at the end of the twentieth century.
Marxists call the world system that has dominated this century imperialism. It was Vladimir Lenin who analysed developments within capitalism in his pamphlet, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, published in 1916. He sought to explain the causes of the first world war, which was then raging, as being rooted within the stage of development that capitalism had reached rather than as a result of the policies of governments or the "accidents" of history.
Lenin argued that twentieth century capitalism was no longer dominated by individual capitalists operating in a market ruled by free competition. Instead, there had been a massive growth in monopolies - huge corporations cornering the market and dominating it.
Monopolies were formed through the concentration of production in ever larger enterprises, through merger or buying up of competitors. This concentration often coincides with combination, that is the grouping together in a single enterprise of several different branches of industry e.g. a large steel plant that smelts iron ore, converts pig iron into steel, then rolls the steel into plate.
The endless push to maximise profit drives the capitalist to concentrate and combine, and so dominate more of the market. If a capitalist buys up or develop industries that provide raw materials or further processes products (combination) initial costs are cut so more profit is extracted from the finished goods. Once started this process is inexorable and the concentration of enterprises becomes so great that no competitors are left and the capitalist has a monopoly.
Lenin believed the end of free competition and its replacement with the rule of monopolies was largely completed by the beginning of the twentieth century. Yet it originated in the 1860s when free competition reached its peak. Capitalists began to see the advantages of monopolies and cartels (monopolists joining forces on an international basis - also known as trusts) to reap greater profits from the booms and survive the slumps.
After the relatively long boom at the end of the nineteenth century and the crisis of 1900-1903, monopolies and cartels were established as "one of the foundations of economic life". In the US in 1904, 1.1 per cent of businesses were responsible for half of all production.
Lenin wrote: "Capitalism in its imperialist stage leads right up to the most comprehensive socialisation of production; it drags the capitalists, against their will and consciousness, into some sort of a new social order, a transitional one from complete free competition to complete socialisation."
But while "production becomes social... appropriation remains private. The social means of production remain the private property of a few."
The privileged position of the monopolies leads to a greater and greater contradiction between their advanced development and the lack of development of other sections of industry. The drive for domination leads inevitably to conflict and crises.
The tendency to concentrate is also apparent within finance capital. The banks developed from being "middlemen" used by the capitalists into powerful monopolies themselves, controlling the money capital of businesses, large parts of the means of production and the sources of raw materials nationally and abroad. They achieved this by directly annexing other banks and making them into their branches and indirectly by acquiring holdings and shares in banks and businesses.
The last years of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth saw massive expansion in the network of banks, their rapid concentration and a huge growth in their turnover. By 1909 the three big Paris banks had 1,229 branches in France and the number of accounts of the Credit Lyonnais had risen from 28,535 in 1875 to 653,539 in 1912.
From carrying out technical operations the banks had come into their own, the enormous scale of their dealings meant, said Lenin, that "a handful of monopolists subordinate to their will all the operations both commercial and industrial, of the whole of capitalist society; for they obtain the opportunity – by means of their banking connections, their current accounts and other financial operations – first, to ascertain exactly the financial position of the various capitalists, then to control them, to influence them by restricting or enlarging, facilitating or hindering credits, and finally entirely determine their fate, determine their income, deprive them of capital, or permit them to increase their capital rapidly and to enormous dimensions etc."
They become the "common bookkeepers" of the whole capitalist class, organised and socialised in the same way as industry. Through the acquisition of shares and holdings in industry and through the appointment of bank and industry directors onto each others boards, the merging or union of the capital of industry and the banks progresses even further.
Added to this is the role of state officials and ex-state officials on the boards of banks and industry, creating a direct means for the banks and industry to gain political influence. By the turn of the century this process had resulted in domination of finance capital and the financial oligarchy that oversees it.
The dominance of the financial oligarchy also means the dominance of a handful of "financially powerful states". At the time Lenin was writing, the old capitalist countries of Britain and France and the new rapidly expanding capitalist countries of Germany and the United States owned 80 per cent of the worldâs finance capital between them.
These few rich countries accumulated capital in gigantic proportions and consequently sought means of making greater profits from this capital. Commodities had long been exported but the rise of finance capital saw the concurrent rise in the export of capital (loans and investment) itself both within undeveloped parts of Europe and the colonial world. The advantages are clear: profits are high because of the scarce capital already there, the cheap land and raw materials, and low wages of the workers. Money can be made from servicing loans, from commercial treaties, from requiring the debtor country to use your country for orders, contracts etc. And all the profits can be repatriated back to the imperialist country itself.
The imperialist nation states had by 1900 completed the seizure of all of the territories on the planet ö either directly by colonial rule or indirectly by tying countries into economic subservience while formally observing their independence (semi-colonies) as with Argentina, which was dominated by Britain because of the huge amount of British capital invested there.
Lenin argued that imperialism would not lead to stability but to increasing instability, and a greater tendency towards war and economic crises. The rival imperialist powers would fight over the division and re-division of the world. The history of the twentieth century has tragically proved him to be correct.
The division of the world was about obtaining profits, not promoting world harmony. The divisions were according to relative strength, resting on relative capital ö there was no virgin territory or market left, so instead of division, the cartels and imperialist nations would have to resort to re-division to increase their share, leading to instability and even war.
Overall Lenin predicted a tendency of the imperialist nations to become ever more parasitic on the rest of the world ö usurers, loan sharks, bullying less powerful nations to give up their goods and raw materials.
Despite their enormous power and influence "finance capital and the trusts do not diminish but increase the differences in the rate of growth of the various parts of the world economy". This creates massive contradictions and tensions around the globe, and for all the incredible advances in productive forces we have seen this century, imperialism has not even come close to solving those contradictions – as the 31 wars that took place last year alone prove.
Lenin's words, written during the first imperialist war are as true as ever: "what means other than war could there be under capitalism of removing the disparity between the development of productive forces and the accumulation of capital on the one side, and then division of colonies and "spheres of influence" for capital on the other?"
What does imperialism mean for the world working class? Exploitation, oppression and misery. Imperialism as an economic system relies on the exploitation of the non-imperialist world: colonies in Lenin's day, semi colonies today.
Imperialism also played a role in keeping the working class in the imperialist countries in check. As arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes admitted in 1895:
"The Empire is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists."
In other words British bosses could deploy the greater profits made as a result of imperialism (super profits) to stop revolution at home. A section of the working class could be "bought off" (at least temporarily) with some of these super profits. As well as higher wages and better terms and conditions for this layer of workers ö the labour aristocracy ö improvements in sanitation, lighting and housing benefited the mass of workers.
The bitter legacy of this exploitation of the colonies and semi-colonies is not only the enduring poverty and oppression that blights Africa, Latin America and Asia, but the racism that was used to ideologically justify the subjugation of millions upon millions of people. The beginning of the imperialist age saw a huge rise in rabid nationalism, militarism and the first anti-immigration laws.
None of this means that the workers of the imperialist heartlands are lost forever to the cause of socialism. Every crisis forces the capitalists to turn on the working class ö including the aristocracy of labour. Every struggle contains the potential for generating the solidarity and class consciousness that undermine all divisions inside the working class, including racism. And, because of the very nature of the imperialist system ö characterised by war and crisis, the likelihood for such struggles increases.
Indeed, here was the final element of Lenin's theory of imperialism ö namely that it opened up an epoch of wars and revolutions. He was right. The list of revolutions this century is enormous, stretching from Russia in 1905 to Indonesia in 1998. Those revolutions are as much a part of the imperialist epoch as war and economic crisis. And those revolutions hold the key to overthrowing the imperialist world order. The question becomes: can revolutionary socialists win leadership of the masses in order to push those revolutions towards a final victory against capitalism? For Lenin the age of imperialism made the need for revolutionary internationalism literally a matter of life and death for the workers of the world. And so it remains for us today
(Stalin's Legacy of Statelessness)
Joseph Stalin (1879-1953)
The plight of southern Georgia's Meshketian minority illustrates the misery experienced by millions of displaced people in the former Soviet Union. Forcibly deported from Georgia to Central Asia by Joseph Stalin in 1944, they were subsequently evacuated from Uzbekistan by Soviet troops in 1989 when ethnic tension flared there. Today, hundreds of thousands of Meshketians reside unlawfully as "stateless persons" in other countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States, unable to secure basic rights despite the adoption of laws intended to protect them.
And the Meshketians are not alone. More than 9 million refugees, internally displaced persons, repatriates, deported peoples, ecological migrants, and others from across the former Soviet Union have been uprooted since 1989, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. This figure does not include millions of others in the region who have migrated for economic reasons.
Moreover, about 70 million former Soviet citizens live beyond the borders of the country of their ethnic origin. At least 20 million ethnic Russians live outside the Russian Federation, and more than 26 million non-Russians live in Russia. Given these demographics, the potential for further dislocations in the region is immense. Although the majority of these people are unlikely to move suddenly, the conditions that give rise to dislocations, including armed conflicts, human rights violations such as ethnic cleansing, economic underdevelopment, environmental disasters, and general failures of governance are increasingly endemic in the region.
Recommended: Could you pass a US citizenship test?
Clearly, a systematic effort by the international community is required to address this crisis. Representatives of 77 governments and 27 international organizations met in Geneva during May to formulate a strategy. But the program of action adopted at Geneva is a lackluster wish list of general objectives, minus concrete projects or specific legal obligations to help prevent forced migration.
It declares, for example, that commonwealth states are "encouraged" to sign international refugee treaties and "should facilitate" the repatriation of deported peoples, such as the Meshketians. By omitting concrete commitments, the international community misses an important opportunity to promote the development of open societies in the region - perhaps the best strategy to prevent future causes of forced migration.
One such lost opportunity is the conference's failure to design legal protections for the roughly 500,000 people displaced by war in Chechnya. Existing international-refugee treaties limit coverage to refugees who are abroad with a "well-founded" fear of individualized persecution upon return. But the magnitude and nature of displacements caused by various conflicts in the former Soviet Union demand a broader concept that addresses existing realities in post-Soviet Eurasia.
Western European and other states, reluctant to create openings for criticism of their own restrictive asylum regimes, opposed the inclusion of a broadened refugee definition in the conference's final documents. Fear of such criticism also caused these governments to resist participation in the conference by nongovernmental organizations But NGOs, particularly those in the region, can help define clear and effective objectives, as well as monitor the implementation of such objectives in the future.
Follow-up activities after the May ceremonies may be of more consequence. For now, however, the conference appears to be another lost opportunity for reform. In the meantime, the Meshketians and others continue to suffer.
Sent by his mother to the seminary in Tiflis (now Tbilisi), the capital of Georgia, to study to become a priest, the young Stalin never completed his education, and was instead soon completely drawn into the city's active revolutionary circles. Never a fiery intellectual polemicist or orator like Lenin or Trotsky, Stalin specialized in the humdrum nuts and bolts of revolutionary activity, risking arrest every day by helping organize workers, distributing illegal literature, and robbing trains to support the cause, while Lenin and his bookish friends lived safely abroad and wrote clever articles about the plight of the Russian working class. Although Lenin found Stalin's boorishness offensive at times, he valued his loyalty, and appointed him after the Revolution to various low-priority leadership positions in the new Soviet government.
In 1922, Stalin was appointed to another such post, as General Secretary of the Communist Party's Central Committee. Stalin understood that "cadres are everything": if you control the personnel, you control the organization. He shrewdly used his new position to consolidate power in exactly this way--by controlling all appointments, setting agendas, and moving around Party staff in such a way that eventually everyone who counted for anything owed their position to him. By the time the Party's intellectual core realized what had happened, it was too late--Stalin had his (mostly mediocre) people in place, while Lenin, the only person with the moral authority to challenge him, was on his deathbed and incapable of speech after a series of strokes, and besides, Stalin even controlled who had access to the leader. The General Secretary of the Party became the de facto leader of the country right on up until Mikhail Gorbachev.
After Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin methodically went about destroying all the old leaders of the Party, taking advantage of their weakness for standing on arcane intellectual principle to simply divide and conquer them. At first, these people were removed from their posts and exiled abroad. Later, when he realized that their sharp tongues and pens were still capable of inveighing against him even from far away, Stalin switched tactics, culminating in a vast reign of terror and spectacular show trials in the 1930s during which the founding fathers of the Soviet Union were one by one unmasked as "enemies of the people" who had supposedly always been in the employ of Capitalist intelligence services and summarily shot. The particularly pesky Leon Trotsky, who continued to badger Stalin from Mexico City after his exile in 1929, had to be silenced once and for all with an ice pick in 1940. The purges, or "repressions" as they are known in Russia, extended far beyond the Party elite, reaching down into every local Party cell and nearly all of the intellectual professions, since anyone with a higher education was suspected of being a potential counterrevolutionary. This depleted the Soviet Union of its brainpower, and left Stalin as the sole intellectual force in the country--an expert on virtually every human endeavor.
Driven by his own sense of inferiority, which he projected onto his country as a whole, Stalin pursued an economic policy of mobilizing the entire country to achieve the goal of rapid industrialization, so that it could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Capitalist powers. To this end, he forcefully collectivized agriculture (one of the Bolsheviks' key policy stances in 1917 was to give the land to the peasants; collectivization took it back from them and effectively reduced them to the status of serfs again), instituted the Five-Year Plans to coordinate all investment and production in the country, and undertook a massive program of building heavy industry. Although the Soviet Union boasted that its economy was booming while the Capitalist world was experiencing the Great Depression, and its industrialization drive did succeed in rapidly creating an industrial infrastructure where there once had been none, the fact is that all this was done at exorbitant cost in human lives. Measures such as the violent expropriation of the harvest by the government, the forced resettlement and murder of the most successful peasants as counterrevolutionary elements, and the discovery of a source of cheap labor through the arrest of millions of innocent citizens led to countless millions of deaths from the worst man-made famine in human history and in the camps of the Gulag.
As war clouds were gathering on the horizon in 1939, Stalin felt that he had scored a coup by striking a non-aggression pact with Hitler, in which they agreed to divide up Poland and then leave each other alone. Stalin so strongly believed that he and Hitler had an understanding that he refused to listen to his military advisors' warnings in 1941 that the Wehrmacht was massing for an attack, and purged any one who dared utter such blasphemy. As a result, when the attack came, the Soviet army was completely unprepared and suffered horrible defeats, while Stalin spent the first several days after the attack holed up in his office in shock. Because the military had been purged of its best minds in the mid-1930s, it took some time, and many lives, before the Soviets were able to regroup and make a credible defense. By then, all of the Ukraine and Belarus were in German hands, Leningrad had been surrounded and besieged, and Nazi artillery was entrenched only a few miles from the Kremlin. After heroic efforts on the part of the whole country, the tide eventually turned at Stalingrad in 1943, and soon the victorious Red Army was liberating the countries of Eastern Europe--before the Americans had even begun to pose a serious challenge to Hitler from the west with the D-Day invasion.
During the Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam Conferences, Stalin proved a worthy negotiator with the likes of Roosevelt and Churchill, and managed to arrange for the countries of Eastern Europe, which had been liberated by the Red Army to remain in the Soviet sphere of influence, as well as securing three seats for his country in the newly formed UN. The Soviet Union was now a recognized world superpower, with its own permanent seat on the Security Council, and the respect that Stalin had craved all his life. Still, he was not finished. Returning soldiers and refugees were arrested and either shot or sent to the labor camps as traitors, entire nationalities that had been deported during the War, also as traitors, were not allowed to return to their homes, and in 1953, a plot to kill Stalin was ostensibly uncovered in the Kremlin itself. A new purge seemed imminent, and was cut short only by Stalin's death. He remained a hero to his people until Khrushchev's well-known "secret" speech to a Party Congress in 1956, in which Stalin's excesses, at least as far as power grabbing in the Party itself, were denounced.
10.MAO
(Mao was a Chinese communist leader and founder of the People's Republic of China. He was responsible for the disastrous policies of the 'Great Leap Forward' and the 'Cultural Revolution'.)
On October 1, 1949, the People's Republic of China was formally established, with its national capital at Beijing. "The Chinese people have stood up!" declared Mao as he announced the creation of a "people's democratic dictatorship." The people were defined as a coalition of four social classes: the workers, the peasants, the petite bourgeoisie, and the national-capitalists. The four classes were to be led by the CCP, as the vanguard of the working class. At that time the CCP claimed a membership of 4.5 million, of which members of peasant origin accounted for nearly 90 percent. The party was under Mao's chairmanship, and the government was headed by Zhou Enlai (
1898-1976) as premier of the State Administrative Council (the predecessor of the State Council).
Mao was a Chinese communist leader and founder of the People's Republic of China. He was responsible for the disastrous policies of the 'Great Leap Forward' and the 'Cultural Revolution'.
Mao was born on 26 December 1893 into a peasant family in Shaoshan, in Hunan province, central China. After training as a teacher, he travelled to Beijing where he worked in the University Library. It was during this time that he began to read Marxist literature. In 1921, he became a founder member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and set up a branch in Hunan. In 1923, the Kuomintang (KMT) nationalist party had allied with the CCP to defeat the warlords who controlled much of northern China. Then in 1927, the KMT leader Chiang Kai-shek launched an anti-communist purge.
Mao and other communists retreated to south east China. In 1934, after the KMT surrounded them, Mao led his followers on the 'Long March', a 6,000 mile journey to northwest China to establish a new base.
The Communists and KMT were again temporarily allied during eight years of war with Japan (1937-1945), but shortly after the end of World War Two, civil war broke out between them. The Communists were victorious, and on 1 October 1949 Mao proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Chiang Kai-shek fled to the island of Taiwan.
Mao and other Communist leaders set out to reshape Chinese society. Industry came under state ownership and China's farmers began to be organised into collectives. All opposition was ruthlessly suppressed. The Chinese initially received significant help from the Soviet Union, but relations soon began to cool.
In 1958, in an attempt to introduce a more 'Chinese' form of communism, Mao launched the 'Great Leap Forward'. This aimed at mass mobilisation of labour to improve agricultural and industrial production. The result, instead, was a massive decline in agricultural output, which, together with poor harvests, led to famine and the deaths of millions. The policy was abandoned and Mao's position weakened.
In an attempt to re-assert his authority, Mao launched the 'Cultural Revolution' in 1966, aiming to purge the country of 'impure' elements and revive the revolutionary spirit. One-and-a-half million people died and much of the country's cultural heritage was destroyed. In September 1967, with many cities on the verge of anarchy, Mao sent in the army to restore order.
Mao appeared victorious, but his health was deteriorating. His later years saw attempts to build bridges with the United States, Japan and Europe. In 1972, US President Richard Nixon visited China and met Mao.
Mao died on 9 September 1976.
1898-1976) as premier of the State Administrative Council (the predecessor of the State Council).
1966
On August 8, 1966, the party's Central Committee passed its "Decision Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" (a.k.a. "the 16 Points").[28] This decision defined the Cultural Revolution as "a great revolution that touches people to their very souls and constitutes a new stage in the development of the socialist revolution in our country, a deeper and more extensive stage":
| “ | Although the bourgeoisie has been overthrown, it is still trying to use the old ideas, culture, customs, and habits of the exploiting classes to corrupt the masses, capture their minds, and endeavour to stage a comeback. The proletariat must do just the opposite: It must meet head-on every challenge of the bourgeoisie in the ideological field and use the new ideas, culture, customs, and habits of the proletariat to change the mental outlook of the whole of society. At present, our objective is to struggle against and crush those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road, to criticize and repudiate the reactionary bourgeois academic "authorities" and the ideology of the bourgeoisie and all other exploiting classes and to transform education, literature and art, and all other parts of the superstructure that do not correspond to the socialist economic base, so as to facilitate the consolidation and development of the socialist system. | ” |
The Decision took the existing student movement and elevated it to the level of a nationwide mass campaign, calling on not only students but also "the masses of the workers, peasants, soldiers, revolutionary intellectuals, and revolutionary cadres" to carry out the task of "transforming the superstructure" by writing big-character posters and holding "great debates."
The freedoms granted in the 16 Points were later written into the PRC constitution as "the four great rights" of "great democracy (大民主, Dàmínzhǔ)": the right to speak out freely, to air one's views fully, to write big-character posters, and to hold great debates (大鸣dàmíng、大放dàfàng、大字报dàzìbào、大辩论dàbiànlùn – the first two are basically synonyms). (In other contexts the second was sometimes replaced by 大串联dàchuànlián – the right to "link up," meaning for students to cut class and travel across the country to meet other young activists and propagate Mao Zedong Thought.)[citation needed]
Those who had anything other than a Communist background were challenged and often charged for corruption and sent to prison. These freedoms were supplemented by the right to strike, although this right was severely attenuated by the Army's entrance onto the stage of civilian mass politics in February 1967. All of these rights were removed from the constitution after Deng's government suppressed the Democracy Wall movement in 1979.[citation needed]
On August 18, 1966, millions of Red Guards from all over the country gathered in Beijing for an audience with the Chairman. AtopTiananmen Gate, Mao and Lin Biao made frequent appearances to greet approximately 11 million Red Guards, receiving cheers each time. Mao praised their actions in the recent campaigns to develop socialism and democracy.[citation needed]
Marxist-Leninist ideology was opposed to religion, and people were told to become atheists from the early days of Communist rule. During the Destruction of Four Olds campaign, religious affairs of all types were discouraged by Red Guards, and practitioners persecuted. Temples, churches, mosques, monasteries, and cemeteries were closed down and sometimes converted to other uses, looted, and destroyed.[29] Marxist propaganda depicted Buddhism as superstition, and religion was looked upon as a means of hostile foreign infiltration, as well as an instrument of the 'ruling class'.[30] Chinese Marxists declared 'the death of God', and considered religion a defilement of the Chinese communist vision. Clergy were arrested and sent to camps; many Tibetan Buddhists were forced to participate in the destruction of their monasteries at gunpoint.[30]
For two years, until July 1968 (and in some places for much longer), student activists such as the Red Guards expanded their areas of authority, and accelerated their efforts at socialist reconstruction. They began by passing out leaflets explaining their actions to develop and strengthen socialism, and posting the names of suspected "counter-revolutionaries" on bulletin boards. They assembled in large groups, held "great debates," and wrote educational plays. They held public meetings to criticize and solicit self-criticisms from suspected "counter-revolutionaries."
| “ | The world is yours, as well as ours, but in the last analysis, it is yours. You young people, full of vigor and vitality, are in the bloom of life, like the sun at eight or nine in the morning. Our hope is placed on you ... The world belongs to you. China's future belongs to you. | ” |
This was one of many quotations in the Little Red Book that the Red Guards would later follow as a guide, provided by Mao. It was the mechanism that led the Red Guards to commit to their objective as the future for China. These quotes directly from Mao led to other actions by the Red Guards in the views of other Maoist leaders.[31] Although the 16 Points and other pronouncements of the central Maoist leaders forbade "physical struggle (武斗, wǔdòu)" in favor of "verbal struggle" (文斗, wéndòu), these struggle sessions often led to physical violence. Initially verbal struggles among activist groups became even more violent, especially when activists began to seize weapons from the Army in 1967. The central Maoist leaders limited their intervention in activist violence to verbal criticism, sometimes even appearing to encourage "physical struggle," and only after the PLA began to intervene in 1969 did authorities begin to suppress the mass movement.
During the Cultural Revolution, all politicians who had any history of being anything other than dogmatically Maoist were almost immediately purged. Liu Shaoqi, once the most powerful man in China after Mao, was sent to a detention camp, where he later died in 1969. Deng Xiaoping was himself sent away for a period of re-education three times, and was eventually sent to work in an engine factory until he was brought back years later by Zhou Enlai. Many of those accused were not lucky enough to survive their persecution, and were only rehabilitated posthumously, after Deng succeeded Hua Guofeng as the paramount leader of China.
On August 22, 1966, Mao issued a notice to stop "all police intervention in Red Guard tactics and actions." Those in the police force who defied this notice were labeled "counter-revolutionaries." Mao, drawing on his experiences from prior to 1949, suggested that "the sign of a true revolutionary was his desire to kill." Mao's praise for rebellion was effectively an endorsement for the actions of the Red Guards, which grew increasingly violent.[32] Public security in China deteriorated rapidly as a result of central officials lifting restraints on violent behavior.[33] Xie Fuzhi, the national police chief, said it was "no big deal" if Red Guards were beating "bad people" to death.[34]
The police relayed Xie's remarks to the Red Guards and they acted accordingly.[34] In the course of about two weeks, the violence left some one hundred teachers, school officials, and educated cadres dead in Beijing's western district alone. The number injured was "too large to be calculated."[33]
The most gruesome aspects of the campaign included numerous incidents of torture, murder, and public humiliation. Many people who were targets of 'struggle' could no longer bear the stress and committed suicide. In August and September 1966, there were 1,772 people murdered in Beijing alone. In Shanghai there were 704 suicides and 534 deaths related to the Cultural Revolution in September. In Wuhan there were 62 suicides and 32 murders during the same period.[35]
On September 5, 1966, another notice was issued from the party leadership, encouraging all Red Guards to come to Beijing over a stretch of time. All costs, including accommodation and transportation, were to be paid by the government. On October 10, 1966, Mao's ally, General Lin Biao, publicly criticized Liu and Deng as "capitalist roaders" and threats. Later, Peng Dehuai was brought to Beijing to be publicly ridiculed.
2700 B.C. Harappa Civilisation.
2700 B.C. Harappa Civilisation.
1000 B.C. Aryans expand into the Ganga valley.
900 B.C. Mahabharata War.
800 B.C. Aryans expand into Bengal; Beginning of the Epic Age:
Mahabharata composed, first version of Ramayana.
550 B.C. Composition of the Upanishads.
544 B.C. Buddha’s Nirvana.
327 B.C. Alexander’s Invasion.
325 B.C. Alexander marches ahead.
324 B.C. Chandragupta Maurya defeats Seleacus Nicator.
322 B.C. Rise of the Mauryas; Chandragupta establishes first Indian Empire.
298 B.C. Bindusara Coronated.
272 B.C. Ashoka begins reign ; Exclusive Interview with Ashoka.
180 B.C. Fall of the Mauryas ; Rise of the Sungas.
145 B.C. Chola king Erata conquers Ceylon.
58 B.C. Epoch of the Krita-Malava-Vikram Era.
30 B.C. Rise of the Satvahana Dynasty in the Deccan.
40 A.D. Sakas in power in Indus Valley and Western India.
50 A.D. The Kushans and Kanishkas.
78 A.D. Saka Era begins.
320 A.D. Chandragupta I establishes the Gupta dynasty.
360 A.D. Samudragupta conquers the North and most of the Deccan.
380 A.D. Chandragupta II comes to power; Golden Age of Gupta Literary Renaissance.
405 A.D. Fa-hein begins his travels through the Gupta Empire.
415 A.D. Accession of Kumara Gupta I.
467 A.D. Skanda Gupta assumes power.
476 A.D. Birth of astronomer Aryabhatta.
606 A.D. Accession of Harshavardhan Gupta.
622 A.D. Era of the Hejira begins.
711 A.D. Invasion of Sind by Muhammad Bin Qasim.
892 A.D. Rise of the Eastern Chalukyas.
985 A.D. The Chola Dynasty: Accession of Rajaraja, the Great.
1001 A.D. Defeat of Jaipal by Sultan Mahumd.
