Cum conduce spectrul comunismului lumea | Episodul 6: Exportul Revoluţiei - Partea a II-a

2. Exporting Revolution to Africa and Latin America During the Cultural Revolution, the CCP often quoted a slogan by Karl Marx. The proletariat can liberate itself only by liberating all of humanity. The CCP preaches world revolution. In the 1960s, the former Soviet Union was going through a period of contraction and was forced to promote the cutback of external revolution. The goal became to peacefully coexist with Western capitalist countries and provide less support to the Third World revolutionary movements. The CCP called this policy revisionism. In the early 1960s, CCP ambassador to the Soviet Union Wang Jiasheng made a similar proposal but was criticized by Mao as being too friendly to the imperialists, revisionists and reactionaries and not supportive enough to the world revolutionary movement. Therefore, in addition to exporting revolution to Asia, Mao also competed with the Soviet Union in Africa and Latin America. In August 1965, CCP Minister of National Defense Lin Biao claimed in his article Long Live the Victory of the People's War that a high tide in world revolution was imminent. According to Mao's theory of encircling the cities from rural areas, which is how the CCP seized power in China, the article compares North America and Western Europe to cities and thinks of Asia, Africa and Latin America as rural areas. Therefore, exporting revolution to Asia, Africa and Latin America became an important political and ideological task for the CCP. A. Latin America Professor Chengying Hong of the University of Delaware wrote the following in his article Exporting Revolution to the World, an Exploratory Analysis of the Influence of the Cultural Revolution in Asia, Africa and Latin America. In Latin America, Maoist communists in the mid-1960s established organizations in Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, Venezuela and Ecuador. The main members were young people and students. With the support of China, in 1967, Maoists in Latin America established two guerrilla groups, the Popular Liberation Army of Colombia, which included a female company that mimicked the Red Detachment of Women and was called the Maria Cano Unit, and Bolivia's Ñanca Huazu Guerrilla or National Liberation Army of Bolivia. Some communists in Venezuela also launched armed violence actions in the same period. In addition, the left leader of the Peruvian Communist Party, Abimael Guzman, was trained in Beijing in the late 1960s. Apart from studying explosives and firearms, more importantly was his grasping of Mao Zedong thought, particularly ideas of, quote, the spirit of transforming to matter, and that with the correct route, one can go from, quote, not having personnel to having personnel, not having guns to having guns, and other mantras of the Cultural Revolution. Guzman was the leader of the Peruvian Communist Party, also known as the Shining Path, which was identified by the U.S., Canadian, EU, and Peruvian governments as a terrorist organization. In 1972, when Mexico and the CCP established diplomatic relations, the first Chinese ambassador to Mexico was Zhang Shenghui. Zhang was a CCP intelligence agent sent to monitor Hu Zongnan, a general in the Republic of China Army, during the Chinese Civil War. The intent behind making him the ambassador was to collect intelligence, including about the United States, and interfere with the Mexican government. Just one week before Zhang Shenghui took office, Mexico announced the arrest of a group of guerrillas trained in China. This is further evidence of the CCP's attempts at exporting revolution. Cuba was the first country in Latin America to establish diplomatic ties with the CCP. In order to win over Cuba, and at the same time compete with the Soviet Union for the leadership of the international communist movement, the CCP extended to Che Guevara a $60 million loan in November 1960, when he visited China. This was at a time when the Chinese people were dying of starvation from the Great Leap Forward campaign. Zhou Enlai also told Guevara that the loan could be waived through negotiations. When Fidel Castro began leaning toward the Soviet Union after Sino-Soviet relations broke down, the CCP sent a large number of propaganda pamphlets to Cuban officials and civilians through the embassy in Havana in an attempt to instigate a coup against the Castro regime. b. Africa Cheng also described, in the article, Exporting Revolution to the World, how the CCP influences the independence of African countries and what kind of path they take after independence. According to Western media reports, before the mid-1960s, some African revolutionary youth from Algeria, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea, Cameroon, and Congo received training in Harbin, Nanjing, and other Chinese cities. A member of the Zimbabwe African National Union, ZANU, described his one-year training in Shanghai. In addition to military training, it was mainly political studies, how to mobilize rural people, and launch guerrilla warfare with the goal of people's war. An Oman guerrilla described his training received in China in 1968. He was sent by the organization first to Pakistan, then took a Pakistan Airline plane to Shanghai, then to Beijing. After visiting model schools and communes in China, he was sent to a training camp for military training and ideological education. The curriculum of Mao Zedong's works was the most important in the schedule. Trainees must memorize many quotations from Mao. The part about discipline and how to interact with the rural masses was very similar to the, quote, three major disciplines and eight items of attention used by the People's Liberation Army. The African trainees also witnessed China during the Cultural Revolution. For example, during a visit to a school, when a teacher asked how to treat gangster elements, students replied repeatedly in unison, kill, kill, kill. At the end of the training, every Omani trainee received a book by Mao translated into Arabic. Assistance to Tanzania and Zambia was the largest of the CCP's external revolution projects in Africa in the 1960s. The CCP sent a large number of experts from the Shanghai Textile Industry Bureau to help build the Tanzanian Friendship Textile Factory. The person in charge injected a strong ideological tone into these aid projects. Upon arrival in Tanzania, he organized a rebel team, hung the five-star red flag of the PRC on the construction site, erected a statue of Mao and Mao's quotations, played Cultural Revolution music, and sang Mao quotes. The construction site became a model of the Cultural Revolution overseas. He also organized a propaganda team to promote Mao Zedong thought and actively spread rebellious views among the Tanzanian workers. Tanzania was not happy about the CCP's attempts to export revolution. Afterward, Mao decided to build a Tanzania-Zambia railway that would also connect East Africa with Central and Southern Africa. The railway passed through mountains, valleys, turbulent rivers, and lush forests. Many areas along the route were deserted and inhabited only by wildlife. Some of the roadbeds, bridges, and tunnels were constructed on foundations of silt and sand, making the work extremely difficult. There were 320 bridges and 22 tunnels built. China sent 50,000 laborers, of whom 66 died, and spent nearly 10 billion yuan. It took six years to complete the work, from 1970 to 1976. However, due to poor and corrupt management in Tanzania and Zambia, the railway went bankrupt. The equivalent cost of the railway today would be hundreds of billions of Chinese yuan, or in the tens of billions of U.S. dollars. 3. Exporting Revolution to Eastern Europe A. Albania The CCP not only exported revolutions to Africa and Latin America, but also spent a great deal effort to gain influence over Albania, another communist country. As early as when Nikita Khrushchev gave his secret speech marking the era of de-Stalinization, Albania was ideologically aligned with the CCP. Mao was greatly pleased, and he began the program of giving aid to Albania, regardless of the cost. Xinhua News Agency reporter Wang Hongqi wrote, From 1954 to 1978, China provided financial aid to the Party of Labor of Albania 75 times. The sum in the agreement was more than 10 billion Chinese yuan. At the time, the population of Albania was only around 2 million, which meant each person received the equivalent of 4,000 Chinese yuan. On the other hand, the average annual income of a Chinese person at the time was no more than 200 yuan. Within this period, China was also experiencing the Great Leap Forward and the resulting famine, as well as the economic collapse caused by Mao's Cultural Revolution. During the Great Famine, China used its extremely scarce hard currency foreign reserves to import food supplies. In 1962, Rez Milli, the Albanian ambassador to China, demanded aid in food supplies. Under the command of Party Vice Chairman Liu, the Chinese ship carrying wheat purchased from Canada and due for China changed course and unloaded the wheat at an Albanian port. Meanwhile, Albania took the CCP's aid for granted and wasted it. The enormous amount of steel, machine equipment, and precision instruments sent from China were left exposed to the elements. Albanian officials were dismissive. Quote, It's of little importance. If it breaks or disappears, China will simply give us more. China helped Albania construct a textile factory, but Albania did not have cotton, so China had to use its foreign reserves to buy cotton for Albania. On one occasion, the vice president of Albania, Adil Kharkhani, asked Di Biao, the Chinese ambassador in Albania at the time, to replace major equipment at a fertilizer factory and demanded that the equipment be from Italy. China then bought machines from Italy and installed them for Albania. Such so-called aid only instills greed and laziness in the recipient. In October 1974, Albania demanded a loan of 5 billion yuan from China. At the time, it was late in the Cultural Revolution and China's economy had collapsed almost completely. In the end, China still decided to lend 1 billion yuan. However, Albania was greatly unsatisfied and started an anti-Chinese movement in its country with slogans like, quote, We shall never bow our heads in the face of economic pressure from a foreign country. It also declined to support China with petroleum and asphalt. b. Soviet Repression in Eastern Europe The socialist system in Eastern Europe was entirely a product of the Soviet Union. After World War II, according to the division of power laid down at the Yalta Conference, Eastern Europe was handed over to the Soviet Union. In 1956, after Khrushchev's secret speech, Poland was the first country where protests broke out. After protests by factory workers, a crackdown, and apologies from the government, Poland elected Vladislav Gomolka, who was hawkish on the Soviet Union and willing to stand up to Khrushchev. An attempted revolution in Hungary then took place in October 1956. A group of students gathered and toppled the bronze statue of Stalin in Budapest. Soon after, many joined the protest and clashed with police. Police opened fire and at least 100 protesters were killed. The Soviet Union initially wished to cooperate with the newly established opposition party and named Janos as the first secretary of the party central committee and Imre Nagy as the chairman of the Council of Ministers and Prime Minister. After Nagy came to power, he withdrew from the Warsaw Pact, a Soviet-led defense treaty, and further pushed for liberalization. The Soviet Union was unwilling to tolerate this, so they invaded, arrested Nagy, and executed him. The Hungarian incident was followed by Czechoslovakia's Prague Spring in 1968. After the secret report by Khrushchev, regulations in Czechoslovakia began to loosen up. For several subsequent years, a relatively independent civil society was being formed. One of the representative figures was Václav Havel, who later became the president of what became the Czech Republic in 1993. With this social backdrop, on January 5th, 1968, the reformist Alexander Dubček took over as prime minister of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. He strengthened reforms and promoted the slogan of humane socialism. Soon afterward, Dubček began rehabilitating, on a large scale, individuals who had been wrongly persecuted during the Stalin period. Dissidents were released, control over the media was loosened, academic freedom was encouraged, citizens could travel abroad freely, surveillance over religions was reduced, limited intra-party democracy was allowed, and so on. The Soviet Union considered such reforms a betrayal of the principle of socialism and feared that other countries would follow. From March to August 1968, the leaders of the Soviet Union, including Leonid Brezhnev, held five conferences with Dubček, trying to pressure him into abandoning democratic reforms. Dubček rejected the appeals. As a result, in August 1968, more than 6,300 Soviet tanks invaded Czechoslovakia. The Prague Spring, which had begun eight months prior, was crushed. Judging from the Hungary incident and the end of the Prague Spring, we can see that socialism in Eastern Europe was forced upon the people there and violently maintained by the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union let up slightly, socialism in Eastern Europe began falling away immediately. The classic example is the fall of the Berlin Wall. On October 6, 1989, multiple cities in Eastern Germany were holding massive protests and marches, clashing with police. At the time, Mikhail Gorbachev was visiting Berlin. He told the General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, Erich Honecker, that reform was the only way forward. Immediately afterward, East Germany lifted travel restrictions to Hungary and Czechoslovakia. This allowed vast numbers of people to defect to Western Germany through Czechoslovakia, and the Berlin Wall could no longer stop the waves of fleeing citizens. On November 9, the East gave up on the partition. Tens of thousands of residents poured into West Berlin, and the Wall was dismantled. The symbol of a communist iron curtain that had stood for decades disappeared into history. The year 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, was full of turmoil. Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Eastern Germany all achieved liberty, freeing themselves of socialist rule. This was also the result of the Soviet Union giving up on its own policies of interference. In 1991, the Soviet Union fell, marking the end of the Cold War. 4. The End of the Cold War The end of the Cold War was a great relief for many. They thought that socialism, communism, and similar tyrannies had finally come to an end. But this was simply another way for communism to win. The standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union diverted people's attention away from the Chinese Communist Party and gave it time to carry out more malicious and sneaky schemes. The Tiananmen Massacre on June 4, 1989, marked the rise of party leader Jiang Zemin. Aided by the party's suppression and propaganda machine that had already matured, Jiang continued to systematically destroy traditional culture and manufacture party culture. By destroying morals, Jiang cultivated a society of wolf cubs, youth who were anti-tradition and anti-morality, which made way for the large-scale persecution of Falun Gong, and eventually destruction of humankind. Although communists have fallen from power in the former communist countries, communism has never been tried for the crimes it committed on a global level. Russia, similarly, has never purged the Soviet influence or abolished the secret police apparatus. The former head of the KGB is now in charge of the country. Communist ideologies and their followers not only still exist but are spreading their influence to the West and around the world. The anti-communist activists in the West, the older generations who have a deeper understanding of communism, are gradually dying out, while members of the newer generations lack a sufficient understanding of, and the will to understand, communism's evil, murderous, and deceptive nature. Consequently, communists have been able to continue their radical or progressive movements to destroy the existing ideologies and social structures and even seize power through violence. A. Red Square is Still Red As other former communist countries called for independence in succession, people in the Soviet Union also yearned for change. Politics fell into chaos, the economy collapsed, and Russia was isolated in foreign affairs. Then Russian President Boris Yeltsin declared that the Soviet Communist Party was illegal and restricted its activities. People were energetic in expressing their long-held contempt for the party, and on December 26, 1991, the Supreme Soviet passed a law to dissolve the Soviet Union, marking the end of its 69-year rule. But how could deeply rooted communist ideologies yield so easily? Yeltsin set off a decommunization campaign upon establishing the Russian Federation. Statues of Lenin were pulled down, Soviet books were burned, former Soviet government employees were laid off, and many Soviet-related objects were smashed or burned. But all this still didn't get to the essence of communism. The denazification movement after World War II was much more thorough. From the public trials of Nazi war criminals to the cleansing of fascist ideology, the very word Nazi is now tied to a sense of shame. Even today, the hunt for former Nazis continues in order to bring them to justice. Unfortunately for Russia, where communist forces were still strong, the absence of a thorough purge of communism left room for them to make a comeback. In October 1993, only two years after the citizens of Moscow had taken to the streets to demand their independence and democracy, tens of thousands of Moscow citizens marched on the city square shouting the names of Lenin and Stalin and waving the former Soviet flags. The rally in 1993 was of communists asking for the reinstatement of the Soviet system. The presence of troops and police only intensified the confrontation. At the critical moment, the security services and military officials chose to support Yeltsin, who then dispatched military tanks to quiet down the crisis. Yet communist forces still remained and established the Russian Communist Party, which became the largest political party in the country until it was replaced by the current ruling party, Vladimir Putin's United Russia. In recent years, in some surveys, such as those conducted by Moscow's RBK-TV from 2015 to 2016, many respondents, about 60%, have said that the Soviet Union should be reborn. In May 2017, many Russians commemorated the 100th anniversary of the Soviet Union's rise to power. The Soviet Communist Youth League, Komsomol, which was established during the Soviet Union, held an oath swearing ceremony for youths joining them in Moscow's Red Square before Lenin's tomb. At the rally, the chairman of Russia's Communist Party, Gennady Zyuganov, claimed the 60,000 new recruits had joined the party recently and that the Communist Party continued to survive and expand. In Moscow alone, there are almost 80 monuments to Lenin, whose body, entombed in Red Square, continues to attract tourists and followers. Red Square is still red. The KGB has never been thoroughly exposed and condemned by the world. Communism is still present in Russia, and believers of communism still abound. b. The Red Calamity continues. There are currently four countries ruled by self-declared communist regimes – China, Vietnam, Cuba, and Laos. Although North Korea has abandoned Marxist-Leninist communism on the surface, in actuality, it is still a communist totalitarian state. Before the Cold War, there were 27 communist countries. Now, there are 13 countries where communist parties are allowed to participate in politics, while there are currently about 120 countries that have registered communist parties. But over the past century, communist influence in government has faded away in most countries. However, the majority of these countries still came under variants of socialism. Rather than calling themselves communist, the political parties took on names like the Democratic Socialist Party, the People's Socialist Party, and the like. Of the 33 independent countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, the majority have communist parties that are accepted as legitimate political players. In Venezuela, Chile, Uruguay, and elsewhere, the communist party and the ruling party often form coalition governments, while communist parties in other countries play the role of opposition. In the West, and in some countries in other regions, communism did not resort to violent methods, as was done in the East. But through subversion, it has subtly infiltrated society and achieved its goals of destroying people's moral values, destroying the culture God has imparted to them, and spreading communist and socialist ideologies. The specter has, in fact, gained control over the entire world. Achieving the ultimate goal of destroying humankind is only a step away.