Taken from this absolute banger of a paragraph
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As incredibly horrifying as that would be to witness (especially as children), I can’t help but wonder how many millions died due to deprivation while toiling under the landlords, simply due to their class. Like, I can completely understand these landlords’ kids never getting over that trauma, but I hope anyone reading that account would wonder at the conditions that brought it about.
“THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.” - Mark Twain
Twain was such a fucking amazing person. One of my favorite books of all time will always be a Conneticut Yankee in King Aurthur’s Court.
Yes! Love that quote, and love Twain.
I doubt this person has spent very long considering the suffering of the peasants and instead decided that Mao was an evil wizard who cast a spell on the peasantry. In reality, there were regions in China just prior to the land reform where peasants were made to pay genuinely 9/10 of their harvest and weren’t treated very well even beyond this, as they were often enough conscripted into various sorts of unpaid labor like construction, politically completely voiceless due to landlords dominating local governance, beaten even just for perceived disrespect (to say nothing of crimes of want), publicly humiliated, subjected to SV in various forms, trapped in debt via malicious usury, and sold their own harvest back to them at inflated rates during times of famine.
I strongly believe in rehabilitative justice. If I grew up in their position, I would not hesitate to demand the deaths of the monsters who inflicted this on myself, my family, and my fellows, so I think the fact that so many landlords survived is, if anything, a testament to the mercy and pragmatism of the peasantry.
Shit, how many kids saw their parents beaten to death by the landlords and bosses’ men?
For sure, and how many parents saw their children beaten and starved by the bosses? My point is that for a reader (presumably) far removed from that contemporary China, we definitely have the advantage of analyzing the material context: landlords being beaten to death was brought about by the conditions the landlords themselves created! It still sucks on a human level for children of any class to experience such horror, but that just kind of is what it is.
Yeah, i guess I was just kind of struck by the bleak observation, made possible by distance, that these periods of exploitation and abuse, these stories of blood and misery, always seem to end in one big ironic crescendo that’s never fair to the kids. Such a horrible self fulfilling prophecy where the powerful will exercise unlimited violence to keep their power, and make any outcome other than open conflict inpossible. It’s like they know no solutions to unrest other than ultraviolence, and can’t stop even when it comes home to them.
It definitely has the vibe of an inevitable cycle. Breaking the wheel means eternal vigilance, I guess.
That’s the problem with you tankies, not one of you has ever considered if there are good landlords.572,837 billion dead landlords.
Skill issue to that person’s parents
I would have just not been a landlord
THIS SUMMER, there’s only ONE answer to the question of class…
main character cocks pistol
A FATAL ONE.
Moral of the story: Don’t be a landlord.
I’m pretty sure that the number presented there is representative of the overall reduction in the landlord population, but many fled (or even were allowed to escape), though of course many were also killed.
The maoist uprising against the landlords was the largest and most comprehensive proletarian revolution in history, and led to almost totally-equal redistribution of land among the peasantry.
it’s the most honorable death a landlord can have
I wonder what this post is referencing
Unfortunately, I have already depicted you as the landlord and myself as Chairman Mao
Would it surprise anyone to learn that the book I am reading has nothing whatsoever to do with Mao or that period of time, and the author just sort of slipped this into the middle of an introduction describing what is in each chapter?
New tagline maybe?
Least controversial struggle session.
Sometimes I would be fine with going out like this TBH
“In Zhangzhuangcun, in the more thoroughly reformed north of the country, most “landlords” and “rich peasants” had lost all their land and often their lives or had fled. All formerly landless workers had received land, which eliminated this category altogether. As a result, “middling peasants,” who now accounted for 90 percent of the village population, owned 90.8 percent of the land, as close to perfect equality as one could possibly hope for.”
cw: torture
These landlords were brutal tyrants who treated their tenants as slave labor, tortured them, and killed them in sadistic ways. There is a story of how a landlord bludgeoned a peasant with a piece of wood until the peasant’s eyes fell out of their sockets and he died in agony. The bastards totally deserved it.
