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Can you elaborate how exactly? Was your former colleague sent to kill sparrows in rice fields too?
by varjag 5y ago
Can you elaborate how exactly? Was your former colleague sent to kill sparrows in rice fields too?
- HarryHirsch 5y ago(It was the colleague's wife's parents.) Obviously I never got the full story, but from what I heard, the parents were academics who had their house vandalized by the Red Guards and were sent to work the countryside.
- nextaccountic 5y agoDid her parents ever leave China?
- HarryHirsch 5y agoI don't know.
- kragen 5y agoYou're confusing the Cultural Revolution with the Great Leap Forward. If you read a little bit about the Cultural Revolution the connection will be obvious.
- varjag 5y agoDeaths Hundreds of thousands to millions of civilian, Red Guards and military deaths Still not obvious.
- kragen 5y agoYou posted that response literally three minutes after my comment. That's barely enough time to read the introduction section of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution. I suggest you spend more than three minutes learning about a thing before complaining that things are not obvious to you about it. Three hours would be reasonable. You could spend the first hour or two just reading that article, or start with https://www.gwern.net/reviews/Cultural-Revolution https://www.gwern.net/reviews/Cultural-Revolution, which is only about ten or twenty minutes of reading and better written, but of course much less objective. Either of those two starting points will give you plenty of links to explore. Since it's one of the most important events in human history, one with extremely important parallels to current events in the US and extremely important influences on everyone in China, and you evidently don't know anything about it at all (except that it happened in China, I guess), it will definitely be worthwhile.
- nonethewiser 5y agoI don't see an equivalent turn of events in the US. Could you share what you mean?
- kragen 5y agoNo, nothing equivalent to the Cultural Revolution has happened anywhere else ever. Hopefully it never will.
- CamperBob2 5y agoYou don't see parallels with the Pol Pot regime?
- kragen 5y agoYes, history is rich in parallels.
- frankfrankfrank 5y agoWhat is your definition of equivalent? Because I see the French Revolution and it’s Central European offshoots, the Russian revolution, the various Latin American and Asian communist revolutions all very equivalent; they all totally upended and and destroyed an existing culture and whole civilizations. If communistic elements and characteristics are involved, such a situation is equivalent to the Chinese communist “cultural” revolution of destruction by definition. You’re miss-classifying the vector as the cause. One may argue scale, but not equivalency.
- kragen 5y ago"Interchangeable", or, at greater length: Equivalent \E*quiv"a*lent\ ([-e]*kw[i^]v"[.a]*lent), a. [L. aequivalens, -entis, p. pr. of aequivalere to have equal power; aequus equal + valere to be strong, be worth: cf. F. ['e]quivalent. See {Equal}, and {Valiant}.] 1. Equal in worth or value, force, power, effect, import, and the like; alike in significance and value; of the same import or meaning. [1913 Webster] For now to serve and to minister, servile and ministerial, are terms equivalent. --South. [1913 Webster] The Cultural Revolution did not upend and destroy an existing culture and whole civilizations, but neither did the other events you're describing. A big difference between the Cultural Revolution and things like the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution is that the Cultural Revolution entrenched the existing leader of PRC, while the French and Russian Revolutions overthrew the existing leaders, which is generally considered to be one of the most important things about them. The Cultural Revolution was more akin to Stalin's purges of his opposition within the Party, the Night of the Long Knives, the Salem witch trials, the Cambodian Killing Fields (as CamperBob2 pointed out), the Terror, or the Roman Dominate, but it has important differences from each of them. For example, the Night of the Long Knives lasted three days, the Cultural Revolution lasted 10 years, and the Dominate lasted about 300 years.
- DenisM 5y agoYou have broken a number of guidelines in your various comments, for example: Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that." (this comment above) Be kind. Don't be snarky. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30116919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30116919 Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30118970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30118970 Reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html