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Quote by Henning Mankell

“Wherever battles are waged there are casualties, and death is a common occurrence. But what is closest to our hearts is the best interest of the people and the suffering of the vast majority, and when we die for the people, it is an honorable death. Nevertheless we should do our best to avoid unnecessary casualties. Mao Zedong, 1944”

Quote by Henning Mankell

Book:The Man from Beijing
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The Man from Beijing

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Henning Mankell

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“In any case, if we are to understand the meaning of Maoist reason and a critique of its boundaries, we must also learn to think Maoism in its totality: which means to also think its distance from pre-Maoist Leninism and pre-Leninist Marxism, and which further means to think what makes Maoism the highest stage of revolutionary science - by what rationale can we call it a stage, what makes the process of which it is a part scientific, and what scientific thinking means for Maoists interested in developing revolutionary theory.”

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Book:Critique of Maoist Reason
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“A former Red Guard relates, “I believe many little girls and boys of my generation dreamed of being a geological prospector… Propaganda for recruiting young people to work in this area was very effective. When my neighbor’s daughter was accepted by the geology department of a prestigious university, we all envied her for her future prospects of an adventurous life.”

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Book:Maoism at the Grassroots: Everyday Life in China’s Era of High Socialism
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“I was enticed like a fly to a pot of honey by something reminiscent of a religious cult offering salvation. We were not urged to commit collective suicide, because the Day of Judgment was nigh, but to give up our individuality for the benefit of a collective intoxication, at the heart of which was a Little Red Book that had replaced all other forms of enlightenment. It contained all wisdom, the answers to all questions, expressions of all the social and political visions the world needed in order to progress from its present state and install once and for all paradise on earth, rather than a paradise in some remote kingdom in the sky. But what we didn’t even begin to understand was that the sayings comprised living words. They were not inscribed in stone. They described reality. We read the sayings without interpreting them. As if the Little Red Book was a dead catechism, a revolutionary liturgy.”

RevolutionaryCultMaoismHenning MankellPolitical Metaphor
Book:The Man from Beijing
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“At Hongguang Commune, a roadside area of more than 2,000 mu was cleared of more than 180 dwellings. At least 12,000 homes were dismantled throughout the county. Unrelated families were obliged to share quarters, sometimes with domestic fowl. Cadres burst into homes without notice, tossed out belongings, and reduced a house to rubble in an instant. Commune members returning from deployment elsewhere wept upon finding their homes, wives, and children gone. Some families relocated seven times in a year. Cadres ransacked homes, often snatching desirable goods. Some commune members retaliated by hiding snakes in their rice jars.”

ChinaSocialismCommunismMarxismMao ZedongMaoismLeninismGreat FamineRed China
Book:Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962
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“This new idea that the movement has to be completely transparent to everyone as a principle, especially to people whom we don't trust, to me this is an unconscious influence from liberal culture. That no one should be held back from knowing everything that any part of the movement is up to? This is an idea that has come about from the current distortion of the left as part of the cultural zone of "play nice" middle-class reformism. As though bourgeois civil liberties mindsets developed in part by interaction with cops and courts should define how we in the struggle relate and work with each other. As though we aren't outlaws and rebels. This didn't exist in earlier eras when the movement was primarily made up of oppressed working people fighting to survive, guarded in their trust, and for good reasons. 'Necessity know no laws'.”

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Book:Basic Politics of Movement Security
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