법률사무소로 찾아와 자신을 진짜 빨갱이라고 고백한 사람도 있었다. 노동자 출신인 그는 어려서부터 북한의 대남방송을 듣고 스스로 공산주의자가 되었다고 했다. 그러다가 결심을 하고 중국을 통해 월북했다는 것이다. 그는 북한에서 방송을 통해 알던 사람들을 만나보고는 실망했다. 메시아의 모습이 아니라 이빨이 빠진 초라한 노인들이었다는 것이다. 그는 다시 남한으로 넘어와 월북한 사실을 자수하고 감옥에서 형을 다 치르고 나왔다고 하면서 이렇게 말했다.
“북한사람들은 진짜 공산주의자가 아니었어요. 또 지금 이 사회에서 겉으로 좌파라고 표방하는 놈들은 다 엉터립니다. 이 사회의 진짜 골수 빨갱이들은 겉으로 드러나지 않아요. 진짜 골수 빨갱이의 조건은 어떤 건지 아십니까? 진짜 노동자 출신이어야 해요. 진짜 빨갱이들은 세상에 노출되지 않아요. 대를 이어 출판사 같은 데서 평범하게 일하면서 혁명을 준비하고 있죠. 이 사회에서 겉으로 좌파를 표방하는 놈들도 다 짝퉁 같은 놈들이예요. 나 같은 진짜는 따로 있어요.”
미움과 증오가 이 사회에 전염병같이 만연되고 있다. 아버지와 아들이 어머니와 딸이 시아버지와 며느리가 정치논쟁으로 금이 가고 있다. 부자들 중에는 한 발은 미국에 두고 여차하면 도망갈 준비가 되어 있다. 가진 자들의 탐욕과 부정부패는 사납게 비판하면서 자신의 이기심과 작은 부정들은 보지 않는다. 제 자신이 먼저 참되고 선하고 정의롭지 않고서 어떻게 세상 평화와 정의를 바랄 수 있을까. 증오가 가시처럼 숨어있는 낡은 이념의 틀을 벗어나야 한다. (엄상익 변호사, 발췌)
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불두화(佛頭花)의 꽃말이 제행무상(諸行無常)이라고 한다.
꽃에게 너무 무거운 의미를 부여한 건 아닐까?
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Patsy Cline은 교통사고로 젊은 나이에 사망한 가수이다. 그런데 그녀의 목소리에는 다른 여성 가수들에게서는 들을 수 없는 힘과 독특함이 있다.
그녀의 노래 Crazy
https://youtu.be/6QEDb3xzdec
You Made Me Love You
https://youtu.be/IdpaF9mU5yM
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교황의 잘못된 개인주의 비판
자유주의자이 요구하는 것은 단지 자신이 살고 싶은 방식을 자발적으로, 강요 없이, 스스로 결정하게 해 달라는 것이다.
The Pope's Favorite Straw Man: "Individualism"
•Ryan McMaken
Since his election in 2013, Pope Francis has repeatedly attacked what he now calls the "liberal-individualist" or "neoliberal" vision of the world. With last week's statement to the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, Francis has renewed the attack, but in the process has exhibited a number of political biases and demonstrably false assumptions.
This line of attack began almost as soon as Francis's pontificate began. In 2013, for example, he denounced “trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world..."
The Pope has also repeatedly suggested that he believes financial markets are essentially unregulated and that many of the the world's regimes are laissez-faire minimalist states. Obviously, such claims can easily be shown to be empirically false. The financial sector is one of the most heavily regulated worldwide, and the governments in the richest countries in the world — the United States included — spend approximately one-fifth of total GDP on government welfare programs alone. Indeed, when it comes to government spending on health care — not private spending, mind you — the United States — that supposed bastion of "free-market" thinking — is the fourth highest in the world.
The Pope's Imaginary World
The Pope also tends to indulge in a variety of other easily-disproved and empirically false claims. He claims, for example, that the world's poor are getting poorer, when all the available data points in exactly the opposite direction. Meanwhile, infant mortality rates among the world's poorest regions are falling, literacy rates are increasing, and access to clean water is increasing.
Any good Christian cleric, of course, will exhort the faithful to pay attention to the poor, and to act with radical amounts of charity. In his attempts to cater to certain political ideologies, however, the Pope merely betrays a deep ignorance of the basic facts surrounding economic trends in the world.
Now, with his latest attack on the "liberal-individualist" view, the Pope also appears to not understand the very ideology he attacks, and resorts to setting up straw men about what is most easily described as laissez-faire liberalism — or simply "liberalism."
The Pope imagines that libertarianism is immensely popular, and then trots out all the usual accusations:
Finally, I cannot but speak of the serious risks associated with the invasion, at high levels of culture and education in both universities and in schools, of positions of libertarian individualism. A common feature of this fallacious paradigm is that it minimizes the common good, that is, “living well,” a “good life” in the community framework, and exalts the selfish ideal that deceptively proposes a “beautiful life.” If individualism affirms that it is only the individual who gives value to things and interpersonal relationships, and so it is only the individual who decides what is good and what is bad, then libertarianism, today in fashion, preaches that to establish freedom and individual responsibility, it is necessary to resort to the idea of “self-causation.” Thus libertarian individualism denies the validity of the common good because on the one hand it supposes that the very idea of “common” implies the constriction of at least some individuals, and the other that the notion of “good” deprives freedom of its essence.
Ah yes, libertarianism is sweeping the universities and schools! Every where we look, artists and intellectuals tell us of the virtues of libertarianism. The "High levels of culture" are absolutely saturated with libertarian ideologues, Francis tells us.
It's clear that Francis doesn't exactly have his finger on the pulse of modern academia, and but even though he apparently knows little about where and with whom libertarianism is popular, let's take a look at what Francis seems to believe characterizes the ideology.
Libertarian thought, Francis says, involves a rejection of the common good, and strips human life of the idea that there is a "good life" outside the bare-bones human existence of the marketplace. There is no value in the "community framework" in the libertarian mind, Francis claims, since "the very idea of 'common'" must be rejected by libertarians because it constricts the freedom of at least some individuals.
In all of this, Pope Francis repeatedly misses the mark.
The "Homo Economicus" and "Extreme Individualism" Straw Men
In his critique, Francis appears to be merely repeating left-wing talking points that have been around for many years and rely on creating a crude cartoon version of libertarianism. Indeed, Francis is doing to liberalism what many critics of Christianity have been doing for centuries. As C.S. Lewis once noted about some critics of Christianity, "Such people put up a version of Christianity suitable for a child of six and make that the object of their attack." Francis is employing a similar method, albeit with a different target.
Here at mises.org, we've dealt with these claims before, thanks to George Monbiot at The Guardian who has taken a special interest in attacking the liberal ideology for causing every ill under the sun whether it be poverty or loneliness. Indeed, Monbiot has been something of a mini-Francis in promulgating the anti-liberal party line on how liberalism destroys all other human values and reduces human beings to a state of little more than profit-seeking, dead-eyed units of capital. Much of this begins with the idea that liberalism demands that our view of humanity be reduced to seeing everyone as a profit maximizing machine, known as "homo economicus."
Monbiot writes:
Our dominant ideology [liberalism] is based on a lie. A series of lies, in fact, but I’ll focus on just one. This is the claim that we are, above all else, self-interested — that we seek to enhance our own wealth and power with little regard for the impact on others. Some economists use a term to describe this presumed state of being — Homo economicus, or self-maximising man. The concept was formulated, by J S Mill and others, as a thought experiment. Soon it became a modelling tool. Then it became an ideal.
The only problem here — a problem for both Monbiot and Pope Francis — is that the idea of "homo economicus" as a model for humans has always been a straw man and has nothing to do with actual markets and liberal ideology.
Not surprisingly, archliberal Ludwig von Mises understood exactly this, writing in Human Action:
It was a fundamental mistake ... to interpret economics as the characterization of the behavior of an ideal type, the homo oeconomicus. According to this doctrine traditional or orthodox economics does not deal with the behavior of man as he really is and acts, but with a fictitious or hypothetical image. It pictures a being driven exclusively by "economic" motives, i.e., solely by the intention of making the greatest possible material or monetary profit. Such a being does not have and never did a counterpart in reality; it is a phantom of a spurious armchair philosophy. No man is exclusively motivated by the desire to become as rich as possible; many are not at all influenced by this mean craving. It is vain to refer to such an illusory homunculus in dealing with life and history.
Every insightful liberal theorist — Mises included — has fully accepted that human beings have motivations and values outside the marketplace, and no one is — nor should they be — motivated strictly by profit maximization.
In reality, human society is extremely varied and complex. Culture, religion, ethnic identity, language, and a host of other variables exist outside of markets, and no respectable liberal claims that markets or the pursuit of monetary profit should eclipse all these other factors that influence human values.
Liberalism has never been in conflict with these facts about human nature and human society. But, for the anti-market ideologue, such as Monbiot and Francis, liberalism somehow dictates how everyone should live their daily lives, and thus makes us lonely and despairing in the process.
Monbiot continues:
There are plenty of secondary reasons for this [loneliness], but it seems to me that the underlying cause is everywhere the same: human beings, the ultrasocial mammals, whose brains are wired to respond to other people, are being peeled apart. Economic and technological change play a major role, but so does ideology. Though our wellbeing is inextricably linked to the lives of others, everywhere we are told that we will prosper through competitive self-interest and extreme individualism.
This is simply another way of stating Francis's thesis that liberalism trashes the idea of a "good life" outside of the market activity.
Again, this whole argument relies on the "extreme individualism" caricature of liberalism.
The very idea stems from a (possibly willful) misunderstanding of the difference between methodological individualism and individualism in practice.
This is especially unforgivable for a Catholic cleric like Francis since Catholic philosophers and theologians were pioneers in emphasizing the importance of the individual. That is, Christian theology is closely connected to the idea of an individual's personal relationship with God, and that a person is responsible for his own actions and moral choices.
Many strains of liberalism — which draw heavily on Christian ideas of individualism and morality — employ a similar sort of methodological individualism in that only individuals make choices. Moreover, human beings derive their rights from their status as individual human beings and not as members of a group, whether an ethnic group or a state.
None of this, however, suggests that people must be individualistic in lifestyle or that human beings must reject the idea of living in community with others.
After all, it is entirely consistent with the ideas of liberalism to live in a large extended family, to join a commune, or live in a densely-populated urban setting with others. All that liberals ask is that the decision to live a certain way is made voluntarily and without being coerced. A person commits no illiberal act when he gives away all his possessions to live in a monastery shared with others. There is nothing contrary to liberalism in offering free room and board to strangers or family members. There is no group or individual activity that is verboten by liberalism so long as the participants are cooperating freely.
In fact, Mises — who has been attacked by Monbiot for his "neoliberalism" — assumed that individuals would come together to achieve common goals. In Human Action, Mises notes that "Every step by which an individual substitutes concerted action for isolated action results in an immediate and recognizable improvement in his conditions."
Moreover, according to Mises,
The advantages derived from peaceful cooperation ... are universal. They immediately benefit every generation ... [f]or what the individual must sacrifice for the sake of society he is amply compensated by greater advantages.
Of course living cooperatively and seeking a "common good" in solidarity with others brings many advantages, materially and otherwise. Virtually no one denies this except some anti-social misanthropes who can hardly be blamed on any particular ideology.
So where is this liberalism-inspired rejection of community and the common good that Francis imagines exists out there sweeping the globe? It doesn't exist.
If Francis does wish to identify institutions that breed conflict, poverty, war, and social disintegration, he'd do much good by turning his attention to states, to central banks, and to the global machinery of coercion and war that works daily to undo the great progress being made every day thanks to markets and other forms of peaceful and voluntary cooperation.
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중국은 이렇게 공산화 되었다.
끔찍한 피의 숙청과 광기
The Horrors of Communist China
Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.
It's a scandal that few Westerners are even aware, or, if they are aware, they are not conscious, of the bloody reality that prevailed in China between the years 1949 and 1976, the years of communist rule by Mao Zedong.
How many died as a result of persecutions and the policies of Mao? Perhaps you care to guess? Many people over the years have attempted to guess. But they have always underestimated. As more data rolled in during the 1980s and 1990s, and specialists have devoted themselves to investigations and estimates, the figures have become ever more reliable. And yet they remain imprecise. What kind of error term are we talking about? It could be as low as 40 million. It could be as high as 100 million or more. In the Great Leap Forward from 1959 to 1961 alone, figures range between 20 million to 75 million. In the period before, 20 million. In the period after, tens of millions more.
As scholars in the area of mass death point out, most of us can't imagine 100 dead or 1000. Above that, we are just talking about statistics: they have no conceptual meaning for us, and it becomes a numbers game that distracts us from the horror itself. And there is only so much ghastly information that our brains can absorb, only so much blood we can imagine. And yet there is more to why China's communist experiment remains a hidden fact: it makes a decisive case against government power, one even more compelling than the cases of Russia or Germany in the 20th century.
The horror was foreshadowed in a bloody civil war following the Second World War. After some nine million people died, the communists emerged victorious in 1949, with Mao as the ruler. The land of Lao-Tzu (rhyme, rhythm, peace), Taoism (compassion, moderation, humility), and Confucianism (piety, social harmony, individual development) was seized by the strangest import to China ever: Marxism from Germany via Russia. It was an ideology that denied all logic, experience, economic law, property rights, and limits on the power of the state on grounds that these notions were merely bourgeois prejudices, and what we needed to transformed society was a cadre with all power to transform all things.
It's bizarre to think about it, really: posters of Marx and Lenin in China, of all places, and rule by an ideology of robbery, dictatorship, and death that did not come to an end until 1976. So spectacular has the transformation been in the last 25 years that one would hardly know that any of this ever happened, except that the Communist Party is still running the place while having tossed out the communist part.
The experiment began in the most bloody way possible following the second world war, when all Western eyes were focused on matters at home and, to the extent there was any foreign focus, it was on Russia. The "good guys" had won the war in China, or so we were led to believe in times when communism was the fashion.
The communization of China took place in the usual three stages: purge, plan, and scapegoat. First there was the purge to bring about communism. There were guerillas to kill and land to nationalize. The churches had to be destroyed. The counterrevolutionaries had to be put down. The violence began in the country and spread later to the cities. All peasants were first divided into four classes that were considered politically acceptable: poor, semi poor, average, and rich. Everyone else was considered a landowner and targeted for elimination. If no landowners could be found, the "rich" were often included in this group. The demonized class was ferreted out in a country-wide series of "bitterness meetings" in which people turned in their neighbors for owning property and being politically disloyal. Those who were so deemed were immediately executed along with those who sympathized with them.
The rule was that there had to be at least one person killed per village. The numbers killed is estimated to be between one and five million. In addition, another four to six million landowners were slaughtered for the crime of being capital owners. If anyone was suspected of hiding wealth, he or she was tortured with hot irons to confess. The families of the killed were then tortured and the graves of their ancestors looted and pillaged. What happened to the land? It was divided into tiny plots and distributed among the remaining peasants.
Then the campaign moved to the cities. The political motivations here were at the forefront, but there were also behavioral controls. Anyone who was suspected of involvement in prostitution, gambling, tax evasion, lying, fraud, opium dealing, or telling state secrets was executed as a "bandit." Official estimates put the number of dead at two million with another two million going to prison to die. Resident committees of political loyalists watched every move. A nighttime visit to another person was immediately reported and the parties involved jailed or killed. The cells in the prisons themselves grew ever smaller, with one person living in a space of about 14 inches. Some prisoners were worked to death, and anyone involved in a revolt was herded with collaborators and they were all burned.
There was industry in the cities, but those who owned and managed them were subjected to ever tighter restrictions: forced transparency, constant scrutiny, crippling taxes, and pressure to offer up their businesses for collectivization. There were many suicides among the small- and medium-sized business owners who saw the writing on the wall. Joining the party provided only temporary respite, since 1955 began the campaign against hidden counterrevolutionaries in the party itself. A principle here was that one in ten party members was a secret traitor.
As the rivers of blood rose ever higher, Mao brought about the Hundred Flowers Campaign in two months of 1957, the legacy of which is the phrase we often hear: "Let a hundred flowers bloom." People were encouraged to speak freely and give their point of view, an opportunity that was very tempting for intellectuals. The liberalization was short lived. In fact, it was a trick. All those who spoke out against what was happening to China were rounded up and imprisoned, perhaps between 400,000 and 700,000 people, including 10 percent of the well-educated classes. Others were branded as right wingers and subjected to interrogation, reeducation, kicked out of their homes, and shunned.
But this was nothing compared with phase two, which was one of history's great central planning catastrophes. Following collectivization of land, Mao decided to go further to dictate to the peasants what they would grow, how they would grow it, and where they would ship it, or whether they would grow anything at all as versus plunge into industry. This would become the Great Leap Forward that would generate history's most deadly famine. Peasants were grouped into groups of thousands and forced to share all things. All groups were to be economically self-sufficient. Production goals were raised ever higher.
People were moved by the hundreds of thousands from where production was high to where it was low, as a means of boosting production. They were moved too from agriculture to industry. There was a massive campaign to collect tools and transform them into industrial skill. As a means of showing hope for the future, collectives were encouraged to have huge banquets and eat everything, especially meat. This was a way of showing one's belief that the next year's harvest would be even more bountiful.
Mao had this idea that he knew how to grow grain. He proclaimed that "seeds are happiest when growing together" and so seeds were sown at five to ten times their usual density. Plants died, the soil dried out, and the salt rose to the surface. To keep birds from eating grain, sparrows were wiped out, which vastly increased the number of parasites. Erosion and flooding became endemic. Tea plantations were turned to rice fields, on grounds that tea was decadent and capitalistic. Hydraulic equipment built to service the new collective farms didn't work and lacked any replacement parts. This led Mao to put new emphasis on industry, which was forced to appear in the same areas as agriculture, leading to ever more chaos. Workers were drafted from one sector to another, and mandatory cuts in some sectors was balanced by mandatory high quotas in another.
In 1957, the disaster was everywhere. Workers were growing too weak even to harvest their meager crops, so they died watching the rice rot. Industry churned and churned but produced nothing of any use. The government responded by telling people that fat and proteins were unnecessary. But the famine couldn't be denied. The black-market price of rice rose 20 to 30 times. Because trade had been forbidden between collectives (self-sufficiency, you know), millions were left to starve. By 1960, the death rate soared from 15 percent to 68 percent, and the birth rate plummeted. Anyone caught hoarding grain was shot. Peasants found with the smallest amount were imprisoned. Fires were banned. Funerals were prohibited as wasteful.
Villagers who tried to flee the countryside to the city were shot at the gates. Deaths from hunger reached 50 percent in some villages. Survivors boiled grass and bark to make soup and wandered the roads looking for food. Sometimes they banded together and raided houses looking for ground maize. Women were unable to conceive because of malnutrition. People in work camps were used for food experiments that led to sickness and death.
How bad did it get? In 1968 an 18-year-old member of the Red Guard, Wei Jingsheng, took refuge with a family in a village of Anhui, and here he lived to write about what he saw:
"We walked along beside the village… Before my eyes, among the weeds, rose up one of the scenes I had been told about, one of the banquets at which the families had swapped children in order to eat them. I could see the worried faces of the families as they chewed the flesh of other people's children. The children who were chasing butterflies in a nearby field seemed to be the reincarnation of the children devoured by their parents. I felt sorry for the children but not as sorry as I felt for their parents. What had made them swallow that human flesh, amidst the tears and grief of others — flesh that they would never have imagined tasting, even in their worst nightmares?"
The author of this passage was jailed as a traitor but his status protected him from death and he was finally released in 1997.
How many people died in the famine of 1959–61? The low range is 20 million. The high range is 43 million. Finally in 1961, the government gave in and permitted food imports, but it was too little and too late. Some peasants were again allowed to grow crops on their own land. A few private workshops were opened. Some markets were permitted. Finally, the famine began to abate and production grew.
But then the third phase came: scapegoating. What had caused the calamity? The official reason was anything but communism, anything but Mao. And so the politically motivated roundup began again, and here we get the very heart of the Culture Revolution. Thousands of camps and detention centers were opened. People sent there died there. In prison, the slightest excuse was used to dispense with people — all to the good, since the prisoners were a drain on the system, so far as those in charge were concerned. The largest penal system ever built was organized in a military fashion, with some camps holding as many as 50,000 people.
There was some sense in which everyone was in prison. Arrests were sweeping and indiscriminate. Everyone had to carry around a copy of Mao's Little Red Book. To question the reason for arrest was itself evidence of disloyalty, since the state was infallible. Once arrested, the safest path was instant and frequent confession. Guards were forbidden from using overt violence, so interrogations would go on for hundreds of hours, and often the prisoner would die during this process. Those named in the confession were then hunted down and rounded up. Once you got through this process, you were sent to a labor camp, where you were graded according to how many hours you could work with little food. You were fed no meat nor given any sugar or oil. Labor prisoners were further controlled by the rationing of the little food they had.
The final phase of this incredible litany of criminality lasted from 1966 to 1976, during which the number killed fell dramatically to "only" one to three million. The government, now tired and in the first stages of demoralization, began to lose control, first within the labor camps and then in the countryside. And it was this weakening that led to the final, and in some ways the most vicious, of the communist periods in China's history.
The first stages of rebellion occurred in the only way permissible: people began to criticize the government for being too soft and too uncommitted to the communist goal. Ironically, this began to appear precisely as moderation became more overt in Russia. Neo-revolutionaries in the Red Guard began to criticize the Chinese communists as "Khrushchev-like reformers." As one writer put it, the guard "rose up against its own government in order to defend it."
During this period, the personality cult of Mao reached it height, with the Little Red Book achieving a mythic status. The Red Guards roamed the country in an attempt to purge the Four Old-Fashioned Things: ideas, culture, customs, and habits. The remaining temples were barricaded. Traditional opera was banned, with all costumes and sets in the Beijing Opera burned. Monks were expelled. The calendar was changed. All Christianity was banned. There were to be no pets such as cats and birds. Humiliation was the order of the day.
Thus was the Red Terror: in the capital city, there were 1,700 deaths and 84,000 people were run out. In other cities such as Shanghai, the figures were worse. A massive party purge began, with hundreds of thousands arrested and many murdered. Artists, writers, teachers, scientists, technicians: all were targets. Pogroms were visited on community after community, with Mao approving at every step as a means of eliminating every possible political rival. But underneath, the government was splintering and cracking, even as it became ever more brutal and totalitarian in its outlook.
Finally in 1976, Mao died. Within a few months, his closest advisers were all imprisoned. And the reform began slowly at first and then at breakneck speed. Civil liberties were restored (comparatively) and the rehabilitations began. Torturers were prosecuted. Economic controls were gradually relaxed. The economy, by virtue of human and private economic initiative, was transformed.
Having read the above, you are now in a tiny elite of people who know anything about the greatest death camp in the history of the world that China became between 1949 and 1976, an experiment in total control unlike anything else in history.
Don't tell me that we've learned anything from history. We don't even know enough about history to learn from it.
Excerpted from The Death Camps of Communist China
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과두제를 타도하는 단일한 최고의 방법은 선전 기구를 공격적으로 끊임없이 공박하는 것이다.
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