Word: lifton
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...well to remember all this in reading Robert J. Lifton's new book, Revolutionary Immortality: Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The work attempts to formulate what Lifton calls a "psychohistorical" model of China's Cultural Revolution, the baffling internal convulsion which has kept China on the verge of anarchy since the summer of 1966. As social science, the book's contribution is uncertain. It suggests fruitful insights, but some of its observations verge on the obvious, and most are impossible to document...
...Lifton undertook his book to supply an ingredient which he felt was lacking in current accounts of the Cultural Revolution: namely the link between psychological phenomena and historical framework, between the feeling of individuals and the events taking place around them...
With the decay of a revolution, Lifton writes, "the dying revolutionary can envision nothing but the total extinction of his own self." Because Mao and a few around him suffer from this "sur vivor paranoia," China "must be made to convulse." Thus the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was contrived by Mao and his aging comrades in a quest for the rebirth of zealous Communism in China. To stoke the fires of fanaticism, the leaders called forth specific images of hate: "American imperialism," "bourgeois remnants," and "modern revisionism," and turned the Red Guard loose in the streets...
Despite all this, concludes Lifton, the "militant rectitude" of the revolution continues to be threatened. The dan gers, he says, lie in the protean nature of man, whose "psychological style is characterized by easy shifts in belief and identification...
Though intriguing, Lifton's thesis is simply a psychiatric twist on similar findings of other China-watchers. It is not new, just considerably more arcane; observers have duly noted similar death rattles in Communist revolutionaries from Marx to Castro...