Word: symbolization
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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LIFTON'S concepts become intelligible only when he relates them to the specific case of China. "The essence of the 'power struggle' taking place in China," he argues, "as of all such 'power struggles' is power over death." The symbol of immortality linking Mao with the mass agents of upheaval is the Revolution. As an old man facing death, he has seized on his political work and vision as his connection with Chinese history. The knowledge that they will outlive him allows him to face death, and the threat of their corruption stimulates an almost paranoid response--a need...
...symbol of Mao and his revolution, in turn, link the masses to Chinese culture and history. With ancestor worship and family under attack from the communist leadership, the revolution is a substitute for the biological line. This explains the deification of Mao, and even more than Mao, Mao's Thought. Mao's Thought must be the sole (thus unchallenged) basis for the order which survives him. The hysterical attack on all tradition is an attempt to clear the field for the rise of a new cleansed Maoist order, and youth is the bearer of the new tradition because it symbolizes...
LIFTON'S approach, then, has a certain intuitive and empirical weight. But in seeking to pinpoint one key symbol and stretch it into a foundation for China's chaos, he strains his hypothesis. Lifton has an exceptional command of the data on the Cultural Revolution, and his scheme explains most of its history. But few of his observations (as he readily admits in the introduction) cannot be explained by political, sociological and economic theses. This would not argue against his approach if it were not for one thing: the tremendous difficulty of verifying generalizations about the psychological make...
...SACRED COD of Massachusetts, perhaps the last enduring symbol of the majesty of this Commonwealth, has been purloined from its pedestal in the Great and General Court. Perhaps, in this age of growing disrespect for law and decency, such an act is to be expected. But it cannot be condoned...
China last week became the first Communist nation in history to have a non-Communist President. Long the reviled symbol for everything "bourgeois" in China, President Liu Shao-chi, 70, was expelled from the Communist Party and denounced as a "renegade, traitor and scab" as well as a tool of those familiar Red devils, "imperialism, modern revisionism and the Kuomintang reactionaries." Despite this attack, however, Liu still hangs on as President, a post from which he can legally be removed only by the National People's Congress...