I came across this quote while reading a book on thought reform during China’s Cultural Revolution and it helped to explain a lot of what we experienced in the summer of 2020.
“Punish the past to warn the future” is incredibly familiar. It’s a tactical process by which old Tweets, or anything done and recorded had been sifted through for any type of offense.
And it’s not relegated to right wing targets, although the fallout seems to be lopsided. Both Jimmy Kimmel and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau have been shown to use black face but they didn’t pay any price for it. To be accurate, Jimmy Kimmel was not just black face but total black body in his satirical impression of Karl Malone. Jimmy kept his job.
During the summer of 2020 we saw a rash of vandalization towards statues which represent the past. Any statue of a person thought to possibly have any ties to racist acts or ideas was open game. Statues of Founding Fathers like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington were targeted, and even a former slave like Frederick Douglas became a target. It seemed to have no bounds even though early attempts to rationalize this vandalizing pointed to the moral errors of otherwise great people.
But why?
To be fair, it’s hard to assess motivation. Many people may have simply been caught up in a protest that turned into something different. That often happens when people are angry and feed off of each other. But there has to be something that associates all of these occurrences as they are not completely random. There is some method to how they were choosing statues. It’s also not random that the statue of Lenin still stands in Seattle.
The quote I shared is from a speech given by Mao Tse-Tsung in 1942. He was the leader of the Chinese Communist Party who led its Cultural Revolution. Here is an expanded excerpt:
“…two principles must be observed. The first is, ‘punish the past to warn the future’ and the second, ‘save men by curing their ills.’ Past errors must be exposed with no thought of personal feelings or face.” — Mao Tse-Tsung, 1942
As a follower of the Marxist tradition Mao saw history as a history of oppression evolving towards a predetermined end. It is then man’s task to facilitate its continued progress towards that end. Thus, any oppression of the past must be highlighted in order to identify and warn against it and prevent it today and into the future. And that is exactly what we see today with both the attack on historical statues and past behavior. It all serves as a warning.
“We invented the critical theory because we realized we cannot articulate the view of the good society and what is right on the terms of the existing society,but we can criticize the aspects of this society that we wish to change.” — Max Horkheimer
“Negative thinking necessarily becomes positive because it frees the seeds of the ideal society from the constraints in the existing society.” — Herbert Marcuse
“Ruthless criticism of all that exists.” — Karl Marx
This is what the ‘critical’ in critical theories means. If you’re not familiar with critical theories, they are the framework for the activism we see in academia that has spilled out into the streets and into our corporate trainings on race, gender, and politicizing all aspects of life.
It is a truly pessimistic view of the world and history in particular. Instead of reading and understanding history as a way to understand humanity, understand progress, and then copy it forward, it values only the negatives of history.
I know some will be uncomfortable with the correlation between Maoist speeches and the action of self-proclaimed activists when it is highly unlikely that any of the activists involved in the vandalizing ever read any Mao or Marx. But reading and studying a text is not required to act out the spirit of its ideas.
The history of Christianity has tons of instances of widespread harms committed in its name and nobody seems to have any problem asserting so. But important to remember is that up until recent history, literacy itself was rare and relegated to the upper classes and priests or monks. Mass literacy is a function of the Protestant Revolution which didn’t officially start until 1517.
Somehow, illiterate people acted out the spirit of ideas they had never read.
The more I think about it, the more ridiculous it is to assume people have to read ideas to act them out. Most of what we think and act out is picked up from the general expectations of our surroundings combined with the nature of our humanity. Modifying that through reading is likely the exception, not the rule. Very few people read books they haven’t been forced to read in educational settings.
Somehow these ideas are making their way through our social milieu. Whether they come directly from speeches or studies of Marxist or Maoist tradition may not matter so much. What matters are the consequences of those ideas as they play themselves out. In China, the consequences included fifty-five million people dead.
Ideas have consequences.