When They Go Low, We Go High

by Philip Collins

  Has there ever been a more affecting series of rhetorical questions? Could there be? Wiesel was renowned for asking more questions than he supplied answers for, but these questions are not designed to evade an answer. He asks if Americans should have responded differently to the Holocaust and offers no answer. The rhetorical question is a way of dressing a painful statement so as to reduce the offence. It is also a way of communicating the lack of comprehension at how it could have been allowed to happen. There was no answer; there is no answer. That is Wiesel’s point. These are questions that are really slightly softened accusations.

  Wiesel then changes the tone and the register of the speech rather abruptly. He passes from the specific instance of indifference to the fate of the Jews to a series of more optimistic encounters. The only words that mark the transition are a weak ‘And yet …’ This is raising the most significant problem with the speech, which is that Wiesel is unclear as to whether a lesson has, or has not, been learned. The defeat of Nazism and the collapse of communism are events of great historical significance that should either have been ignored – the speech could merely have been about the plight of indifference – or treated at greater length. Here they are touched en passant as if they hardly matter. But the world has not been, as Wiesel’s own list shows, wholly indifferent to the plight of the suffering. The sense that this is a manifesto for intervention, for what Kofi Annan was later to describe as ‘the responsibility to protect’, is confirmed by Wiesel’s praise for the action in Kosovo. The audience is left a little unsure about how pessimistic it is meant to feel about the prospect for regular humanitarian aid. It is the question with which Wiesel now ends.

  Does it mean that we have learned from the past? Does it mean that society has changed? Has the human being become less indifferent and more human? Have we really learned from our experiences? Are we less insensitive to the plight of victims of ethnic cleansing and other forms of injustices in places near and far? Is today’s justified intervention in Kosovo, led by you, Mr. President, a lasting warning that never again will the deportation, the terrorisation of children and their parents be allowed anywhere in the world? Will it discourage other dictators in other lands to do the same? What about the children? Oh, we see them on television, we read about them in the papers, and we do so with a broken heart. Their fate is always the most tragic, inevitably. When adults wage war, children perish. We see their faces, their eyes. Do we hear their pleas? Do we feel their pain, their agony? Every minute one of them dies of disease, violence, famine. Some of them – so many of them – could be saved. And so, once again, I think of the young Jewish boy from the Carpathian Mountains. He has accompanied the old man I have become throughout these years of quest and struggle. And together we walk towards the new millennium, carried by profound fear and extraordinary hope.

  The rhetorical technique of returning at the end to the image from the beginning gives the speech an organic unity, and because the young boy from the Carpathian Mountains has, against the odds, grown to be an old man fifty-four years older, to the day, a moving conclusion. It is always satisfying when a speech resolves like this, just as it is with a melody in a minor key. The device of coupling the Wiesel who is speaking as an old man with the young man who is still with him is a clever way of saying that this terrible event will never go away. Later Wiesel would say that the scars could never truly heal – the nightmares, the perpetual insecurity, the inability to laugh deeply. ‘What about the children?’ he asks. One of the children was the seven-year-old Tzipora, to whom Night was dedicated.

  At the end of the speech, the young boy and the old man join hands to walk towards the new millennium. The emotions they carry are a beautiful expression of what humane politics can do. The spectre of utopia is profound fear; its promise is extraordinary hope. The purpose of politics is to contain the fear so that the hope can thrive. Wiesel’s resilience in coming to this conclusion is astonishing. In Buchenwald, the place of eternal infamy, he saw his father yield to dysentery and starvation and could not bear the burden of not being able to try to help him. ‘I will never forgive myself,’ he wrote. Yet the young boy tattooed indelibly as prisoner A-7713 never gave way to indifference. He found it within himself to hope, and the least we can do is remember.

  There is no more affecting passage of rhetoric anywhere than this, from Night:

  Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God himself. Never.

  LET A HUNDRED FLOWERS BLOOM

  No speech has a more forbidding title nor a darker irony in its most compelling phrase. In February 1957, the chairman of the Communist Party of China, Mao Zedong, proclaimed to the Supreme State Conference in Beijing a long disquisition ‘On the Correct Handling of the Contradictions among the People’. The speech included a line of Chinese poetry by which it has since become known. ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom’ is nothing like as benign a phrase as it sounds. It means the opposite of what it says at face value. The licence it promised proved to be lethally counterfeit. ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend’ sounds like the reign of free speech; in fact it was the prelude to a crackdown on dissent.

  It is notable how often the tyrant borrows the language of democracy to win legitimacy. Liberal democracies permit many voices to be heard, and out of that cacophony improvement proceeds gradually, progressing by trial and error as mistakes are made and slowly rectified. The heroic figure of these societies is the rebel as imagined by Camus: thoughtful, critical, dissenting, reflective and engaged. In Beijing in 1957 Mao appeared to endorse all these attributes, and every word of it he then abused.

  Mao had been persuaded by his premier, Zhou Enlai, to be seen to embrace criticism. The year before, Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor, had denounced his predecessor’s crimes. What looked like self-criticism was, in fact, the process by which the Soviet Union erased the past. This is the perennial pattern: crime, detection, denunciation, erasure. Mao appeared to be acknowledging fallibility and seeking the wisdom of critical voices. Perhaps, as he said the words, he even meant them. It is not definite that his speech was initially intended as a ruse, designed to flush out dissent. Certainly, Mao’s text, taken literally, reads like authentic liberal licence: ‘A period of trial is often needed to determine whether something is right or wrong … Often, correct and good things were first regarded not as fragrant flowers but as poisonous weeds.’ So far this could be John Stuart Mill talking. Indeed, Mao more or less summarises Mill’s view that the truth will emerge as the upshot of spontaneous, free exchange: ‘It is only by employing the method of discussion, criticism and reasoning that we can really foster correct ideas and overcome wrong ones.’

  There is, though, poison in the last of those flowers in the implication that Mao can arbitrate between ‘correct ideas’ and ‘wrong ones’. The rest of the speech discloses the deceit. The year before Mao’s Hundred Flowers speech, the Soviet Union had quelled the Hungarian uprising with brutal efficiency. Mao’s section entitled ‘Can Bad Things Be Turned into Good Things?’ is, apart from the menace, pure 1066 and All That: ‘Everybody knows that the Hungarian incident was not a good thing … Because our Hungarian comrades took proper action in the course of the incident, what was a bad thing has eventually turned into a good one.’ The scope for discussion and free speech in Hungary was severely curtailed. The crushing of the rebels was, says Mao, a good thing.

  Mao then comes to the core of his spee
ch, which is a study of contradiction. He suggests that error is an objective ideological fact that can be eradicated by conscious reflection. Under the malign influence of Lenin, Mao thought that history obeyed laws and that he knew exactly what they were. He believed he could always spot the difference between a fragrant flower and a poisonous weed: fragrant flowers are those that history allows to flourish. Suddenly sounding as if he is preaching from the revolutionary scriptures, Mao affirms: ‘The ceaseless emergence and ceaseless resolution of contradictions constitute the dialectical law of the development of things.’ Anyone unversed in the law of the development of things is therefore in the grip of an error. ‘The contradiction into which the intellectuals have fallen,’ Mao continues, ‘is that they have not yet all been remoulded.’ For Mao, the theory is true and people have to be made to fit it. It is already clear there is no place in Mao’s China for a rebel who speaks freely: ‘In the building of a socialist society, everybody needs remoulding.’

  It did not take long for the duplicity of this speech to became blatant. Mao had invited citizens to send in their thoughts, but when the complaints duly arrived he declared the criticism had gone too far. Like every dictator who feigns tolerance, Mao had a low threshold for rebels. He launched the Anti-Rightist Campaign in which his thuggish flunkies rounded up hundreds of thousands of critics who were then transported for execution, or for remoulding in labour camps. Mao would later congratulate himself for having ‘enticed the snakes out of their lairs’. He had the text of his speech amended post facto to take out the references to intellectual freedom. He was erasing his own words no sooner than he had spoken them. If a country has no critical apparatus, a leader can both say and unsay whatever he likes.

  In Mao’s China the freedom to speak belonged exclusively to the leader, and he could also talk as long as he liked, because listening was not voluntary. Mao, Castro and Hitler could all command the stage for hours at a time. When Stalin spoke, interminably and boringly, nobody wanted to be the first person to stop applauding for fear of the reprisals. Part of the act of authoritarian leadership is the conviction that the voice of the leader and the voice of the people are one and the same. This is why there is no need for free speech. The thoughts of the people are spoken in the leader’s rhetoric. The tyrant conducts monologues, as Camus said, above a million solitudes. On this occasion, Mao wasn’t even seeking to hide the facts. In the opening to the speech, he bragged that 700,000 counter-revolutionaries had been disposed of. They were rebels in the grip of falsehood. Once they resisted remoulding there was only one fate left for them.

  Political murder is a direct and ubiquitous implication of the revolutionary claim to know what cannot be known. Any leader with the zeal to be convinced that they are right at a level too deep for ordinary understanding, and the authority to impose that twisted vision, will do violence to rebels sooner or later. The consequences of Mao’s truth claim were predictably calamitous. In 1958 he began an attempt to collectivise labour under the slogan – again displaying the macabre penchant for irony of a man who liked to write poetry – of The Great Leap Forward. Mao confiscated all property and herded people into giant communes where they were coerced into work. The result was a catastrophic grain shortage and, between 1958 and 1962, the death of 45 million people. Mao’s arrogant assumption that he understood the laws of history ensured that more people died at his hands in China than were killed in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia combined.

  A democracy would never permit a suspension of the rule of law on that scale. Any leader with a record so bloody could never be allowed to govern, let alone thrive. Mao did lose his grip on power in China, but only temporarily. By 1966 he was back with another crazed idea; the decade-long Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. This was his campaign to preserve the true communist ideology and purge the infected elements of capitalist and bourgeois thought. Red Guard groups of enthusiastic youths formed around China to carry out Mao’s command, under the misleading banner of ‘To rebel is justified!’ It wasn’t, and everybody knew it. The Red Guards set out explicitly to destroy such wisdom as Chinese history contained. They sought to eradicate what they described as ‘the four olds’ – old ideas, old customs, old habits and old culture. Mao had a new truth to put in their place.

  The daily reality of the revolution was dire. Millions of people were persecuted and humiliated in public, subjected to arbitrary imprisonment, torture and hard labour. Intellectuals and party officials deemed to hold treacherous views were murdered or harassed to the point of suicide. Schools and universities were closed and churches, shrines and libraries among the many cultural institutions that were ransacked. When the outcome was a civil war, Mao ordered the People’s Army to restore order. ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom’ had turned out to be a poisonous joke. Mao’s revolution had produced a military dictatorship that lasted until 1971. The final death toll of the Cultural Revolution is disputed but it lies somewhere between half a million and two million people. The whole appalling saga came to end only with Mao’s death, at the age of eighty-two, in September 1976.

  The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains

  What Mao had done, with terrible consequences, was to substitute his own authority for the gradually accumulated wisdom of a liberal society. Like all revolutionaries and tyrants, Mao had no sense that the clash of contending schools of thought was exactly how progress occurs. The speech of the supreme leader is always a protracted essay in complete certainty. In his wise essay Rationalism in Politics the conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott set out the danger of the belief that politics can be written like a rule book. The best cook, Oakeshott pointed out, is not necessarily the one who has memorised the recipe book. Politics is a field of practical wisdom. But Mao believed in the sovereignty of rationalism. He thought all wisdom could be recorded in a book. The book in question, the official manual for the Cultural Revolution, was his Little Red Book. The longest entry in it is the credo that Mao had set out in a speech on 11 June 1945, at the Seventh National Congress of the Communist Party of China. The speech was built around a Chinese fable and it is entered in The Little Red Book as ‘The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains’.

  The context for the speech was what Mao called, with the sinister gift for euphemism that set a rhetorical pattern for his reign, a ‘rectification’ campaign. This was a purge of rebel elements that he, as chairman of the Secretariat and the Politburo, deemed insufficiently loyal. The speech parades Mao’s implausible faith in the innate power of the Chinese peasantry. The hero of the fable around which Mao constructs his rhetorical conceit is an old man who instructs his two sons to begin to dig up the two mountains, Taihang and Wangwu, that block the view from his house. In Mao’s clunky retelling of the myth the two mountains represent imperialism and feudalism. A Wise Old Man interrupts the sons’ digging to point out that the task is impossible. The Foolish Old Man retorts with the wisdom of the ages. After his sons have finished digging, he says, his grandsons will take over and then their sons will dig after that, and so on, until the mountains disappear.

  Apart from Mao’s insertion of the twin demons of imperialism and feudalism, this speech is actually a metaphor for the gradualism of a free society. It is a story one might imagine Edmund Burke using to illustrate the connection between the generations and the stock of mute wisdom stored in the institutions of a constitutional democracy. Slowly, gradually, the mountains diminish, but only because every successive generation passes on the task to the next, each continuing the work of its predecessor. Piecemeal progress will not satisfy Mao’s vaulting ambition, though. Like every utopian, he wheels on the deus ex machina. Mao’s story concludes with God being so moved by the old man’s conviction that he sends down two angels to carry off the mountains on their backs. The moral of the tale in Mao’s telling is therefore quite different: if your conviction is strong enough then it can move mountains.

  Mao’s speech embodies another crucial difference between the free society and
the nation governed by a revolutionary zealot. Politics takes time and democracy calls for patience, but the dictator is always in a tearing hurry. The apparently insuperable position of the tyrant is always more fragile than it seems. Power is a question of court rivalry rather than popular legitimacy, and the man who has arrived, as Mao famously put it, ‘at the barrel of a gun’ is always fearful that he will depart that way too. The example of Robespierre shows how this breeds impatience, hurried orders and an incapacity to tolerate failure. The great virtue of the democratic leader is that he can make a mistake and, like Peel and Disraeli in nineteenth-century Britain, change course. The dictator, by contrast, always doubles down on an error. When a dictator is in a hole he commands that other people should keep digging. The slogan of the Great Leap Forward – ‘the spirit of the Foolish Old Man is the spirit that will transform China’ – turned out to be grimly true.

  China is no longer the tyranny it was under Mao, though it is a long way yet from a free society. The authoritarian Chinese state lacks Mao’s sadistic capacity for violence but it retains his capacity for error on a grand scale. Where dissent is not permitted, authority does not hear the voices saying it might be in the wrong. China has already made a serious error because its leaders chose the wrong side in an old dispute about population. In 1795, in the midst of the revolutionary terror instigated by Robespierre, the Marquis de Condorcet used his enforced period of hiding to write a book called Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Human Mind. It is, to this day, one of the great accounts of the idea of human progress. Condorcet argued that social evils were the result of ignorance. He eschewed belief in a utopian end-state, writing that human history was a permanent state of adaptation. The book inspired Thomas Malthus to write An Essay on the Principle of Population, which he published in 1798. Malthus infamously argued that the world could not cope with population growth were it not for periodic natural disasters and social catastrophes such as famine. Condorcet thought human societies were flexible enough to adapt; Malthus thought population growth would bring disaster.