Cultural Amnesia (70 page)

Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought
contend.

—MAO ZEDONG, APRIL 1956, AS
QUOTED BY PHILIP SHORT IN
Mao
, P. 455

T
HE PRETTY
RUBRIC
looks so harmless even today, now that we have some idea of what it cost. Halfway between a poem and a slogan, it is a small thought that would fit on a big T-shirt. It
doesn’t even sound wrong. Mao designed it to sound right. For the trick to work, millions of people had to believe the words meant what they said, even though the Party, within long memory,
had never rewarded a contentious voice with anything except torture and death. Anyway, the suckers fell for it. The flowers bloomed, the schools of thought contended, and Mao’s executioners
went to work. The slogan had the same function as the Constitution of the Soviet Union, which Aleksandr Zinoviev tellingly defined as a document published in order to find out who agreed with it,
so that they could be dealt with.

The hideous outcome of the Hundred Flowers campaign is described in Philip Short’s book about Mao,
a political biography from whose long march of horror no student should excuse himself a single step. You can get the essence of Jung Chang’s
Wild
Swans
in a few chapters, although you owe it to yourself and the author to read the whole thing. But Short’s book has no essence; or, rather, it is all essence; you need to ponder
the whole lot. For one thing, Mao was not the same man in the beginning as he was later on. Hitler and Stalin both were: in the early days, all they lacked of their later, epidemic awfulness was
the power to exercise it. But Mao, who ended by killing a greater number of innocent people than both of them put together, started off as a benevolent intellectual: a fact which should concern
us if we pretend to be one of those ourselves. Mao was no Marxist when he began. He scarcely could have been: Marx was not translated into Chinese until
1918, and Mao had no
foreign languages. Nor, it seems, did he have a violent streak. He seems to have believed in a sort of peaceful anarchism. When he took up communism, he was the first Communist leader to break
out of the orthodox view about the revolution depending on the urban proletariat. He saw the importance of the peasants, and in 1927 published a thoughtful document on the subject,
Report on the Peasant Movement in Hunan
. When the fighting started, he made his troops behave well, apparently in the belief that a measure of decency would earn credit
for the movement.

His first attack on his own Party members did not occur until 1931–1932, by which stage Stalin was
exterminating whole populations. Mao was a long while cranking himself up to anything on that scale, but when he really got going he kept up the tempo. The Hundred Flowers campaign was rare only
in that it depended on a trick. At all other times, the state just went steaming on with its permanent purge. It didn’t need trick questions, because nothing a potential victim thought of
saying could possibly be of any use anyway. At the time of the Cultural Revolution, when Liu Shaoqi published his
How to Be a Good Communist
, it was greeted
as “a big anti-Marxist-Leninist and anti-Mao-Zedong-Thought poisonous weed.” No good Communist could be good enough. Liu was sixty-seven years old when he was driven to his death by
the Cultural Revolution, after a dedicated lifetime of carrying out Mao’s homicidal orders to the letter. All this was happening while some of my fellow undergraduates in Cambridge were
under the impression that Western values were being challenged by whatever was happening in China. They were indeed, and I, for one, had sufficient suspicion of absolute power to guess in what
way: but I nowhere near guessed the full horror of the reality. The only explanation is that Mao had even less imagination than we did in the matter of fatalities occurring among Chinese. There
are so many of them, so how much does it matter when a few hundred thousand of them go missing?

Perhaps our best hope of understanding what was going on in his mind is to suppose that it was a version of what goes on
in ours. Old men continue in their sins because to stop would be to admit them. But to concentrate on Mao’s late-flowering monstrosity is surely a misleading emphasis. His early-flowering
humanitarianism is a much more
useful field of study. When it became clear that there were no democratic means by which it could attain its object, he started thinking about
the undemocratic means. The message seems to be that when the possibility of critical discussion is withdrawn, anything can happen, and everything is altered. Among the things altered is logic
itself. As Swift foretold and Orwell analysed in detail, totalitarian obsession distorts the logical element within language, cancelling and even reversing its power to specify. Towards the end
of Mao’s reign, when there was—as there had to be by then, with the whole country in ruins—yet another version of a Leninist New Economic Policy, it was once again discovered
that “small scale production engenders capitalism.” Any moves towards rehabilitating the unjustly condemned were attacked as a “right deviationist wind of reversing correct
verdicts.” Correcting reversed verdicts would have been more like it. When Zhou Enlai died, there was true grief: at least he had not been insane. When Mao died, the grief was mainly
feigned, except among the young, who knew nothing. It needs to be remembered, however, that to have some idea of what had gone on it was not enough to be older, and to have survived. One needed
information, and Mao had so organized his colossal abattoir of a state that information rarely travelled further than a scream could be heard. But that was inside China. Outside China, the story
went everywhere, and there was never any excuse for not hearing it. The idea that there was is part of the lie—the part fated, it seems, to last longest.

CHRIS MARKER

The name Chris Marker (b. 1921) is a fiction. His real name was Christian François
Bouche-Villeneuve but he preferred to operate under a false identity. Fiction and falsity, by some alchemy never fully explained, conferred on him, according to his many admirers, a greater
power to handle his raw material, which was made up of fact and truth. It was a tribute to his talent that this absurd proposition looked quite plausible when you saw his first documentaries
on screen. (Some commentators prefer to call a Marker movie an “essay,” but they are perhaps too influenced by their memories of when the word “documentary” meant box
office death.)
Cuba Si!
(1961) was especially effective. Framed closely in black and white, the Bearded Ones looked wedded to authenticity. Marker
struck foreign observers as being by far the best mind of the movement that became internationally famous as the
nouvelle vague.
Admittedly the
competition wasn’t strong. From the political angle, Jean-Luc Godard was an obvious featherbrain, and François Truffaut had more sense than to make any overt political statements
beyond the usual ones about alienation:
The 400 Blows
incited rebellious youths to become film directors, not to revolution. Later in the decade, when
the Paris
événements
were making world news, Marker came readily to mind as one of the serious voices that prepared
the way. Even those of us who suspected that his Marxist world view was as frivolous as everybody else’s were impressed by his tone of voice, most notably rich and confident in his
must-see movie
Letter from Siberia
(1957). His documentaries
sounded
great. They therefore had a big influence on
some of the young writers who would later earn a crust in British television. When I was a TV critic in the 1970s I tried to point out, armed by my memories of how Marker had bewitched me,
that the filmed documentary was a blunt instrument. Later on, when I was filming documentaries of my own, I took care to disclaim, by making my commentary as self-deprecating as possible, the
apparent omniscience that the written voice-over automatically conferred.

Today, documentaries win red-carpet coverage. Almost always, for good reasons, the documentaries that make the biggest
noise stem from the left. Usually they lack Marker’s spare, literate elegance, but what they inherit from him is his loose relationship with the truth. Even when filmed on the spot,
with real people really suffering, the atmospherics tend to the specious and the arguments to the fraudulent. “Actual” hardly ever means factual. Michael Moore’s
documentaries are conspicuous examples of these failings. In
Bowling for Columbine
there is a scene in which he inveighs against U.S. planes taking off.
He brands their mission as imperialist. But the planes in the footage were taking off for Kosovo, where they saved the lives of thousands of Muslims who would otherwise have been murdered. So
that particular stretch of Moore’s supposedly factual documentary is saying the opposite of what is true. The big difference between Moore and the founding father of his art-form in
modern times, Chris Marker, is that Moore must know that he is telling an untruth. When Moore says that the poor of the world could have clean water overnight if the advanced nations agreed
to it, he must know that he is talking nonsense. Marker really did believe that there was a collectivist answer to the troubles of the world.
He was the post-war French
gauchiste
artist-intellectual in a pure form, with the ingenuous version of Sartre’s disingenuousness. By the time Marker became well-known, in
the early 1960s, the bulk of his most vital work was already behind him. Whether or not Vietnam broke his heart, it certainly cramped his style. Later still, as his dreams retreated, he faded
away into guru status.
La Jetée
(1962), a film composed almost exclusively of stills from which everything is absent including him, was really a
premature epitaph, although the lasting strength of his influence demands that attention should be paid to his later showpiece
Sans soleil
(1982), a
brave attempt at the synthetic work that gets everything in. Such a mind-scrambling attempt to say everything at once was a powerful hint that he was really born for the Internet, but had
arrived in the world of universal information a few decades too early. Many of us who were floored by his first brilliant works, however, never really got over them.