I found this horrific post on Michael Berube’s blog. It concerns deaf-mutes in Mao’s China. They are robbed of their speech until the “Mao Zedong Thought Medical Team” brings Mao’s thoughts on health care to them.
//www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4U_acIJesI
“Who has made them deaf-mutes?” the narrator asks at 1:14. You might be thinking, “They’re deaf by nature,” or “They had an accident when they were young,” but you would be wrong. “It was the scab and traitor Liu Shaoqi.”
Note: Liu Shaoqi was was Chairman of the People’s Republic of China before the Cultural Revolution.
He fell out of favour in the later 1960s during the Cultural Revolution because of his perceived ‘right-wing’ viewpoints and, it is theorised, because Mao viewed Liu as a threat to his power. He disappeared from public life in 1968 and was labelled China’s premier ‘Capitalist-roader’ and a traitor. He died under harsh treatment in late 1969…. (Wikipedia)
“So why can’t they speak?” the narrator asks at 1:45. “To answer this question, the team studies Mao’s brilliant essays “On Practice” and “On Contradiction.” “On Practice” has nothing that I can see about deaf mutes. Instead, is an essay devoted to the relation of praxis and theoretical knowledge. It ends with these grand words:
In the present epoch of the development of society, the responsibility of correctly knowing and changing the world has been placed by history upon the shoulders of the proletariat and its party. This process, the practice of changing the world, which is determined in accordance with scientific knowledge, has already reached a historic moment in the world and in China, a great moment unprecedented in human history, that is, the moment for completely banishing darkness from the world and from China and for changing the world into a world of light such as never previously existed.
After careful reading of Chairman Mao’s work, these “ordinary citizens- -“there are no doctors or specialists among them,” the narrator recounts- -begin their cure; and all 105 deaf-mutes are cured!
Of course, “the deeply oppressed deaf-mute’s cannot suppress their rage” (3.56), and “All their anger is focused on Liu Shaoqi” (as it should be; what good would it do them to focus their anger on God, nature, or arbitrary illness?). “He is the deadly enemy of working people and deaf-mutes!” they cry in unison (4:15).
The narrator says it is “a miracle on earth created by Mao Zedong Thought” (5:30).
Thought you’d want to know.