Uyghur Muslims
and other minorities in China’s western province of Xinjiang are being detained
in huge internment camps. Estimates
range from the hundreds of thousands to 3 million, the latter figure coming
from the U.S. State Department.[1] More recently, the BBC reports (with the aid of satellite images) that numbers
of mosques are being demolished, and that children are being separated from
their parents en masse in an effort
to re-educate them (thereby re-engineering humanity apart from the family unit)
by means of giant boarding schools.
There are no other words for this than cultural genocide.
For China
and the Communist Party, which is officially atheist, this is part of (as Marx
would have it, see below) the “permanent revolution” since revived following
Xi’s ascension to uninterrupted power. We
see it in Xi’s other activities vis-à-vis China’s Extradition Treaty with Hong
Kong and in the not infrequent threats to Taiwan, considered a rogue province
representing the ‘unfinished revolution’.
The persecution of Christians in China following Mao’s victory in 1949
has also been a core interest as the Communist Party asserted its totalitarian power
over “western influence” in the forms of freedom of conscience and the
closely-linked (but insidious) freedom of association.[2]
Below are
several selections from Marx’s “On the Jewish Question”. Ethnically Jewish, Marx is famous for his
depiction of religion as “the opium of the people”.[3]
Historically, he derived much
inspiration from the example of Jacobin dechristianization during of the French
Revolution when an atheist “Cult of Reason” replaced Catholicism, and when –
among other things - the 12-month calendar was abolished, only to be replaced
by a more ‘rational’ system. This all
ended with Robespierre himself at the guillotine on the Ninth of Thermidor (27
July 1794). The paratotalitarianism of
the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, as discussed here by Marx, still
serves as a model for Xi and the Communist Party of China, particularly in
regards to religion – and today’s Uyghurs.[4]
The decomposition of man into Jew, protestant
and citizen, religious man and citizen, this decomposition is no trick played
upon political citizenship, no avoidance of political emancipation. It is political emancipation itself, the
political manner of emancipating oneself from religion Of course, in times when the political state
is born violently as such out of civil society, when man’s self-liberation
tries to complete itself in the form of political self-liberation, the state
must go as far as abolishing, destroying religion, but only in the same way as
it goes as far as abolishing private property, at the most, by declaring a
maximum, by confiscation or a progressive tax, or in the same way as it
abolishes life, by the guillotine. In
moments of particular self-consciousness political life tries to suppress its man. However, this is only possible through violent
opposition to its own contradictions, by declaring the revolution to be
permanent. The political drama therefore
ends necessarily with the restoration of religion, private property, and all
the elements of civil society, just as war ends with peace.[5]
….
The abstraction of the political man is thus
correctly described by Rousseau: ‘He who dares to undertake the making of a
people’s institutions ought to feel himself capable, so to speak, of changing
human nature, of transforming each individual, who is by himself a complete and
solitary whole, into part of a greater whole from which he in a manner receives
his life and being; of altering man’s constitution for the purpose of
strengthening it; and of substituting a partial and moral existence of the physical
and independent existence nature has conferred on us all. He must, in a word, take away from man his
own resources and give him instead new ones alien to him, and incapable of
being made use of without the help of other men.’[6] ….
The actual individual man must take the
abstract citizen back into himself and, as an individual man in his empirical
life, in his individual work and individual relationships become a species
being, man must recognize his own forces as social forces, organize them, and thus
no longer separate social forces from himself in the form of political
forces. Only when this has been achieved
will human nature be complete.[7] ….
…. And the question is no longer: which gives
freedom, Judaism or Christianity? It is
rather the reverse: which gives more freedom: the negation of Judaism or the
negation of Christianity.[8]
[1]
See Charles Burton, “How Xi trumped Trump at the G20 summit,” The Globe and Mail, Monday July 1, 2019,
p. A11.
[2]
See the fascinating accounts by exiled dissident Liao Yiwu, God is Red: The Secret Story of How Christianity Survived and
Flourished in Communist China (New York: HarperCollins, 2011).
[3]
Karl Marx, “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy
of Right: Introduction” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed., David McClellan (Oxford
University Press, 1982), p. 64.
[4]
See Pierre Manent’s philosophical discussion of Jacobinism and Marx’s “On the
Jewish Question” in Pierre Manent, Modern
Liberty and Its Discontents, ed. and tr. Daniel J. Mahoney and Paul Sexton
(Toronto: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), pp. 129-133.
[5] Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question”
in Selected Writings, p. 47. Note: this work was printed in Hong Kong.
[6] Ibid., pp. 56,57. See “The Legislator” in Rousseau’s The Social Contract, Book 2, Chapter
7. The original translation is by
G.D.H.Cole. Cf. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, tr.
G.D.H. Cole, revised J.H. Brumfitt and John G. Hall (New York: Dutton/Everyman’s
Library, 1973), p. 194.
[7] Karl Marx, Selected Writings, p. 57.
[8] Karl Marx, “The Capacity of
Present-Day Jews and Christians to become Free” in Selected Writings, p. 57.
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