- Why, after just over two years since the revisionist restoration in China, were the reactionary troops of the Chinese revisionists so brutal and merciless? Why, in invading Vietnam, were the Chinese troops able to inflict such cruelty on the Vietnamese people? How did these thugs and scum spring up like bamboo shoots after a rain after the restoration, and how did the Chinese
You can take a look at this post; it answers part of your question: 我的一些问题 - #17，来自 共和国之剑
I’m not very familiar with the specific situation in Vietnam right now, but you can refer to this website (a web translator is needed): https://vidanphucvu.wordpress.com/
You didn’t answer my question at all. I’m just curious why a whole bunch of rogues and bandits would suddenly pop up. The little screw only talked about the fact that rogues and bandits emerged and were absorbed into the army.
Also, when I click that big Send button, it won’t send.
Thanks, at least now I know that Vietnam completely went off the rails in 1986! And in 1981, the Vietnamese military wasn’t exactly full of decent people either.
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Which send button are you referring to? The one for replying to the post? I’m not really sure about that; maybe it’s a device issue. Are you using the Brave browser?
The fundamental reason, of course, is the change in the nature of the state power; as a component part of that state power, the army also began to serve as the counterrevolutionary lackey of the bourgeoisie and played a reactionary role. After the counterrevolutionary coup at the Huairen Hall, the capitalist roaders usurped military power, so in order to restore capitalism they had to turn the army into their counterrevolutionary army. After purging the revolutionary elements within the army, they began to re-establish a rigid hierarchy inside it, extolling commandism and the notion that oppression is justified, causing the socialist people’s army to gradually degenerate. In such circumstances, under the revisionist line, it was inevitable that the army would become detached from the people and serve the ruling class.
But this was only one fundamental reason, and it was not enough to make the people’s army suddenly degenerate into counterrevolutionary butchers in Vietnam in 1979. This issue should be viewed in this way: Deng Xiaoping’s invasion of Vietnam was precisely his venomous scheme to change the nature of the army. The invasion of Vietnam was not only because the Chinese revisionists wanted to pledge allegiance to U.S. imperialism, to prove that they were third-world traitors who could be exploited by U.S. imperialism, or because they were willing to wage war against the Vietnamese revisionists in order to preserve Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia; it was also meant to use this as a way to “temper” a counterrevolutionary army accustomed to suppressing the people.
Such a scheme was not without precedent; it had already occurred as early as the English bourgeois revolution. After the outbreak of the English bourgeois revolution, Cromwell used the power of the yeomanry to organize a highly combat-effective new-style army, the “New Model Army.” Relying on this revolutionary army, he defeated the king’s army controlled by the feudal landlord class and seized power in England. But after the revolution broke out, the English bourgeoisie he represented was unwilling to push the revolution forward; instead, in order to safeguard bourgeois interests, it sought to suppress the people and delayed issuing the various revolutionary decrees it had previously promised that would grant the people freedom and various rights. At that time, a revolutionary faction representing the interests of the common people (the yeomanry) emerged within the army, composed of lower-ranking officers and soldiers — the Levellers — demanding that the revolution be carried forward. Sharp contradictions arose between them and the bourgeois senior officers and commanders at the top of Cromwell’s New Model Army. In order to suppress the revolution, halt its advance, and set it on the road to reaction, Cromwell on the one hand carried out a sweeping purge of Leveller elements within the army and changed its composition; on the other hand, he sent this army, composed of peasants and long engaged in fighting for equality and democracy, to Ireland, where it served as the vanguard of the invasion of Ireland and as the executioner slaughtering the Irish people. The English bourgeoisie’s calculation was precisely to incite England’s revolutionary peasants and the oppressed people of Ireland to slaughter each other, while weakening both sides so that the English bourgeoisie could reap the benefits as a bystander: suppressing the revolution and occupying Ireland at the same time. More importantly, this kind of counterrevolutionary practice would also have an extremely bad influence on the soldiers in the army, habituating them to slaughtering the people, and in this kind of counterrevolutionary practice their worldview would change from progressive ideas seeking equality and democracy into reactionary ideas of greed and brutality, taking pride in plundering the people. Facts proved that this English bourgeoisie “remolding of thought” really did take effect: the soldiers of the New Model Army later one after another degenerated into bandits, and some of them even made huge fortunes by pillaging the Irish people, especially by seizing the land of the Irish people, becoming a new bourgeois and landlord class and thus forming the ruling foundation of the English bourgeoisie, strengthening both bourgeois dictatorship and colonial rule over Ireland. Regarding this historical lesson, Marx once revealed with deep meaning: “The English republic of Cromwell’s time was overthrown by Ireland. Never repeat the same mistake!” (“Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann (November 29, 1869)”, Volume 32 of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels, first Chinese edition).
Here, what the Chinese revisionist traitor clique played with was precisely the same method as the English bourgeoisie of the time. In order to accelerate the degeneration of the socialist army, they sent the people’s sons and daughters from worker-and-peasant backgrounds to the battlefield in Vietnam, forced them to slaughter the Vietnamese people, and used bloody counterrevolutionary practice to corrode the revolutionary ideas they had previously received during the socialist period, making them grow accustomed, from worldview to way of life, to getting something for nothing, to taking pleasure in slaughtering the people, and to being content to serve as counterrevolutionary lackeys. In this way, those units that participated in the invasion of Vietnam became, from top to bottom, even more counterrevolutionary in nature than the other armies under Chinese revisionist control at the time: extremely brutal and extremely hostile to the people. And precisely because the Chinese revisionists had such an army under their command, when the people rose up en masse in protest in 1989 and many units refused to suppress the people, they were still able to obtain the support of this army stained with Vietnamese blood. This army was then transferred to Beijing on Deng Xiaoping’s orders and, heedless of the pleas and cries of any citizens or students, brazenly opened fire on unarmed crowds, causing countless casualties and once again committing monstrous counterrevolutionary crimes!
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An article in People’s Daily during the socialist period, titled “A nation that oppresses other nations cannot be free — Rereading Marx and Engels’ writings on the Irish question”, mentioned this historical lesson from the British bourgeois revolution:
During the seventeenth-century English bourgeois revolution, a national uprising against Britain broke out in Ireland. The English bourgeoisie, represented by Cromwell, immediately sent the revolutionary army, made up mainly of Levellers and democrats (the Levellers reflected the demands of the urban and rural petty bourgeoisie, and they were very dissatisfied with the policies carried out by the bourgeois Long Parliament), to suppress the Irish people after defeating the king’s army. This was an extremely sinister criminal conspiracy by the English bourgeoisie (which was still in its revolutionary stage at the time!): to stir up national hatred and make the English revolutionary fighters, who demanded equality and democracy, slaughter one another with the Irish people, who demanded national equality and independence. As a result, the Irish people’s uprising was suppressed, the new nobles and financial magnates of England seized two-thirds of Ireland’s land, and that revolutionary army turned into a counterrevolutionary army. Since then, Ireland became the political stronghold of the English aristocracy-bourgeoisie. Based on this bloody historical lesson, Marx pointed out to the English proletariat: “The English Republic of Cromwell’s time was overthrown because of Ireland. Do not repeat the same mistake!”
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The general move of the Communist Party of Vietnam onto the revisionist road was around the time that, in 1975, under the leadership of the Communist Party of Vietnam, the Vietnamese people drove out the American aggressors and eliminated the puppet regime in South Vietnam; after that, a small handful of capitalist roaders within the CPV jumped out and attempted to openly restore capitalism, refusing to carry the democratic revolution forward, wanting to seize the fruits of revolutionary victory in order to serve their implementation of bourgeois dictatorship. This plot accelerated after the restoration of capitalism in China in 1976, and the invasion of Cambodia in accordance with the will of the Soviet revisionist masters was the mark of the CPV’s complete degeneration and transformation, and its open betrayal of the revolution. For details, please refer to the article “Vietnam: The Aborted Revolution”.
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Yes. For example, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, the Black Guards incited the so-called “bloodline theory” and directed the focus of struggle at the openly declared landlords and bourgeois elements in society, as well as the children of landlords and bourgeois families. Their purpose was to divert the main direction of the struggle and to try to shift the target of the Cultural Revolution away from the capitalist-roaders within the Party.
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But the other armies were also revisionist, so why didn’t the rest of the military support the crackdown and the massacre?
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And a lot of the soldiers who enlisted in ’77 and ’78 were thugs and scum, and there may even have been prisoners among them (my personal guess).
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Because, in the case of the other military forces in the Middle East, civilians had surrounded the troops at the time and begged them not to open fire, so the rank-and-file soldiers were unsettled and didn’t dare shoot directly. The generals above, meanwhile, were afraid that if they ordered fire and the liberals later came to power, they would be singled out as war criminals and made scapegoats for accountability; they were also afraid that once they gave the order to shoot, the lower-ranking soldiers would refuse to carry it out and mutiny. To protect themselves, they simply refused to give the order to open fire.
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If he didn’t open fire, he himself was removed from office and investigated by Deng’s clique.
What rhetoric did Japan and the Chinese revisionists use back then to make soldiers willing to do this?
Does being willing to do that mean massacring the masses? Back then, the PRC adopted an information blockade, cutting off their contact with the outside world before the bandit troops entered the city. Soldiers were not allowed to read the news or newspapers to learn the truth about the movement; they were only allowed to obey the propaganda and orders of the revisionist regime, which turned black into white and white into black.
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So the people’s soldiers were so easily able to go and “slaughter the Vietnamese people and one another,” “grow accustomed to getting something for nothing,” and “take pleasure in slaughtering the people”? Isn’t this a naked smear against workers, peasants, and soldiers? The workers, peasants, and soldiers of socialist China all underwent more than twenty years of class struggle. Were they the kind of people who could casually pick up a gun and kill for personal gain? The kind who would degenerate and change so easily?
If a buy-off policy could change people’s worldview that easily, then why would the traitorous clique of the Chinese revisionists even bother carrying out such a tense palace coup? Wouldn’t it be enough to just buy everyone off directly?
During the Russian Civil War, landlords and rich peasants lent out the grain that was scarce at the time to the poor peasants, so they could also experience the thrill of making a windfall. Did the poor peasants follow them then? No. Under the leadership of the poor peasants’ committees organized by the Bolsheviks, they drove the landlords and rich peasants out of the countryside. But when it comes to you, are the workers, peasants, and soldiers of socialist China so easily corrupted and transformed? Do they have no class standpoint at all?
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The problem with red_ich1 is where the Chinese revisionist regime recruited the thugs and scum it sent to invade Vietnam and slaughter the Vietnamese people. Luanma’s answer is that these thugs and scum came from the sons and daughters of workers, peasants, and soldiers who had degenerated and been corrupted—what kind of logic is that? Luanma talks abstractly about how the revolutionary forces within the army were all purged, while at the same time citing the English bourgeois revolution’s “New Model Army,” made up of yeomen, as evidence that it massacred the Irish people, in order to prove that the sons and daughters of workers, peasants, and soldiers would shoot and slaughter the people for personal enjoyment. Yeomen already wanted to get rich on their own, and besides, in the course of invading Ireland, the ones who actually got rich were not ordinary soldiers at all. Can an army of the proletariat be the same as an army made up of yeomen?
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Don’t Pin the Crimes of the Traitor Clique on the Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers — A Critique of the Garbled “Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers Can’t Be Trusted” Thesis
In its answer to this issue, Garbled mentioned, in part, the changes in the nature of the regime and the army, but its central argument is wrong and harmful.
It says that the counterrevolutionary clique sent soldiers from worker-peasant backgrounds to the war of aggression, and that after killing and plundering, these soldiers gradually grew accustomed to getting things without working for them, even came to enjoy slaughtering the people, and eventually became a counterrevolutionary army suppressing the people.
On the surface, this line of argument criticizes revisionism, but in reality it shifts the crimes of the revisionist traitor clique onto the workers, peasants, and soldiers. Its essence is this: once the leadership changes, the workers, peasants, and soldiers will change immediately too; just give them a bit of benefit and let them take part in a few counterrevolutionary actions, and they will abandon their class stand and turn into butchers of the people.
This is the traitor philosophy of “workers, peasants, and soldiers can’t be trusted.”
I. When an army degenerates, the first change is in the regime and leadership
An army is not something that exists independently, cut off from state power. Which class holds the army, what line it follows, and whose orders it obeys determine which class it mainly serves.
After capitalist restoration, the capitalist-roaders usurped state power and leadership over the army. They purged revolutionary cadres, struck at the forces that upheld the socialist road, restored a rigid hierarchy, strengthened command obedience, changed the army’s political education, cadre system, recruitment standards, and reward-and-punishment system, and gradually transformed the army into a violent tool for safeguarding the rule of the new bourgeoisie.
That is the root of the problem.
It was not that the workers, peasants, and soldiers suddenly all turned bad; it was that the state machinery was seized by the bourgeoisie. The counterrevolutionary clique used organizational power, command power, and coercive force to turn part of the troops into tools for aggression and for suppressing the people.
Garbled begins by acknowledging that the nature of state power changed, but later on it sets this root cause aside and instead goes on at length about how children of workers and peasants supposedly rapidly became corrupted in war. In effect, it plays down the betrayal of the leadership clique and exaggerates the responsibility of the workers, peasants, and soldiers.
II. “Being forced to kill” is not the same as “taking pleasure in killing”
On the one hand, Garbled says the soldiers were forced by the counterrevolutionary clique to take part in the war of aggression; on the other hand, it says that after going through this practice, they quickly came to crave getting things without working and to take pleasure in slaughtering the people.
There is a huge leap in reasoning here.
A soldier who, under orders, deception, blockade, military law, and hierarchical oppression, carried out a reactionary task does not thereby mean to say that he subjectively approved of the war, much less that he took pleasure in it.
There may be many concrete reasons why a reactionary army can carry out reactionary orders:
upper-level officers and backbone personnel have already been replaced;
soldiers are subjected to strict information blockade and deceptive propaganda;
there are orders, punishments, and threats of death within the army;
troops are isolated from the masses and cannot learn the truth;
a few reactionary backbone elements monitor and coerce the majority of ordinary soldiers;
those who truly dare to resist have already been purged, transferred, or suppressed.
All of this must be investigated concretely.
Garbled provides no evidence to prove how ordinary workers’ and peasants’ soldiers, after being forced to carry out orders, became people who “took pleasure in slaughtering the people,” yet it directly assigns them this reactionary psychology. That is not historical analysis; it is outright slander against workers, peasants, and soldiers.
III. Counterrevolutionary practice can corrode people, but that does not mean workers, peasants, and soldiers have no class stand
People do change through practice, and counterrevolutionary practice can of course corrode some people. A few people from worker-peasant backgrounds may betray the revolution, seek promotion and wealth, and become lackeys of the bourgeoisie.
Marxism has never denied this possibility.
But acknowledging that some people may degenerate is completely different from preaching that the broad masses of workers, peasants, and soldiers can easily degenerate as a whole.
The class stand of workers, peasants, and soldiers does not fall from the sky, nor is it just a slogan. It comes from their real position in the relations of production, from the long-term exploitation and oppression they have suffered, and from education in socialist revolution and class struggle.
This stand may be disturbed and may waver, but it does not simply disappear in an orderly fashion because of a single order from above, one war, or a little material inducement.
If workers, peasants, and soldiers were really this unreliable, if the practice of more than twenty years of socialist revolution and class struggle had no effect at all, then why would the capitalist-roaders need to stage a coup? Why purge revolutionary cadres? Why blockade information? Why restore a hierarchy? Why use state machinery to suppress the masses?
The very fact that they had to adopt these measures shows precisely that the broad masses of workers, peasants, and soldiers did not automatically follow them.
IV. Garbled’s analogy with Cromwell’s army erases the class nature of different armies
Garbled uses the history of Cromwell’s New Model Army invading Ireland during the British bourgeois revolution to explain why the army of socialist China would degenerate.
This analogy is mechanical.
Cromwell’s army emerged during the bourgeois revolution, and its main social base included independent small farmers, artisans, and petty-bourgeois masses. It opposed feudal monarchy, but it was not a people’s army led by the proletariat and transformed through socialist revolution.
Independent small farmers inherently had demands for obtaining land, expanding private property, and making personal fortunes. Under bourgeois leadership, their revolutionary character and their private-owner tendencies existed at the same time. The English bourgeoisie’s use, division, and transformation of this army had its own specific class basis.
The workers’ and peasants’ soldiers of socialist China, by contrast, were established under proletarian leadership and had gone through the land revolution, the War of Resistance Against Japan, the War of Liberation, socialist transformation, and long-term education in class struggle.
The two armies differed in leading class, ownership basis, political tradition, and the experiences of their soldiers.
Garbled only sees that both once took part in revolution and later were used by the ruling class for aggression, and then declares that both followed the same path of degeneration. That is not making a concrete analysis of a concrete problem; it is forcing a historical anecdote into a mechanical mold.
V. This view turns the traitors’ responsibility into the masses’ shortcomings
After a counterrevolutionary clique seizes power, what does it most need to conceal?
Its own betrayal.
It will say that the masses were always only concerned with personal interests, that workers, peasants, and soldiers never had firm convictions, that the people’s army was always bound to rot, and therefore that capitalist restoration was inevitable.
Although Garbled verbally opposes revisionism, its explanation is actually helping this traitor philosophy.
According to its account, after restoration, the army quickly became a counterrevolutionary army mainly because workers, peasants, and soldiers were easily corrupted by killing and plunder. In this way, the capitalist-roaders’ usurpation of leadership, purge of revolutionary forces, and transformation of the state machinery are pushed into the background.
The traitor clique will say: it was not we who betrayed the workers, peasants, and soldiers; it was the workers, peasants, and soldiers who could not stand the test.
That is a reversal of responsibility.
VI. The “workers, peasants, and soldiers can’t be trusted” thesis inevitably leads to rule by a minority elite over the masses
If the broad masses of workers, peasants, and soldiers do not have a firm class stand and are easily bought off, deceived, and corrupted, then whom can the revolution rely on?
In the end, it can only rely on a small number of people who claim to be the most knowledgeable, the most enlightened, and the least likely to degenerate.
In this way, the masses are no longer the masters of history, but merely material manipulated by a minority. The masses can be led to revolution today by revolutionary leaders, and tomorrow be led to counterrevolution by revisionist bosses. They have no judgment of their own and no fighting capacity.
This is the same ideological root as Garbled’s earlier view of the majority of the masses as wavering “intermediate figures”: it does not believe in the masses, only in a few individuals; it does not believe that workers, peasants, and soldiers can form and maintain a class stand through struggle, and instead treats the masses as objects to be handled at will.
This is not the Marxist mass line, but a petty-bourgeois view of history centered on heroes.
VII. A correct analysis must neither idolize workers, peasants, and soldiers nor slander them as grass that bends with the wind
Criticizing Garbled’s view does not mean saying that workers, peasants, and soldiers are always right, or that anyone from a worker-peasant background will never betray the revolution.
Within the masses there are advanced, intermediate, and backward sections. Workers, peasants, and soldiers are also affected by bourgeois ideology, hierarchy, and personal interests. Some will waver, some will surrender, and some will become backbone elements of counterrevolution.
The issue is how this differentiation should be explained.
Marxism requires analyzing:
which revolutionary forces were purged;
which reactionary elements were promoted;
how the composition of cadres and soldiers changed;
what orders and propaganda the troops received;
how the state machinery carried out deception and coercion;
how the masses were isolated from the army;
who resisted, who hesitated, and who carried out the orders;
what changes took place in different people’s class positions and real interests.
Only in this way can one explain how a people’s army was seized and transformed by a counterrevolutionary clique.
You cannot simply say “counterrevolutionary practice changed the worldview” and leave out all the complex issues, much less describe the crimes of part of the reactionary troops as the result of workers’ and peasants’ children quickly falling in love with slaughter.
The masses are not saints who can never make mistakes, but neither are they grass that falls with one bribe and walks away with one deception.
VIII. What Garbled really needs to correct is its basic attitude toward the masses
The problem with Garbled this time is not only a lack of factual material, and not only inaccurate analogy, but a problem with its stand.
It sees the crimes of the counterrevolutionary army and first suspects not how the capitalist-roaders usurped and transformed state machinery, but why workers, peasants, and soldiers could be so easily corrupted.
It sees the masses carrying out wrong orders under counterrevolutionary rule, and instead of examining what kind of control, deception, and coercion they were under, it directly describes them as people who crave enjoyment and take pleasure in slaughter.
This way of looking at things shows that it fundamentally does not believe in the masses.
A true Marxist should first stand on the side of the workers, peasants, and soldiers, analyze how counterrevolutionary rule oppresses, deceives, divides, and uses them, and at the same time expose the role of the few traitors, labor traitors, and reactionary backbone elements within it.
One must not stand above the masses and, using an intellectual’s imagination, declare that the masses are easily corrupted.
Conclusion
Garbled’s answer correctly mentions the change in the nature of state power and leadership over the army, yet then overturns its own class analysis with the claim that “workers, peasants, and soldiers rapidly degenerated in counterrevolutionary practice.”
Its central idea, in the final analysis, is this:
workers, peasants, and soldiers have no firm stand;
socialist education has little effect;
the masses are easily bought off by interests;
once the counterrevolutionary leaders issue orders, the people’s army will quickly become a tool for slaughtering the people.
This is not Marxism, but the traitor philosophy of “workers, peasants, and soldiers can’t be trusted.”
A counterrevolutionary clique’s temporary control of state machinery does not mean it has won the genuine support of the broad masses of workers, peasants, and soldiers. The fact that a people’s army was seized by the bourgeoisie does not mean that workers, peasants, and soldiers are naturally willing to oppose the people.
What should be investigated is who usurped leadership, who purged revolutionary forces, who changed the class nature of the army, and who used state machinery to force and deceive soldiers into committing crimes.
The crimes of these traitors must not be pinned on the workers, peasants, and soldiers.
Trust the masses, rely on the masses, organize the masses, and at the same time carry out class struggle among the masses — that is the Marxist stand.
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