Communism

As part of the prep for China I read Quotations From Chairman Mao Tsetung (aka The Little Red Book) and The Communist Manifesto.

The Communist Manifesto is actually very short. Most of the version I have is preface, the actual manifesto is only 40 pages. It starts off with complaints about capitalism. The interesting part there is they are all the same complaints that people have now. I wonder if they are just the obvious fundamental issues or if people today are just repeating what Marx said. I actually read this a few months ago so I'm having trouble thinking of examples. It was interesting because at first I figured I was in the category of bourgeois as I am reasonably well off in a rich country, but as he described it I realized I'm really a proletarian. While all of his complaints are still discussed today, I agreed with some of them. However, as soon as he started describing his solution (communism) he lost me. Once he said put all power in the hands of the government I knew I was not going to be a big fan. A lot of the ideas seemed a bit arbitrary, although maybe that is just because it is a brief manifesto and a longer description would make more sense.

Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung is very different from the communist manifesto. This book is really a big collection of quotations. It is organized in chapters and the quotations are put in an order so that there is a somewhat constant flow of ideas within a chapter even though most quotations are a paragraph or two long. It actually says very little about the concept of communism and takes it as a given that Marxist-Leninist communism is the best form of government. A lot of the quotations are directly or indirectly about the army and war which makes some sense since he ran the country during a civil war and world war II. It was a bit weird reading it because a lot of what is said are really good ideas, but it becomes fairly clear that it is mostly propaganda and lies. There is a lot of talk about the important of criticism and listening to the people which doesn't exactly match the fact that I'm not sure which email accounts I'll have access to there since they block so many websites in order to keep people from seeing criticism of the country.

Well I'm headed off to Asia in a couple days. I'm not bringing a computer so I'm not sure exactly how I'll be communicating with people in the US. I may or may not blog much while I'm there. If not I'm sure when I get back you'll hear more than you ever wanted to know about my vacation.

For those that make it to the end of my posts - previously I said I was going to observe an implant. The patient had something come up so the procedure was rescheduled. So instead I got to spend the day at work in nice clothes explaining to everyone why I was dressed up. (I'm not irritated though - the patient had a good reason for having the procedure rescheduled).