Several members of my wife's family were nabbed during China's rightist movement. They were tricked by Mao's urging for constructive criticism. When they offered opinions that they meant to be helpful, they were imprisoned, some for as long as twenty years.
Elsewhere on HN people have been criticized for what's been called a knee-jerk reaction to socialist ideas. But the history of socialism makes that reaction every bit as legitimate as the reaction to touching a hot stove.
The point that people are trying to argue here is that Marx himself felt that there was always bloody struggle to implement social change. There were several 'phases' of political change that he defines. I can't remember them all (last time I read this stuff was Philosophy 101, Feudalism was probably one of them), but currently we are on "Democracy/Capitalism". The next stage would be "Socialism" and then "Communism." He viewed transition between stages as only coming about through bloody revolution.
Side Note: While people like to say "Socialism == Communism", Marx viewed them as separate and distinct 'stages' of political/economic development.
Actually, in the original German, Marx used the words Socialism and Communism interchangeably in many of his writings. (Kommunismus and Sozialismus) It was Vladimir Ilyich Lenin who first differentiated between the two and started using socialism to refer to a transitional state between "lower" and "upper" Communism.
Of course, the socialism that most people refer to doesn't correlate with any correct definition (more closely "democratic socialism"), but what do we expect from the "unwashed masses". ;)
My grandpa was sent to labour camp merely for being a professor and having relations in Taiwan, he wasn't even very vocal about politics. My grandma avoided it by being on an expedition at the time. From their account, it didn't seem like that people were merely tricked into criticizing the state.
During the civil war, the communists has substantial support from the academics and intellectuals (think Spanish Civil War). This combined with successful economic policies during the early 50s made Mao overly confident of his support base.
At the time the Nationalists in Taiwan was still recognized as the legitimate government of China on the world stage, so Mao wanted some vocal support. To his surprise he opened the can and worms came out, which caused huge embarrassment, and he blamed it on rightist infiltration.
As a reaction he locked up "naysayers" and implemented radical ideological-based economic policies that ended up in disaster, so he stepped down for a few years. During the time his rival Liu Shaoqi became the chairman, who played with the idea of market economy and was warming up to the west.
This infuriated Mao as it implied his failure as a visionary, so he out-maneuvered Liu and launched the cultural revolution to manufacture support for his vision on a large scale. It helped him to maintain power til his death, but at the cost of running the country into the ground.
The Anti-Rightist Movement was a reaction against the Hundred Flowers Campaign, which had promoted pluralism of expression and criticism of the government. It is not clear whether the Hundred Flowers Campaign was a deliberate tactic to smoke out "rightists", or whether Mao simply decided that it had gone too far.
One would have a cached answer to a problem if the circumstances and question were identical, i.e. same function, same input. In normal conversation, these are almost never the same. In addition, language is faulty and ambiguous. As an astute reader, one has the responsibility to attempt to understand the argument in the full complexity of how it was meant, not just how it was said. To this end, there are very few identical answers to identical questions. Certain answers may be similar to answers given to similar questions in the past, but they should never be knee-jerk. Instead, they should be reasoned and polite with as much understanding as possible. Of course, everyone responds out of frustration at times, but this should never be held to be ideal.
Oliver Cromwell, who is generally regarded as the father of English Republicanism (bearing in mind that the English Parliament is the oldest in the modern world) also carried oppression of the Irish which today we would unhesitatingly class as genocidal.
My own wife's family hail from North Vietnam. Not particularly educated or politically opinionated, they nevertheless saw several off their family wiped out by what we'd today call 'collateral damage' - in this particular case, the family home had the bad luck to be within spitting distance of a factory, and got flattened by an American bomb.
Permit me a degree of skepticism about the moral purity of institutions we take for granted. though I'm neither a communist or a socialist, I don't see that being democratic and capitalist gives anyone a free pass to kill people.
Elsewhere on HN people have been criticized for what's been called a knee-jerk reaction to socialist ideas. But the history of socialism makes that reaction every bit as legitimate as the reaction to touching a hot stove.