Pierre Rigoulot is a Doctor of the Institute of Social History. Last published work:
Hot spots of the cold war (1945-1980)
, ed.
L'Archipel, Paris 2019.
They were a few in this year 2020 to stand up against the official Chinese discourse and, with supporting facts and testimonies, to show the weaknesses of propaganda, its exaggerations, its minimizations and its evasions.
Most recently, in late December, Zhang Zhan, a 37-year-old lawyer, who traveled to Wuhan in February to investigate the Covid-19 epidemic there, was sentenced to four years in prison for "
provoking troubles
”.
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His criticisms of the Chinese Communist state, its delays in alerting the whole world, its intimidation and threats, no doubt count a lot in its heavy condemnation.
But it was not only, in the eyes of power, to punish someone who damaged their image.
It was a question of punishing a woman who brought to light the false nature of the speech made by the Party, and finally exposed the Great secret of the communist speech: its essentially false nature.
It was not only a question of claiming the right for everyone to freely seek the origin of Covid 19 and to judge the way in which the Chinese state had communicated about this nascent epidemic.
Nor was it a question of who could investigate in China or what about freedom of expression in that country.
No one asked maliciously if Covid 19 would not be too sensitive a subject, like the repression of the Uighurs, like that of the Tibetans or the Mongols.
We know what to expect in a country like present-day China, even if its citizens can enter and leave the country and do business with the party's back on their necks.
We are, with communism, in a system where the only source of truth is the Party.
The conviction of an objective witness can be seen elsewhere, under the domination of a dictator or a junta - military or not - who arbitrarily decide what they can hear and what they cannot hear.
And undoubtedly there is also a share of personal responsibility of the Chinese n ° 1 Xi Jinping in the decision taken to reduce to “
harmful rumors
” what was the fruit of a serious investigation.
But lying in Communist China is much more than that.
It is not the work of a man, of a leader eager to impose his image, his personal style a little imperial and to establish a reputation for intransigence.
The lie is not the prerogative of the n ° 1 in search of legitimacy.
Mao was lying.
And Liu shao shi, his unfortunate opponent during the Cultural Revolution was also lying.
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In a communist country, lies are everywhere.
How to explain it?
This is the question posed by the handful of whistleblowers alongside Ms. Zhang Zhan.
A very serious question which has nothing to do with a controversial and pressing questioning: would not the lie be at the heart of the Chinese Communist Party as of any Communist Party?
First observation: we are, with communism, in a system where the only source of truth is the Party.
This chases away any dissenting thought, any source of alternative or corrective discourse with legitimate claims.
There could be no other in a communist regime.
Outside the Party, there is no salvation, in any case no true speech.
Outside the party, foreign influence rages, the nostalgic sighs of the bourgeoisie, reactionary regrets and sometimes the impatience of leftism.
No value to respect for dialectical materialism.
It is enough to facilitate the inevitable evolution towards communism
Second observation: if the Party - and its leader, that goes without saying - dispenses with correct conceptions and applies them appropriately, it is because it echoes Marxism-Leninism, a doctrine which claims to be scientific.
Need we recall that Marx believed he had identified the laws of human evolution in the same way that Darwin, to whom he dedicated his
Capital
, had found the laws of the evolution of species?
Under such conditions, law, truth, morality are little more than ideological vapors.
Is moral, Lenin loved to repeat, this is what serves the Revolution.
No value to respect for dialectical materialism.
It suffices to facilitate the inevitable evolution towards communism.
The Party simply sweeps aside human, institutional and cultural obstacles.
The bullets in the back of the neck, the prisons and the camps are there for that.
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We should probably not disappoint the naive too much, and they were numerous as far as France, who believed that communism aimed for Good, Happiness, Social Justice or Equality.
Marx, for his part, confided to his friend Engels, after having drafted a text on the principles of the International, that he had indeed been obliged to mention "
Justice
" and "
liberty
", in short, values, but that 'he had made sure they didn't do too much damage!
This inevitability of the movement towards communism - third observation - needs violence (proletarian, of course, even popular).
This is the béaba of the Communist Manifesto and in order not to worry too much the
ingenuous
"
masses
" who hope for the realization of a better world, we must mask this usual, normal, desirable violence, so as not to contradict the pretty speeches on the world. best to come.
Solzhenitsyn understood this well and in his “
Stockholm speech
”, he stressed that violence finds its refuge in lies, and that lies find its support in violence.
Any man who chooses violence as a means must inexorably choose lying as a rule.
These same human rights defenders are wrong to think that with a communist regime, things could be otherwise
Human rights defenders like the NGO Human Rights Watch were therefore right to point out that Mainland China, despite its ordinary cynicism, was lying and concealing at the end of December, since it chose to violently strike a woman who sought the truth, the "
sleepy period between Christmas and New Year
" and made respectable legal guises.
But these same human rights defenders are wrong to think that with a communist regime, things could happen otherwise.
The "
truth
" itself is put there at the service of the Party!
We called "
socialist realism
", which characterized the dissemination of this good Word in Stalin's time, but we could keep this name today: it is still and always a question of saying "
what is
" in the light of this. that we
already
“
know
” the future of the world, that is to say the final victory of the communist world.
The lie is there, from the start, since the party's discourse consists of a so-called "
recognition
" in the world of data that it has already put there with its classes which must destroy themselves violently or its messianic conception of the proletariat. guided-by-his-party!
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The naive who believe that the truth arises from the confrontation between the assumptions formulated by free spirits and reality as well as by the dialogue with other researchers, are a hundred leagues from the communist vision.
This is "
true
" and whoever opposes it is moved by past or outdated interests.
It is therefore very systematically that the Party lies and that a speech made outside the Party comes down, as in the case of Ms. Zhang Zhan, to
condemnable
“
false rumors
”.