Written by: Nick G. on 21 December 2024
(Above: Norman Bethune operating in the wounded in a field hospital in China.)
December 21 is the anniversary of Mao Zedong’s statement In Memory of Norman Bethune.
It was written in 1939 after the Canadian doctor who had gone to China to treat soldiers wounded in the War of Resistance Against Japan, died of blood poisoning contracted from the wounds of a Communist Eighth Route Army soldier whom he had been treating.
Bethune was born in 1890. He began medical studies, but suspended them to work as a stretcher-bearer in France during WW1. He received a shrapnel wound in the Second Battle of Ypres, then completed his medical studies in 1916.
Bethune specialised in thoracic surgery and developed or modified more than a dozen new surgical tools.
During the Depression, he became convinced of the links between the poor health of working people and the economic system of capitalism. He advocated socialised medicine and travelled to the Soviet Union to study its system of universal free health care. He joined the Communist Party of Canada in 1935.
Towards the end of 1936, Bethune went to Spain and offered his services to the forces supporting the Republican government. To better provide for the wounded anti-fascists, he developed a mobile blood transfusion service to take bottles of donated blood to the wounded.
Returning to Canada, Bethune agreed to go to China. In January 1938, he arrived in Yan’an where he met Chairman Mao. He spent the best part of the next two years on the battlefield, treating Communist soldiers and their wounded Japanese enemies alike.
Chairman Mao’s eulogy for Bethune spoke of his personifying the spirit of Communism. He praised “his utter devotion to others without any thought of self”, and said that his “spirit of internationalism, the spirit of communism,” was “our internationalism, the internationalism with which we oppose both narrow nationalism and narrow patriotism.”
Mao used Bethune’s example to call on his followers to overcome bad habits born of the old society. “Every Communist must learn from him. There are not a few people who are irresponsible in their work, preferring the light and shirking the heavy, passing the burdensome tasks on to others and choosing the easy ones for themselves. At every turn they think of themselves before others. When they make some small contribution, they swell with pride and brag about it for fear that others will not know. They feel no warmth towards comrades and the people but are cold, indifferent and apathetic. In truth such people are not Communists, or at least cannot be counted as devoted Communists.”
If the example of Bethune was an inspiration during the War of Resistance Against Japan, its importance was in no way diminished during the period of China’s socialist construction.
It was placed together with two other writings, Serve the People and The Foolish old Man Who Moved the Mountains and published at the start of the Cultural Revolution under the heading “The Three Constantly Read Articles”.
Chairman Mao knew that it was one thing to bring the old society to an end, and an altogether different thing to build a new and different society. It required the adaptation and development of the spirit of Communism from the pre-revolutionary, to the post-revolutionary situation.
That meant overcoming the old ideas, old habits and old customs inherited from the past and revolutionising people’s thinking in accordance with the requirements of advancing along the socialist road.
If people’s thinking had been revolutionised to carry out Liberation, it needed to be further revolutionised and carried to each new stage of the elimination of classes and the replacement of bourgeois individualism with proletarian collectivism.
The Cultural Revolution aimed at nothing less than the complete transformation of people’s world outlook. Without this change, without restricting the bourgeois right brought into the new world from the old, there would inevitably be a change in direction and the socialist road would succumb to the capitalist road, socialism would be abandoned and capitalism restored.
The “three constantly read articles” were promoted to support the socialist slogan “Fight self, repudiate revisionism”. This linked the survivals of feudal and capitalist thinking to the emergence of policies designed to destroy confidence in socialism and promote the reversion to capitalist economic and political methods.
The essence of the slogan “Fight self, repudiate revisionism” was the struggle between the proletarian and bourgeois world outlooks representing the concept of working for the public interest as against the concept of working for one’s own interest.
The betrayal of Chairman Mao’s revolutionary line by Deng Xiaoping and others confirms Mao Zedong’s warnings about the failure to restrict bourgeois right and the consequences of adopting policies that expanded bourgeois right.
Today’s China is both capitalist and social-imperialist. It has not officially discarded socialism, and hides its capitalist restoration behind the nonsense of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and practices imperialism in competition with the US and its imperialist bloc.
Regrettably, some on the Left in Australia are enamoured of the “characteristics” fig-leaf.
Within progressive circles there are not a few who praise China’s opposition to US hegemony, failing to see the imperialist motivation of China in doing so.
For our part, we will work to prevent US preparations for war against China whilst upholding an anti-imperialist line of opposing all imperialism.
We will constantly read the “three constantly read articles” to remould our own world outlook and develop the spirit of Communism with our own ranks.
