further chronicles of nihilism

the closed and open fist

Zhang Xianzhong was born in Yan’an, Shaanxi Province in 1600, a waning year of the Ming Dynasty. Yan’an later became famous as the destination of the Long March, and the hiding place from which the Chinese Communist Party masterplanned their campaigns against the Japanese and their victory over the Kuomintang in the civil war which followed.

But that was over 330 years in the future. China at the time of Zhang’s birth was a dictatorship in an advanced state of decay. Styles of governance in China have been compared to closed and open fists. The Mings kept their fists tightly shut, running a highly centralized, proto-soviet administration with the emperor as the final arbiter of pretty much everything, amid a general atmosphere of radical suspicion. It was a Ming emperor who forbade the Admiral Cheng Ho – that’s Sinbad the sailor to you – from pursuing maritime trade and exploration, lest China be contaminated by new ideas.

Over time, the fist loosened. It was senility, rather than reform, that was at work. Successive emperors became the captors of various factions of eunuchs. Brutality persisted, but inefficiency in its application provided the space for rebels to operate. The great public works of irrigation and flood control by which a hydraulic empire demonstrates its legitimacy fell into disrepair. Natural disaster and famine stalked the land.

So did Zhang Xianzhong, a floating warlord and freelance rebel, known as the yellow tiger by his growing band of desperate followers, increasingly convinced that the mandate of heaven had fallen upon him.

In 1640, Zhang broke out of Shaanxi and stormed through Hubei to the Yangtze. Repelled once by Sichuanese troops loyal to the Ming, he regrouped and smashed his way through to the province at the head of a peasant army 100,000 strong.

By now, heaven had revealed to Zhang his true identity as the Great Western King. The scholars of Chengdu disagreed. Zhang summoned them to a “special examination”. His career then reached the apotheosis described by Andrew Sinclair in Anatomy of Terror:

Having destroyed the educated, Chang set about murdering the merchants, then the women, then the officials. Finally he gave orders that his own soldiers should slaughter each other. He ordered the feet of his officer’s wives to be cut off and to make a mound of them. On top of the pile he placed the feet of his favoured concubine. He tallied the ears and feet which his bodyguard hacked from the bodies of villagers from the remote districts, and her stated his reasons for annihilation on a stone tablet which he caused to be erected in his memory:

Heaven brought forth innumerable things to support man.
Man has not brought forth one thing to recompense heaven.
Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!

the seven kill stele

Later, after Zhang had been put to death by troops of the invading Manchus, the seven kill stele was bricked over, but thought too potent to destroy. A platoon of sturdy atheists from the People’s Liberation Army eventually blew the thing up in the late 1970’s.

Rumour has it that this was on the orders of Deng Xiaoping, a native of the countryside around Chengdu. Deng came from a Hakka family, one of thousands brought from the coastal regions of Northern Guangzhou by the Kangxi Emperor to repopulate the area after Zhang’s death.

What does all this have to do with recent atrocities? For a start, we have a post-Ming empire, formed, as was the Ming, in the name of the people. It emerges as a brutally repressive, chronically suspicious, highly centralized state whose rationale is the general welfare of the people.

Decay sets in. Change comes. Greeted as openness and reform, even by those who did not stand to profit directly from it, it turns out to be another stage of decay. The weak emperor Yeltsin is surrounded by scheming oligarchs. The kingdom goes straight from communism to plutocracy, without any interlude of capitalism. Bits fall off the edges of the empire, as within it, poverty spreads and life expectancy drops.

For Zhang Xianzhong, read Shamil Besaev, warlord of the Wahhabi faction of the Chechen guerillas. Zhang started out as a carpenter, and may have had some military training in locally organised anti-bandit militias. Besaev started out as a computer repairman, before fighting under Russian command in Abkhazia in the early 1990’s against Georgian troops.

Later, Besaev turned against the empire. At first it was replaced in his loyalties by his native Chechnya. Then his vision expanded to encompass a united federation of Caucasian Peoples. Not especially religious as a young man, it seemed now that as his power grew that it came from God. Wahhabism enabled God to speak to him more clearly; and the voice in his head proclaimed him the Great Southern King, the military commander of the Caucasian Islamic Emirates, the scourge of unbelievers and their children. For what has mankind brought forth to recompense heaven?

Zhang and Besaev were and are nihilists born out of the rot of empire. The question, at least as far as the empire's new emperor is concerned, is now whether you can end the nihilism without restoring the empire.

Comments

[Matthew]

*claps*

[Josh Narins]

It was very informative for me, but I have a different view on the Chechen situation.

What is justice?
Part of justice is, in the modern system, being able to go to court and receiving a fair trial, should the need arise, or going to the a local magistrate to plea for a redress of grievances.
What does it mean when the Judge, your lawyer, and the Governor, speak a different language? How easy is justice, in that case?

Why should the Chechen people be forced to speak Russian to get justice?

(quick switch)

I understand that 90% of Palestinians speak Hebrew, while less than 10% of Israelis speak Arabic. Imagine the "justice" of a Russian-born (slavically accented) Israeli guard screaming at you, in a foreign language, and being shot if you disobey.

Language is central, and for that reason I am not against the idea of a different deal for the Chechens, Ingushyans, and Dagestanis (and, if all things pan out well, a different deal for the South Ossetians, too).

Stalin dealt with this problem by forcing thousands and thousands of Russian speakers into the trans-Caucasian provinces.

Linguistics, and I believe my proof of this is near mathematical in its precision, is the single best way to examine the question of terrorism.