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History Guy
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Reads too many books...
Oct 2001
time: 23:25
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A short story...Mao with a twist!
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THE CHAIRMAN'S JUSTICE
The sky turned a shade of deep gray, and began to churn in a rhythmic fashion. The winter would bring on more snow this evening, small drops of frozen water, dancing on the air, descending slowly from the heavens, from the lands of the shunned celestial palace, down to earth, to rest upon the cold, hard ground. The wind blew noisily, and brushed about the fallen snow, and the dead and rotting leaves that lay beneath it.
It had been a hard year already. The summer had not been especially warm, indeed, it felt like autumn come early. All over the great lands, crops failed, rice and beans, anything that grew, seemed either to wither and die, or to be shrunken to a puny size, not fit for man or beast. Of course, now it would be fit, for what is fit for one man is fit for the next, all must make do on the same amount of food, water, money…that was the way, the new way. The pure, Socialist way. The way that the entire country had gone after the Revolution.
Revolution continued on. The good Doctor who’d insured the first Revolution was long gone, as well as his lackey general. The Premiers had either died or been replaced. Finally, their came a new leader. The Nationalists had finally been ousted; the Long March had done its work. Its leader was now given a new rank. The Chairman was now the benevolent ruler, and under him, all would flourish.
But first, a hard task would have to been undertaken. The People’s Republic looked on sadly and noted the folly that still existed in the people. The Chairman gave rousing speeches in the Capital, shouting for a crusade, a revolution, “traditional values and bourgeois things” were the enemy, he now told his people. Such things had to be taken down; they did more damage than good. The old ways were folly, they had to be defeated.
“Even though we have attained extraordinary great achievements,” said the Chairman of the People’s Republic in his soft, soothing voice, “there is no reason to be arrogant. Modesty makes you more forward, arrogance makes you go backwards. I should always remember this truth.” Clapping greeted him, and he thus outlined his plans. Great achievements still lay ahead, there was much more to be done. The Revolution began. The purge began.
That had been three years ago. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was not leading to the greater and better things the Chairman had promised. Thousands of dissenters had been executed; millions of blacklisted books were burned in the Central Commune of the Capital. Questions had been raised. Prominent scholars put democracy forward as the answer to such problems. These men were now enemies of the state, of the People; the Republic simply could not allow such dangerous thinking.
Thousands of such scholars were executed, many by being buried alive. The mass-murders were on such a giant scale that they were like nothing before seen. Yet, for the good of the People, the work continued, the Revolution went on strong, the crackdowns were as never before.
This man, Prisoner No. 1129, was just such a scholar. Back in the days before the Revolution, he’d been a prominent historian, philosopher, and poet. He’d graduated from one of the finest colleges of the old regime. Such high-minded intellectualism was now to be looked down upon and snubbed. Such people pretended to know more than they did, and such pretension bred rebellion, it bred trouble. The People could not have their minds poisoned by such things; they would be as twisted and didactic as the scholars were to begin with.
The Prisoner watched the snowfall lightly onto the ground. A particularly graceful flake fell before his eyes, and was caught up by a chilly breeze, borne aloft again, and carried towards the heavy, yellow-brown coat of the soldier who held his arm. The flake vanished away into nothingness, sinking into the warmth of the cold man’s coat.
The man was to die soon. The High Court of Justice had declared him an enemy of the state, a traitor. He was one of the worst, in fact, a snake in the grass, a democrat if there ever was one. Such men spread the virus of democracy, something that had to be stamped out. A crowd stood watching in the Central Commune. The Prisoner was to be made an example to the state itself. Rebellion against the People brought on death, this had to be made clear. Insecurity could not be allowed, on any circumstances.
The scholar looked about him, aloft at the grand old buildings that towered above all. Such glory there had been in them, but now how they looked so gray, so bleak, so dead. The once graceful architecture was now crowned by giant paintings of the Chairman, of his unassuming face, made so terribly assuming by the sheer size of the portraits. A ghost of a kindly smile hung above his chin. There was no life here, anywhere. The very people themselves looked gray and dead. Indeed, there was nothing surrounding him that had any life at all. The snow came down on the scene like ashes descending from an eruption. All was bleak.
“Prisoner No. 1129, you have been found guilty of treason and corrupting the minds of the youth with your antisocial and misguided teachings. The High Tribunal of the People’s Court has ruled a sentence of death, to be carried out here in the Central Commune of the Capital,” boomed the ecstatic voice of a tall, thin, by-spectacled military officer in full uniform, standing in a high podium near the People’s Palace, at the end of the Central Commune. The man was ant-like in his little box, dwarfed by the Chairman’s beaming mug.
“Misguided and anti-social?” cried the scholar, “At least democracy does not seek to build itself into some utopia on the bones of the working man!”
The officer in the podium answered back calmly, “Need I say more? You spew lies, No. 1129, anti-social, unmutual, degrading lies. You seek to pollute the clean atmosphere of the minds of the People with your ‘democracy’, the greatest of evils, which seeks to fatten the rich man on the bones of the tax payer!”
“No, sir, it is you who spew lies. You have and will attempt, vainly, to destroy our culture and our past. Our temples and our heritage you would have crushed and broken, like our will and our individual thought. You would have us like ants, living and dying in the intolerable conditions of your work camps, bleeding our lives away by making products we shall never have, building bombs you’re too afraid to use, building guns so that you may keep us in this lifestyle!”
“The People has individuality here, we think! We know what is good for us, because we made it good for us, we made it!”
“We, the Chairman, the People’s Proletarian Commune of Electorates?!”
“Is it any different in your ‘European’ democracy, your false western ideals?”
“There is no ideal government, sir, there is no utopia, but at least in my ‘false western ideals’ the People have a say in what they would have…the center of the West, Europe, has given us the building blocks to a better future, do not waste it on vain hopes like your Communism!”
“Ah, yes, the West. I see that our opinions here are the same.” The officer turned to the people, his gloved hand raised triumphantly, “This man is no honorable friend, but we must acknowledge, dear People, the truths he says here, at least where the West is concerned. The West gave us much to be thankful for.”
The officer looked again at the Prisoner, and then turned his face to the crowd, gripping the edges of his podium, his twisted smile breaking through his gray lips, “Europe produced a man named Darwin, who laid for us the building blocks. He taught to us the truths of our existence, that we are simply highly evolved monkeys, apes with noticeable brains! The survival of the fittest is his doctrine, and it is the right one, for it has proven itself over and over again…
“You see, my friends…the second gift of Europe was the one built with Darwin’s building blocks. Karl Marx wrote his Manifesto, and it is the highest truth we have to us. We can build Utopia, there is Utopia! And it is in our grasp! And it is this!” He removed his cap, and held it aloft, pointing with gloved hand at the great red star that sat above the rim. “Here is freedom!”
The scholar cried out a final time, “Think for yourselves! What has the Great Proletarian Revolution brought you but poverty, an empty stomach…death, burning, loss of knowledge, madness, pain, suffering…disease? Nothing. The promised fruits and gifts of the Chairman never came to you, do not forget that! You are not lost, you cannot be easily contained…think for yourselves, embrace the truth! The truth will set you free, but the Republic will keep you crushed and in chains for all time to come!”
The officer was not listening. He was watching the tall, uniformed officer who was approaching quickly from the bottom of the high podium. The officer stepped down slightly to greet him, and hailed him. They exchanged words. The officer then turned, and walked back up the podium. The messenger stepped back into the crowd.
“The time for the execution is now. All is prepared. Take the Prisoner to the statue of the Chairman, which he shall face when he dies. The benevolent and forgiving face of our leader will be the last thing that he shall ever behold.”
The guards turned round, clutching the scholar’s arms, and taking him down the road, marching quickly, towards the tall, gray statue that stood in the very center of the Central Commune of the Capital. The crowd quickly followed, advancing down the street several feet to get a better view of the justice that they knew was about to be meted out. Traitors die traitor’s deaths, as they all knew. The People would have the revenge they so richly deserved for having to put up with these high-minded intellectuals who claimed to know all, and corrupted the pure minds of the People.
An officer towards the statue walked up the scholar, and he looked up as it loomed before him. The rather plain features idealized in stone looked slightly ridiculous. The man who appeared in so many huge portraits surrounding him, always dressed neatly in the yellow-brown suit, modestly clothed, almost like a workingman, a blood red background surrounding his form. In the statue, there was just grayness, like the heap of stone that it was. Dead, expressionless, pointless.
The officer removed from its holster a small, black army service revolver. He brought it against the back of the Prisoner’s neck. Cold steel chilled him to the bones. The scholar watched the snow accumulate on the stone Chairman’s outstretched arms, and noticed a white dove sitting on the man’s head. It looked down at him, and he looked up at it. The shot rang out. There was almost a shocked silence as the blood splattered the officer’s face and uniform, and the body fell forward, against the base of the statue.
The stone features paid no notice. For the Chairman, this was simply another move in his war on the bourgeois. It was merely a slight incident resulting in the satisfaction of the court’s rulings.
To it, Chairman Lincoln paid no notice.
Last edited by History Guy on 08-02-2003 at 21:19
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08-02-2003 05:42
Very nice. You should write more. 
Any way, great stuff. 
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