Preface:
One day in 1980, Museveni, then Uganda's defense minister, approached Gao Qiufu, a Xinhua news agency correspondent in Uganda, and made a strange request to him: "Can you get me 250 copies of the Selected Works of Mao Zedong?"
Gao Qiufu went through the warehouse of the Chinese Embassy in Uganda and found only 5 copies, all of which were given to him. What no one expected was that 6 years later, Museveni led a Ugandan guerrilla force to overthrow the remotely controlled comprador government of the United States and Britain and liberate Uganda.
Uganda's current President, Museveni
So, how does Museveni do it? Why did Mao Xuan have such great power in the Ugandan revolution?
Today is the 46th anniversary of Chairman Mao's death, let us use the past of "Museveni 5 Mao's Choice to Fight the Country" to peek at the leopard, to see how the great man's thoughts have influenced and changed the world in the half century after his death.
First, the president of a small African country whose mantra is "power comes out of the barrel of a gun"
Uganda, located in eastern Africa, across the equator, surrounded by Tanzania, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan, the territory of only 240,000 square kilometers, and not an inch close to the coastline, is an absolute sense of Africa's landlocked small country.
Uganda was under British colonial rule until 1962. After 62 years of nominal independence, but in fact still remotely controlled by Britain and the United States, by 1971, Amin, arguably Africa's most brutal ruler, staged a coup d'état and became Uganda's president, ruling Uganda in a brutal manner.
Like all comprador governments in history, the Amin government brutally suppressed it internally and colluded with Anglo-American capital externally to sell out national interests. Uganda, an already impoverished landlocked country, has been in dire straits all year round.
Amin, who brutally ruled Uganda
The 40 million Ugandan people, like the sun, look forward to their heroes.
And this hero, in fact, was born as early as 1944, he is Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, a fierce man who twice overthrew the Ugandan comprador government by relying on 5 Mao elections, and Chairman Mao's hardcore "fan" in Africa.
Museveni was 27 years old when Amin staged a coup in 1971. As early as 2 years ago, when he was still in college, Museveni had already seen the social reality that Uganda was nominally independent, but in fact remotely controlled by Britain and the United States, and the comprador government was poisoned.
He had the intention of changing the fate of his country and liberating the ugandan people, but he was struggling to find a "dragon slaying knife" until he met Mao Xuan.
The social situation in Uganda in the 1960s and 1970s has many similarities with the situation after the success of the democratic revolution in modern China. First of all, from the perspective of its own economic conditions, Uganda, like modern China, is an absolute agricultural country, with a weak economic foundation, facing the advanced productive forces of developed countries in Europe and the United States, and wanting to compete with the West economically is almost a fool's dream.
Second, Uganda seems to be independent after 62 years, but the rulers are still the remnants of the feudal dynasties of the British colonial era, the so-called emerging bourgeois forces are just compradors representing Western interests, and the brutal rulers like Amin are about the same as the warlords of old China.
In this context, if you want to change the fate of the country and liberate Uganda through the peace movement, you are fighting with the tiger.
In 1969, during his university years, he was deeply exposed to Mao's choice of Museveni, and in order to truly liberate Uganda, he wrote a paper entitled "Feasibility Study of the Theory of Violent Revolution in Post-Colonial Africa".
The paper carefully analyzed the current situation and international pattern of Uganda, and drew on the many experiences of independence and liberation of other colonial countries in modern times, and finally came to the conclusion that Uganda could not be saved by tinkering with capitalist reforms and a peace movement that compromised everywhere. The only way to truly change uganda's national destiny is the most radical violent revolution.
In chairman Mao's words, it means "power comes out of the barrel of a gun." To put it one more word, this is exactly the mantra that Museveni most often said during his leadership of the Ugandan revolution.
In 1980, four years after Chairman Mao's death, Museveni, who had been appointed Minister of Defence for his outstanding contribution to the struggle to overthrow the Amin junta, was dissatisfied that the Ugandan government at that time was still unable to get rid of the manipulation of capitalist powers such as Britain and the United States, and decided to resign from the ministerial post and "go up the mountain" again to lead the Ugandan people's second revolution.
At this time, Museveni was already a mature practitioner of Chairman Mao's theory, and he knew very well that in order to carry out revolution, it was not enough to shine and heat on his own, and only by arming more comrades with Mao Zedong Thought could he truly realize the revolutionary ideal of "the spark of a spark can ignite the plains." So he approached Gao Qiufu, a reporter of the Xinhua News Agency in Uganda, and put forward a request for 250 copies of Mao Xuan.
So, how did Museveni practice the spirit of Mao's election and lead the Ugandan revolution to victory?
Second, it is forbidden to eat bananas in the fields of the masses
Since its inception, Mao Xuan has been translated into 26 languages and published in more than 100 countries around the world, and I don't know how many people have been exposed to and learned the ideas in it, but it is still relatively rare for Museveni to rely on 5 Mao Xuan's books to succeed in two revolutions and change the fate of a country.
The root cause is not how profound the truth recorded in "Mao Xuan" is, but that many things are easier said than done. It is simple to understand the theory, but it is not so easy to turn the theory into reality and practice for a long time.
The only secret reason why Museveni was able to rely on the "5 Maoist choices to fight the country" was that he effectively turned the ideas and theories selected by Mao into his own actions.
To give just two simple examples, in some African countries, due to historical and cultural reasons, the class solidification is very serious. The real underclass, and the bourgeoisie, and the tribal chiefs, are fundamentally the existence of two worlds, and there is basically no intersection between each other's lives.
Born into a middle-class family, Museveni was Uganda's minister of defence before the second "uphill" revolution in 1980, and had a high prestige and status throughout Uganda.
However, when he took more than 20 comrades-in-arms to the jungles of northwestern Uganda, formed a revolutionary base area, and led the guerrillas to confront the Ugandan government supported by the United States and the West, he was able to mingle with the poor people in the jungles in backward villages and even tribes, and explain to them that the life of the Ugandan people was so poor and difficult because there were two big mountains of comprador government and Britain and the United States, and only by overthrowing these people could Uganda truly win the opportunity for independence and development.
It was through this act of eating, living, and standing with the poor that Museveni gained the support of the Ugandan people, and the guerrilla group he formed grew rapidly.
In addition, Museveni paid special attention to civil-military relations. He studied chairman Mao's theory that "the army must be politicized", trained the guerrillas with the requirements of "children and soldiers", and required them to always stand with the Ugandan people. ”
Ugandan guerrillas
Uganda is located in the tropics, and this discipline can be said to have not only captured the true meaning of chairman Mao's thought on the theory of military-civilian relations, but also conformed to Uganda's national conditions.
It was by practicing the seemingly ordinary but few people in Chairman Mao's thought that Museveni was able to pull up a guerrilla force of more than 50,000 people in just 6 years, relying on the first 26 people, and led them to seize power in Uganda, gain the support of the Ugandan people, and form a new government.
III. Forever "Teachers"
Since leading the Chinese people to victory in the revolution and establishing a new China, Chairman Mao has had many identities. Members, secretaries, chairpersons, etc. But his old man's favorite thing is the identity of "teacher".
After Chairman Mao's death, the Western media once called him "the legend of our time", "the giant of giants", and "the person who changed the history of China and the world".
I think none of this matters to the world, because no matter how glorious the history of the past is, it is impossible to change it after it has already happened. The future is full of variables.
Before Chairman Mao, Marx, Engels, Lenin and other teachers of the proletarian revolution were, of course, very great, and they lit the torch and pointed out the way forward for the proletariat of the whole world.
However, due to the limitations of history, the Paris Commune, which first practiced socialist ideas, failed, and the successful experience of the Soviet Union could not be copied to other countries. Because before the establishment of the Soviet Union, Tsarist Russia itself was one of the Western powers, it already had a strong industrial base and a huge working class.
After Chairman Mao's death, the masses cried goodbye
However, most of the other third world countries, including China, have been colonized or semi-colonized by the West in modern times, and their own capitalism has not been fully developed, and the social economy is generally still dominated by agriculture.
Under such economic conditions, it is difficult to succeed in copying the experience of the Soviet revolution. Chairman Mao led the great cause of defeating all internal and external enemies and establishing a new China under the leadership of Chinese people, thus opening up a new road for the world.
If Marxism-Leninism has pointed out the direction for the proletariat of the whole world, then Chairman Mao's thought is to give these revolutionaries who have found the direction a "dragon slaying knife" that can cut through the thorns that stand in the way and walk out of their own road.
The former is a worldview, the latter is a methodology. And this is precisely chairman Mao's greatest contribution to the world.
Since the advent of "Mao Xuan", people like Ugandan President Museveni who are interested in changing the fate of their country and nation can rely on the "five Mao Elections" to lay the foundation of the country as long as they want.
Moreover, this ideological weapon can be passed down forever, from generation to generation, across any time and space constraint. In a sense, as long as Mao Xuan is still there, those capitalists, compradors, and even the Western powers will not dare to go too far in the face of the poor, the property class, and the poor countries of the small countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Even if you still want to bully small countries and poor countries, you must at least find a bag of washing powder to cover up. When the wicked are compelled to cover up their sins, for the good, it is a historical progress in itself.
IV. Conclusion
On September 9, 1976, after the news of Chairman Mao's death came out, the United Nations lowered its flag to half-mast to mourn, people from many countries around the world spontaneously took to the streets to commemorate the parade, and leaders of more than 100 countries publicly mourned. No leader of that country has ever died since modern times, and it can have such a huge impact.
This is not because he led the revolutionary cause to success in China, but because people know that from now to the future, in infinite time and space, his old man's ideas will continue to be passed on throughout the world, personally and fundamentally changing the fate of the proletariat, which accounts for the overwhelming majority of the world's population.
He is not only a "teacher" of the Chinese people, but also a "teacher" of the people of the world.
The so-called "after I leave, you will become me" is the most straightforward interpretation of this contribution.