Sasha Gong says the most successful trick of any dictatorship, including the left in America, is separating what is true from what counts as truth. You are hungry; that is true. The official line says the Party has created abundance; that is truth. Growing up in Mao's China, she was amazed by the gap from a very young age, and at 12 she rejected it for the first time.
In 1968, with her parents in a labor camp and homes on the college campus where she lived being ransacked, books began circulating. One was a small blue volume stamped for internal criticism by Party cadres only: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn's account of a single day in a Soviet labor camp. Gong read it and felt little at first; the prisoner ate better than her family did. Then she reached a footnote. A line in which a prisoner says Stalin trusted no one, not even his own brothers, was labeled a vicious attack against Comrade Stalin. In that second everything connected: every misery she had seen traced back to the system, and if Stalin, then Mao. She was 12, and it was the most frightening thought of her life, because anyone who thought it could be shot. After those years, she tells Jenny Beth Martin, nothing frightened her again.
Sasha Gong holds a PhD in sociology from Harvard and later directed the China branch of Voice of America. This conversation is from The Jenny Beth Show, a production of Tea Party Patriots Action.
Call your senators and representative at 202-224-3121 and tell them America does not need a socialist experiment. Watch the full interview at jennybethshow.com and learn more at teapartypatriots.org.
00:00 — How a dictatorship separates "true" from "truth"
00:58 — "Men can be woman": the official line versus what you see
01:18 — The first time she rejected it, at 12; memorizing every book
02:33 — Houses ransacked, books circulating, and a small blue book
03:16 — What One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is
04:07 — Her aunt, a military doctor, sentenced to thirteen years for criticizing Mao's wife
04:35 — "Everything horrible is normal"
05:04 — The footnote: "a vicious attack against comrade Stalin"
05:39 — "Every misery is connected to that system." How about Mao?
06:24 — The scariest thing in her life, and why fear stopped working
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