Stalinist Golden Center: Difference between revisions

When Khrushchev took power after the death of Stalin, Mao upheld Stalin's line and the [[Sino-Soviet Split]] occurred in light of the condemnation of Stalin and the rejection of Stalin's ''own'' rejection of deviationism. Thus, the [[China|People's Republic of China (PRC)]] became the determinative inheritor of Stalin's legacy in this sense, which Xi Jinping still upholds today. Of course, there has been development since the times of Stalin and Mao, but the grounding of oneself (or a Party) in a pragmatic politics imbued with dialectical materialist thought remains the bedrock of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao's "Golden Center" path of '''''anti-deviationism''''' and rational dialectical pragmatism. In fact, Chinese slogans such as "do not encourage, do not discourage" embody the essence of the Golden Center, and China's many parties working towards the same aims and for the same masses reflect the strengths of the path of governance Stalin greatly helped to forge.  

One simple example of the Golden Center is Marx's position on religion, and specifically Christianity. When he wrote that religion was the "opium of the masses", he was embroiled in the German radical critique of religion in the early to mid-19th century. Marx, however, was not criticizing Christianity from the same place as atheist idealists such as Max Stirner or the [[Young Hegelians]]. He was not anti-religion. Marx was born Jewish, but practiced Lutheranism from a young age. His fundamental argument was that religion itself can be good or bad depending on how it's practiced. The churches of his time were extremely corrupt, leading Marx to criticize Christianity as a tool of the ruling class used to break popular spirit and keep utopianism in the afterlife. As Engels wrote, he and Marx understood that the early Christians were Communists who were surpressed by Rome, and thus their religious practice was revolutionary (before Christianity became the official religion of Rome). Marx took the Golden Center path by not ''immediately'' rejecting or supporting religion itself, but understanding the positive and negative aspects religion ''may have'' in different environments, advocating private practice in spite of the corrupt ''organized'' religious institutions. This is why, after the anti-religious Leon Trotsky sent forces to desecrate churches, Lenin rejected such acts. Lenin liquidated the massively corrupt Eastern Orthodox church, and Stalin later reinstated it, attending mass, confessing sins, and even having a Catholic funeral. This is why Mao, who was praised by the Vatican for representing Christian values, brought Catholics to visit China in the 1970s. Furthermore, this why Fidel Castro was extremely spiritual and spoke often with Cuban nuns to hear their concerns. Finally, the Golden Center path of religion, ''the contextualization of religion in history without immediate acception or rejection'', is why Infrared sees religion as revolutionary in 21st-century America, where the knowledge of corruption in organized religion is commonplace and religion is subject to the general corrosion of Constitutional rights. The key is to take the middle road between outright rejection (anti-religious extremism) and outright acception (religious extremism), in favor of a reasonable position (freedom and protection of private practice, uncorrupted organized religion, and reasonable public criticism of religion).