Mao Tse-tung’s Thought Is the Soul of the Revolutionary People
[This article is reprinted from Peking Review, Vol. 9, #40, Sept. 30,
1966, p. 12. Thanks are due to the WWW.WENGEWANG.ORG
web site for some of the work done for this posting.]
“IMPRINT Chairman Mao’s instructions in our minds; infuse them in our blood; express them in our actions.”
These words are filled with revolutionary sentiment for our great leader Chairman Mao and for the invincible thought of Mao Tse-tung.
This is what the comrades of the No. 32111 Drilling Team have said and this is what they have done.
A sudden explosion sent flames roaring sky high; they burnt down a derrick, charred trees and turned rocks red hot, but they could not destroy even one single red heart of the heroes armed with the thought of Mao Tse-tung. No order was given; Mao Tse-tung’s thought was the command. To a man, regardless of themselves, they rushed into the sea of fire. They dashed to whichever place presented the greatest danger; rushed to whichever place was most critical. When one man fell, many more rushed in. They would rather lose their all than abandon state property, the interests of the people. This was how with their lives and blood they put out the raging fire to write this latest chapter in the heroic history of the sons and daughters of China.
They are a collective Huang Chi-kuang, a collective Chiu Shao-yun, a collective Ouyang Hai, a collective Mai Hsien-teh. They are the concentrated expression of the fusion of the revolutionary qualities of the working class with the great thought of Mao Tse-tung.
Comrade Mao Tse-tung said: Once the correct ideas characteristic of the advanced class are grasped by the masses, these ideas turn into a material force which changes society and changes the world. The heroic action of this drilling team once again proves this irrefutable truth.
Mao Tse-tung’s thought represents the correct thinking of the proletariat, the most advanced class: it is the most powerful ideological weapon of the proletariat marching towards communism; it is contemporary Marxism-Leninism for remoulding people’s souls.
The remoulding of souls is a battle between the two world outlooks, the proletarian and the bourgeois; it is an immensely arduous ideological revolution. All kinds of our work, in the last analysis, can be summed up in one sentence: using Mao Tse-tung’s thought to remould man’s soul and sweep away the influence of the ideologies of the exploiting classes in people’s minds. Once hundreds of millions of people grasp this powerful ideological weapon of Mao Tse-tung’s thought, they will be able to transform heaven and earth and perform miracles. None of them are worth a straw — neither imperialism nor revisionism, reactionaries, ghosts and monsters, hardships and obstacles.
It is certainly no accident that the heroic feat of this drilling team should have been performed during the high tide of the great proletarian cultural revolution. Like a red signal-flare, it told men: with the deepening of the great cultural revolution and with the coming of the new upsurge in the creative study and application of Chairman Mao’s Works, the Chinese people will emerge on the eastern continent as an even more towering, heroic image of the proletarian revolution.
The people of the whole country should learn from the heroic No. 32111 Drilling Team. We should do as they have done — take the study of Chairman Mao’s writings as the first need of our lives, master Mao Tse-tung’s thought and make it our souls, make the implementation of Chairman Mao’s directives our conscious action, and regard the interests of the revolution as the first thing in our lives.
Let us hold high the bright red banner of Mao Tse-tung’s thought, learn from ideas of heroes, follow the heroes’ path and perform heroic deeds, carry the great proletarian cultural revolution through to the end, and strive for new victories in the socialist revolution and socialist construction.
(“Renmin Ribao” editorial, September 26.)
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