Time & Perspective Quote by Mao Zedong

History gets flattened into a battlefield here, and that flattening is the point. Mao’s line isn’t just descriptive; it’s a moral authorization disguised as inevitability. By framing civilization as a long, mechanical cycle of “struggle” leading to “triumph” or “elimination,” he turns political violence from a choice into a law of nature. The rhetoric is stark, almost bureaucratic: subjects are “classes,” verbs are blunt (“triumph,” “eliminated”), and responsibility dissolves into the passive logic of History-with-a-capital-H.

The subtext is disciplinary. If struggle is the engine of civilization, then compromise becomes cowardice, pluralism becomes delusion, and dissent can be recast as standing in the way of progress. “Eliminated” is doing sinister work: it sounds clinical, like a demographic trend, not an act carried out by people with rifles, prisons, and dossiers. That euphemistic distance is a classic move of revolutionary states: sanitize coercion by wrapping it in theory.

Context sharpens the edge. Mao spoke and governed within a Marxist-Leninist framework that treated class conflict as the central explanatory key, then adapted it to China’s conditions: peasant revolution, party discipline, and recurring campaigns to identify “enemies” inside society. In practice, the idea of permanent struggle fed mass mobilizations and purges, from land reform to the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Cultural Revolution, where “elimination” could mean public humiliation, labor camps, or death.

It works rhetorically because it offers clarity in exchange for complexity. If history is a tribunal and classes are the accused, the verdict is pre-written; the leader’s job is simply to deliver it.