Posted on 10/24/2005 8:41:15 AM PDT by GMMAC
The real Mao
Lorne Gunter
National Post
Monday, October 24, 2005
A new biography of Mao Tse-Tung is forcing the Chinese to re-examine their views of the Great Helmsman. The book appears to be causing at least as much ideological dyspepsia among Mao's Western admirers, of whom there are still many.
Mao: The Unknown Story, by the wife-and-husband team of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, demonstrates convincingly that the founding dictator of communist China was a thug, not a secular saint. He was always as willing to kill his rivals and supporters as his opponents, always bourgeois, arrogant and self-absorbed, and never cared much for the peasants he pretended to champion. Peasants, to Mao, were nothing but convenient political tools who helped sustain the cult of personality that brought him to power, and foot soldiers he could send to their deaths to advance his massive re-engineering schemes or consolidate his hold on authority.
According to communist myth, Mao was the man who came closer than anyone to implementing Marxism in the way Marx and Lenin envisioned it -- as a dictatorship of the proletariat wisely overseen by benevolent, selfless champions of the people.
Since the 1970s, when the truth about the economic failures and political violence of Soviet communism began seeping out from behind the Iron Curtain, Marxism's Western apologists have had to cling to ever smaller bits of intellectual flotsam.
First came the denials. The truth was not the truth, but rather a capitalist plot perpetrated to discredit Communism and divert Westerners' attention from the rot and disparity in their own nations.
When even socialists in the Western intelligentsia -- the professors, playwrights, authors, journalists and political theorists -- could no longer deny the ruin and repression in the Soviet bloc, there followed the canard that the ugliness of communism was a recent development, the fault of thick-headed brutes like Leonid Brezhnev or monsters such as Joseph Stalin. Their deeds, it was argued, didn't taint the ideology itself.
But thanks to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and later the fall of the Soviet Union and the opening of the KGB's archives, it became unavoidably clear that the famines, pogroms, forced relocations and other evils had been part of Soviet communism from the start, and that Lenin, for all his outward fatherly gentleness, had been as murderous and corrupt as the rest. Yet some defenders of Marxism still maintained that their theory could be salvaged in some other nation, even if the Soviet experiment had ended in fiasco.
For such diehards, Mao Tse-Tung was an icon. He brought health care to the people, and land reform and women's rights. He introduced universal education. By the strength of his will, he modernized one of the world's most backward countries.
Even as 1997's Black Book of Communism and other sources began revealing how Mao had executed tens of millions in his greed for power and his insane attempts to remake Chinese society, his apologists remained on-message. That was the "old" Mao, they argued, who came into being only after the Gang of Four had taken control of his mind; the young Mao was still to be revered.
In, Mao: The Unknown Story, Chang and Halliday dispel the impression that there were two Maos -- the brilliant, charismatic chairman of the Long March up till the Great Leap Forward; and the ageing drug-addicted sex addict, in thrall to his manipulative wife and her political allies .
There was never a good Mao.
Long before the 1949 revolution, while he was still in opposition to the Chinese Nationalists, Mao was slaughtering any anyone who got in his way -- communist or otherwise. In the 1930s, for instance, he declared more than 4,000 officers in the Red army to be subversives, and had them horribly tortured then killed.
According to the authors, who conducted 10 years of research, much of it in previously untapped Chinese and Russian files, Mao was also a Russian toady and a Japanese collaborator during Japan's inhuman occupation of China. He let his own first wife die rather than delay a non-essential military campaign, invented the most famous tales of his own heroism, had 70 million Chinese purged (more than 10% of the population at the time), and seldom walked during the famous Long March. (He had himself carried on a litter as he read.)
With Stalin, Lenin and Mao all discredited, what heroes do surviving Marxists have left? Kim Jong-Il? Fidel Castro? Don't laugh: As Mao, The Unknown Story makes clear, we should never underestimate a leftist's ability to venerate a mass murderer with a straight face.
© National Post 2005
He also liked little girls.
Spooky, ain't it?
In other words, a typical liberal.
So9
Like the 70 million or so he had killed, or let starve, as a good opener....
MAO killed more than Stalin and Hitler. Of course, they don't teach that at the many leftist colleges around the country.
Who was it who, when asked about Mike Tyson coming out of prison with a Mao tatoo, said, "Well you didn't think prison was going to make him smarter did you."
mark
The BBC World Service serialized the book a few weeks ago. Personally, as one who possessed Mao's Little Red Book back in the 70s and who thought Communism was a good thing for the Chineee, I was shocked.
He was not a leader as some of us thought during that time, but a self-centered, lazy, petty, womanizing, awful person. The people of China were only there to make him comfortable. He was hardly the great champion of the worker.
The serialization was great; I'm sure the book is even better.
That sounds like something Dennis Miller would say.
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