Posted on 11/26/2005 1:15:03 AM PST by nickcarraway
In Berkeley, where revolutionaries schooled in the '60s tilt against global capitalism and post-socialist state China is a growing field of academic study, radicals and scholars alike are coming to grips with a new biography that paints Chinese communist icon Mao Zedong as pure evil.
In "Mao: The Unknown Story," authors Jung Chang and Jon Halliday portray Mao (1893-1976) as a cynical hedonist who rose to absolute power on Soviet strongman Josef Stalin's muscle and his willingness to crush millions of peasants in famine, war and sadistic repression.
The authors, who spent a decade on the project and scoured private and government records in China and Russia, say Mao killed 10 times more innocents than Hitler and was as pitiless as he was incompetent as a revolutionary. The fabled Long March of the 1930s? Bungled. The Cultural Revolution of the '60s and '70s? Nothing more than a murderous fit of pique by a tyrant upset that he'd been crossed by rivals and enamored of public torture.
Mao was, however, a genius of spin. The authors say he sold international leftists a fairy tale of a corrupt state transformed by revolution from the bottom up.
"It was mainly, I think, hot air," Halliday dryly told a large crowd during an appearance at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business earlier this month.
The assertion that Mao used the bloody turmoil of Marxist revolution for purely egotistical ends has prompted praise in some quarters and outrage in others. The controversy comes as China's 20-year economic boom is creating growing social disparity -- and the ruling Communist Party worries about Maoist nostalgia among a new generation of have-nots even as it holds up Mao as a symbol of its historical legitimacy.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
So??!?!?
and was as pitiless as he was incompetent as a revolutionary.
L
Communism discredited itself. It just doesn't work.
Only the SF Gate is surprised that Mao is the largest mass murderer in human history.
Who knew?
jas3
p.s. Answer: EVERYBDOY.
Boundless: The Double Standard for Political Crime
... Review of The Black Book of Communism. Crimes, Terror, Repression, by Stéphane Courtois
et al, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer. Harvard University Press ...
I hope the authors send a complimentary copy to Maoist
John Kerry.
Anyone who tries to make excuses for Mao or Communism is mentally ill.
When you read officially censored commentaries written by individual Chinese, there are lots of codewords like "When you look at the DPRK today, you will have a sense of deja vu and a reminder of the hard times we had before the economic reforms and openings." In other words, Mao's China was like North Korea today.
Even the Chinese Communists now admit the Mao era is all a big mistake and disastrous. Officially when Deng Xiaoping was alive the officially approved judgement of Mao is "70% hero, 30% villain." and today it seems to try to hush any discussions about Mao.
The San Francisco Bay Area far-leftists fail to follow Chairman Hu Jiantao's words: "Keeping up with the times".
;-)
"The authors, who spent a decade on the project and scoured private and government records in China and Russia, say Mao killed 10 times more innocents than Hitler and was as pitiless as he was incompetent as a revolutionary."
Mao was nothing more than a tyrant. Among the millions he killed were about a million Tibetans after he invaded Tibet. China is an imperial power , cowed in modern times only by nuclear weapons. We seem to forget that,conveniently.
I have read something even more hair-raising: in Guangdong (next to Hong Kong) and Hunan, during the Cultural Revolution the Red Guards of rival factions engaged in gun battles. In Guangxi, acts of annibalism were committed: the "class enemies" were taken to face a crowd, killed alive, the remains boiled and eaten.
In a sense the Cultural Revolution has inflicted as much damage on Chinese as the Holocaust on the Jewish people and I think it is far worse than the Purges by Joseph Stalin in the 1930s. Its aftermath still affects us today: notice the lack of ethics, moral values, and moderation from a majority of mainland Chinese today. The Cultural Revolution destroyed the Chinese soul.
It makes the book mentioned in the article read like official Chinese Communist propaganda in comparison. To the Berkeley leftists: if you have any beef with critiques about the CCP, then be my guest mate. See if you can refute any single well-argued point the Nine Commentaries have made.
" Anyone who tries to make excuses for Mao or Communism is mentally ill."
ive met many apologists.....now i know well enough to walk away.
Interestingly, the only "true" believers in communism these days seem to reside in the alternate universe of education.
"A lot of their response would be, 'Materialistically it's great. We can get whatever we want. We don't have to wait in long lines.' But they also said that morally it's really going down because now it's a money society," she said.
Morally there's nothing better than supporting yourself. Morally and spiritually.
I would imagine many of our elitists in the MSM are fans of Mao.
And this is actually being reported in the Chronicle
One of the most important tools of tyrants is lying. "Lying and the Lies that Liars Lie" is basic to understanding tyrannies. Now that the demos are exposed as liars we will be able to understand the devastation caused by moral ambiguity. A few years ago an important book emerged chronicling the memoirs of Mao's physician. Mao was depicted as vulgar, sexually depraved, filthy and riddled with STDs. He raped virgins daily for decades. Mao is personally responsible for the death and disfigurement of even more millions by sexually transmitted disease. He was the greatest evil scourge in the history of mankind.
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