My newest friend is a member of the Maoist Revolutionary Party.
I met him at a certain bookstorein Cleveland heights.
I also read a book for Young Adultswho had to do a book report on Communism,which says that Mao was a mass murderer.
My friend says no way.
I asked him to do lunch with me to discuss his side of it.
So…you informed dopers, Was Mao directlyresponsible for millions of his peoples deaths?
thanks in advance.
—Was Mao directly responsible for millions of his peoples deaths?—
Yes.
Not only by having them killed outright for “wrong thinking.” His Great Leap forward was an incredibly egoistic and idiotic undertaking: basically he thought he was such a genius that he had solved all of China’s economic problems, and so ordered people (on pain of arrest, condemnation, torture, and death) to engage in all sorts of incredibly dumb projects, like making iron in their backyard, building ill-thought out dams (that, of course, burst, killing thousands in one shot), causing massive famine, and just basically miscoordinating anything there was to miscoordinate.
Oh: and while this was all going on, he was basically touring around the country, having sex with every young girl he could lay his hands on.
Virtual Museum of the Cultural Revolution Scroll down to “atrocities”.
I was really surprised the other day while listening to NPR to hear Joan Hinton, an 80 year old nuclear physicist who emigrated to China after working on the Manhattan Project, detailing the virtues of Mao and regretting his death. (She still lives in China and swears he was the greatest thing to ever happen to the country.) http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/features/2002/aug/chineselives/index.html#hinton
How anybody could rule the Cultural Revolution as a good thing is an incredible subject worthy of research.
Sampiro
I’m with ya, pal…That interview torqued me off so much that I had to write them and point out
A. As a commsymp who bemoans the fact that “the bourgeoisie” are returning," Ms. Hinton sees fit to retain a housekeeper
B: As a nuclear physicist (and therefore ostensibly smart), it never occured to her that the reason that the number of comunist countries on earth is dwindling, the reason for the unemployment and corruption in modern China is that * it doesn’t work!*
C: Her beloved Chairman Mao killed more people than all the nuclear weapons in the world.
I can’t believe they wasted airtime on a crank like her.
he started/encouraged the cultural revolution, which destroyed alot of lives.
I don’t know why this guy admires him, then.
Maybe he believes its all libel, or something.
I can’t imagine anyone following someone they Knowingly know has done all that.
Will print this out for him, thanks.
vanilla, who is pro-Taiwan.
I read a book recently that described Mao’s accomplishments as 60% good, 40% bad. Note that these were the words of a fictional Chinese character, but it implied that this is a common sentiment in China.
Not that Mao was by any means a nice guy, but I wonder whether, even as we acknowledge his atrocities, there are positive changes he wrought in China. My understanding is that his predecessor (Chiang Kai-Shek, right?) wasn’t exactly a people’s hero himself.
If you talk with your friend, be prepared to hear about all the great things Mao did, and be prepared for a discussion of whether the good things a person does can really be weighed ont he same scales as the bad things a person does.
Would we, for example, still think Mother Theresa was great if she’d killed and eaten just one baby?
Daniel
China is a scary place, and even the sentiments of the public are scary. On the surface, these sorts of views (which are quite common) seem only a little whacked, and you might be able to simply write it off as the results of exposure to censored media, laced with state indoctrination from birth (I loved their nursery school songs: great classic tunes with titles like “Our Communist Forefathers Industrialized our Economy the Right Way, Bringing into Being a New China that the Whole World Marvels At.”
But dig deeper, and you’ll find a bubbling fount of racialist nationalism unknown in the modern world: If Mao killed millions, that’s okay, because he did it to make China great again, and compared to that, almost anything is an acceptable loss. And if we keep to his accomplishments, China can now begin to regain it’s place as the superior nation (and there’s always an undercurrent of “superior Han race” running in these diatribes).
What’s worst is that the state activily promotes this sort of thinking.
Also, don’t neglect the fact that in the Chinese telling of history, most of the horrible things that Mao did are scapegoated off onto people like the Gang of Four.
Official Chinese history of the past century is more than a little wacky. For instance, did you know that the real reason the US dropped nuclear weapons on Japan was to simply fool the world into thinking that the US had won the war, and take all the credit? When it was really all along China that Japan was going to surrender to?
—Would we, for example, still think Mother Theresa was great if she’d killed and eaten just one baby?—
The scary thing is: this is farther than you’d think from just a hypothetical question. Mother Theresa has a pretty big dark side, according to some critics, and only endless self-promotion convinced people otherwise.
Such as?
Dude, didn’t you read what he wrote? She ate babies!
[sub]that’s what I thought your post was saying at first, Apos – sorry![/sub]
Daniel
Well, sure she ate babies. But they were full-term babies.
I’ve read a lot about Mao, and echo a previous post. Mao was the kind of charismatic person who can lead people and inspire them to win against great difficulty. Right there, you got almost eight hundred pounds of weapons-grade understatement.
But he couldn’t seem to grasp the most ordinary economic and logistical facts. Oddly, as an athiest, he expected Marxism to produce miracles he would not otherwise. The Great Leap Forward, and especially the agricultural programs associated with it, were mind-numbingly unrealistic and destructive. Worse, he refused to acknowledge and reverse his errors.
He was Mao when China need Mao. Unfortunatly, he was still Mao when China needed John Maynard Keynes.
I could never stop at just one myself.
Is cannibalism expressly forbidden by the Catholic Church, like birth control?
“Is cannibalism expressly forbidden by the Catholic Church, like birth control?”
Symbolically it’s a sacrament, but I think the actual practice is frowned on a bit. This has caused confusion with the demented several times in history (and with the Aztecs).
Do a google for “Mao sparrows” and you’ll get a picture of just how nutty that guy was.
I highly recommend the book Red China Blues by reporter Jan Wong. She describes herself as a starry-eyed “Montreal Maoist” who managed to get on a exchange-student program to China in the mid-seventies and how utterly disillusioned she became with how petty and mean-spirited and soul-crushing communism was when you had to live under it, as opposed to watching from a distance.
My personal two cents is that any political leader who makes Josef Stalin his role model is pretty much guaranteed to end up having problems.
If nothing else, you have to admit that the general estimation of Teresa as the pre-eminent saint of our times is based on almost no knowledge of what she actually did, how she ran her affairs and finances, and what the all repercussions of her mission were. Most people simply see vague pictures and worship that notes that she worked with poor people, and get the impression
that she helped them.
Christopher Hitchens, however, points out several telling and utterly unexamined facts about her and her mission that paint a very different picture. I’m not saying that he’s right: but rather that no one should have unexamined heroes that are little more than archetypal images, held to be free from any thoughtful criticism.
Hitchens, if on nothing else, is right to point out that the party line view of her as being a simple saint meant that she could litteraly say or do almost anything, no matter how outrageous, without criticism or even people pointing it out. She could speak on behalf of dictators and theives, telling the poor that these monsters loved them and were good people and had to be obeyed. She could give a speech holding abortion to be the number 1 impediment to peace.
Or the fact that despite swimming in way more than enough donations, she never opened up a community teaching hospital or anything of the sort that would really help improve medical care of the poor and dying (which is pretty much just as detestably squalid and unhealthy as it was when she came there). Instead, she’s built gaudy convents all over the world. And yet no one would point out how nutty or questionable these things were.
But read Hitchens’ accusations for yourself, and perhaps we can open a new thread on this if you wish to discuss it.
http://www.lipmagazine.org/articles/featpostel_56_p.htm
http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/hitchens_16_4.html
Fascinating links. Has Mother Teresa been a debate topic? She should be- it could get nice and juicy!