Coulda sworn we had a Doper with that nick…
That was a resoponse to Cicero’s remark that Che was never a dictator.
All’s I know is that if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao you ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow.
ETA: :smack: Totally missed post #14.
Since this thread seems to be kind of all over the place I don’t suppose it’ll go amiss to note that everywhere I turn lately, Stranger On A Train seems to be making articulate and fascinating posts about twentieth century history, and I, for one, love that!
Exhibit A: Critic darling but overall waste of space and general douchebag French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. Embraced Maoism for a while. Grew disillusioned after several years when he came to the conclusion that this brand of communism also equalled fascism. Gee, who would have guessed?
Mao is a common Chinese name. Unless the restaurant had a pig picture of the chairman, I doubt it was named after him.
With a nose like his, what other kind of picture could there be? 
Sorry to interrupt this right-wing circle jerk, but I would submit that the real reason Mao is occasionally seen in fashion and art in the West is because of Pop art, which concerns itself with deconstructing the modern media. Like Brillo boxes and Campbell’s soup cans in the West, portraits of Mao were mass produced and widely distributed in the East. Thus, Mao became a subject of Warhol, who used minor variations on the same repeated image to comment on the nature of mass media. Despite your paranoid fantasies, contemporary us of Mao’s portrait is not a cryptic sign of latent communism in those hipper and better looking than you, but rather a Pop art riff on a half-remembered topic that probably wasn’t really that deep to begin with.
Plus, Goddard was not a douchebag.
It does.
Great post but I guess my concern is that people in the West shouldn’t see him as such as we have full knowledge (or a fair amount of knowledge) of what he actually did. For all their faults, Cromwell and Washington were products of their time. Mao was a cruel, vicious dictator who directly or indirectly killed multiple milions of people.
I understand Mao’s the one who put the bomp in the bomp-sho-bomp-sho-bomp. Sure, he bomped a lot of people off. Who wouldn’t?
*Mao-muh-muh-Mao, muh-Mao-muh-muh-Mao, muh-muh-Mao-muh-muh-Mao
Da-dang-da-da-dang, da-dingy-dong-ding
Blue moon (blue moon, blue moon)
You saw me standing alone …*
Cite?
Urk? Please don’t toss me in with the likes of Oliver North, the Cato Institute, and the John Birch Society.
I’m not really interested in his politics, but from his filmography (except for Breathless) and criticism toward other directors, I’d have no problem tossing him in the “douchbag” category. Contempt is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, and the title apparently refers to Godard’s attitude toward the audience.
I’d say Mao was a product of his time as well; he came around at a time when the Communist ideology still held much value in the eyes of many, promising reforms from the corrupt Nationalists and representation of the peasantry, and most importantly his tactics against the invading Japanese were nothing short of brilliant. That he was also a bloodthirsty tyrant who in his later years became self-serving and power-consolidating in contradiction to many of his famous quotations doesn’t tarnish his earlier image of heroism against aggressors native and from abroad, particularly when whitewashed by an effective propaganda apparatus which edited history books in a favorable way. In that sense, he’s little different from Washington, and especially (as the Irish are well aware) the brutal, dictatorial Cromwell. We all have blood on our hands; Mao just more, and more recently.
Stranger
The official answer as to Mao, as enunciated by Comrade Deng (who is probably the real founding father of modern China), is that he was 70% right and 30% wrong. I guess that’s a reasonable answer.
The reason Chairman Mao is still respected among Chinese is the same reason the Communist Party still is - for all the corruption, the authoritarianism, and the occassional mass-killing, the lives of the average Chinese are unthinkably better than they were before the Communists came, and they have been getting better faster than at any point in history. I know that most of that is due to technology rather than heroic leadership, but the point still stands.
This is the quote I was given by one of my Chinese friends:
“In 1911, when the Kuomintang took over, China had mud, pigs, and opium. 26 years later, when the Japanese invaded, China still had mud, pigs, and opium. 26 years after the Communists took power in 1949, China had literacy, electricity, public health, and nuclear weapons.”
And Chairman Mao won the war. Without Chairman Mao, correct or not, the general consensus in China is that the CCP could not have survived the Long March or reorganized itself afterwards, and without the CCP to help the Kuomintang could not have defeated the Japanese. If the Kuomintang hadn’t defeated the Japanese, then China would be trapped in the East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and they would not be prospering from it. Whatever his sins after the war, the fact remains that he won it, he was absolutely necessary to winning it, and overall things are better for winning the war than losing it.
I do see you point but Mao wasn’t exactly a hero who was then corrupted by power. He was quite ruthless in his rise to power in the communist party and eliminated enemies with utter dispassion. George Washington did not slaughter untold millions of his own people. No matter what you may say about him he was nothing like Mao in that regard. The same can also be said about Cromwell. As an Irishman who was born and raised in Ireland I know a fair amount about Cromwell. Much of his tactics and actions were commensurate with a wartime setting and are mostly understandable if not excusable. Further, even under the protectorare he was nothing like Mao.
And no, we do all have blood on our hands. Killing several thousand in Drogheda and Dundalk is not the same as killing 30 milion plus people.
Does this version not give undue weight to the role of the Chinese over that of the Americans? Further, this same logic could be used to justify Stallin and indeed even Hitler.