"Mao: The Unknown Story" by Jung
Chang and Jon Halliday.
Posted on 10/21/2005 3:26:22 AM PDT by Pharmboy
"Mao: The Unknown Story" by Jung
Chang and Jon Halliday.
It has become fashionable to look at Hitler and Stalin as the twin monsters of 20th-century history. Entire volumes (like Alan Bullock's "Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives" and Richard Overy's "The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia") have examined these two tyrants through the lens of the compare-and-contrast school of history writing, and much ink has been spilled debating which of them was worse - never mind that such debates seem beside the point, indeed offensive, given the fact that both men were responsible for the deaths of millions upon millions of people.
In their new book, "Mao: The Unknown Story," Jung Chang and Jon Halliday make an impassioned case for Mao as the most monstrous tyrant ever. They argue that he was responsible for "well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other 20th-century leader," and they argue that "he was more extreme than Hitler or Stalin" in that he envisioned a brain-dead, "completely arid society, devoid of civilization, deprived of representation of human feelings, inhabited by a herd with no sensibility, which would automatically obey his orders."
... Their hefty if tendentious and one-dimensional book contains a plethora of valuable new information that helps flesh out the record of devastation left by this heinous tyrant.
...The authors write that "close to 38 million people died of starvation and overwork" during the Great Leap Forward and an accompanying famine. This, they contend, was a result not of economic mismanagement but of cold political calculus. They argue, further, that Mao launched his deadly Cultural Revolution as a means of purging those officials (like his No. 2, Liu Shao-chi) who had dared to question his catastrophic Great Leap Forward policies.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Yep...it was only those dumb Republicans that Mao fooled.
Blam, I included you since this is almost anthropology.
Has the NY Times always called Mao a monster?
I've read it. Some of the tales are barely believable. Those from the "red-zones" plumb the deepest depths of human depravity.
Truth is stranger and fiction.
Mao was also a big time pedophile.
Wow...who thought it could get worse? Did the Monster Mao go after little boys or little girls?
You have to read the 11/3 issue of The New York Review Of Books (not posted on the net yet) where Jonathan Spence reviews this book. He still tries to justify his position.
I love reading these elitist dopes, because each one tries to out liberal the other one. An added bonus in the same issue is a review of a biography of Willie Munzenberg, the so called red millionaire. The conclusion that all these hot shot libs arrive at is that their beloved communist revolution failed because in the most part the main players had major character flaws; they don't make them like the beloved Vladimir Ilyich Lenin anymore.
Girls.
So I guess now commie-ism failed because of the leaders' character flaws, whereas before it failed because they just hadn't gotten it right.
"...he envisioned a brain-dead, "completely arid society, devoid of civilization, deprived of representation of human feelings, inhabited by a herd with no sensibility, which would automatically obey his orders."
...this is exactly the way hillary feels...
remember mao was her biggest influence in her college years.
i wonder though if hillary likes little boys or little girls?
after bill, i'd say girls
"Has the NY Times always called Mao a monster?"
Good question. One still wonders about their complicity with their bootlicking Walter Duranty. Had "Stalin's Apologist" brought out what was really happening there how might things have been different. It does seem a shift that they would even review something that "smeared" their heros.
Not all that unusual in China. Without lapsing into the near pornographic suffice to say there is a well established, if not well publicized, tradition of 'older gentlemen' umm, receiving favors from very young girls. This was supposed to be one of the supreme erotic pleasures , right up there with the bound foot. Go figure,. Every society produces its own curious sociopathic activities.
I don't need that book to tell me that Mao was one of the worst. If you count it by the lives that were lost, he was worse than Hitler and Stalin. But the same thing can be argued about the Khmer Rouge, who at least comes in at a fourth place on the shortlist. But that is history, we have to remember that we have a "Mao" still breathing in North Korea: Kim Jong Il. How many deaths he and his father Kim Il Sung is responsible for is unknown, but I'm shure it's over a million (kz-camps, starvation...). And that is happening today...
"I've read it. Some of the tales are barely believable."
Wow, I'm impressed you've read this book already. Whatever its failings it's getting some amazing coverage in the MSM. I actually heard the authors interviewed on NPR the other day. Based on that I can easily believe the book is tendentious, the woman is very much that way. But it is easy to get tendentious when you go against the ignorant and entrenched liberal mindset that grants respect to slime such as Mao and Castro.
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I think Mao's early success was largely due to Chiang Kai-Shek's failure, in that he didn't respond strongly to Japan's "acts" against the Chinese. From that point forward it was socialism and failure. Just compare Taiwan to China.
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