Tuesday, June 07, 2005

Mao More Than Ever

Others have tried to historicize Chairman Mao, but it looks like someone has finally written a book that will put him in the pantheon of tyrants like Stalin and Hitler, where he's pretty much always belonged.
The excuse with Mao has always been that he didn't know about things like the massive rice famine that killed millions, or the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. Husband and wife Jung Chang and Jon Halliday assert instead that Mao was a sadist who took particular pleasure in the suffering of others.

From the Review:
"Mao had none of the skills usually associated with a successful revolutionary leader. He was no orator and he lacked either idealism or a clear ideology. He was not even a particularly good organiser. But he was driven by a personal lust for power. He came to dominate his colleagues through a mixture of blackmail and terror. And he seems to have enjoyed every minute of it. Indeed what he learned from his witnessing of a peasant uprising in his home province of Hunan in 1927 was that he derived a sadistic pleasure from seeing people put to death in horrible ways and generally being terrified. During the Cultural Revolution he watched films of the violence and of colleagues being tortured."

I've never been convinced by the books that argue something like, "Mao wasn't a tyrant; in fact, he had no idea that 60 million were killed during his reign. He was just writing poetry." It's high time that history remembers him as the monster he was.

No comments: