The defacing of the Mao portrait in Tienanmen Square, which I saw back in my more “fellow traveling” days, calls to mind what most of us are beginning to realize. Communism, indeed leftism in general to a great extent, has shifted over from a political ideology to a religion. 
Mao is almost inarguably the greatest mass murderer in human history. An estimated twenty-thirty million deaths are on his hands, nearly all of them Chinese. And yet the Chinese themselves “religiously” guard against his image being defaced.
Mind-boggling, isn’t it? Furthermore, China today is hardly Communist at all, or even socialist. They are a kind of rigid state capitalism out to compete for all they are worth in global markets. Mao is used as an icon to preserve the perquisites of the ruling classes, which now have gone far beyond the traditional communist nomenklatura. If one were to be honest, it should be Chairman Deng, not Chairman Mao whose image dominates Tienanmen. But Mao the Mass Murder must stay, to serve his religious function. Perhaps soon there will be a resurrection from the Lenin-like tomb where he has been so meticulously embalmed.
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31 Comments
1. Mark_Belt:Only twenty to thirty million deaths? How do Uncle Joe Stalin’s numbers compare with Mousey Dung’s?
May 12, 2007 - 12:32 pm 2. Buddy Larsen:Killing their way to Utopia
May 12, 2007 - 12:49 pm 3. chuck:Do those numbers include the famine that came with the Great Leap Forward? The estimates I have seen for the total deaths due to Mao run from 40-70 million. The latter number looks so large as to be suspect, but I suppose that once we get into the tens of millions the difference is almost pendantic.
May 12, 2007 - 1:26 pm 4. Buddy Larsen:If the three great fascisms of the 20th century had had constitutions with 2nd amendments, the small cadres in Berlin, Moscow, and Peking would never have gotten such power out their small professional armies as to engineer, as they did, such continental atrocities.
May 12, 2007 - 1:37 pm 5. TomTom:There is no operational distinction to be made between political ideologies and religions. Both have True Believers, and that’s all it takes. Heck, I’d lay down my life in ultimate defense of my political ideology, and so I bet would Buddy Larsen. I would’ve been better dead than red.
May 12, 2007 - 2:59 pm 6. Buddy Larsen:yep–the cemetery or the gulag, never the Kremlin. Some things are just too ugly.
May 12, 2007 - 3:52 pm 7. Buddy Larsen:This Oleg Atbashian has star power as a journalist. This is just incredible, on the topic at hand.
May 12, 2007 - 8:20 pm 8. ajacksonian:Looking at China, its policies, problems, crony capitalism, pollution, poverty, Non-Performing Loans, and the amount of the GDP that has bad debt under it, leads to the concept that China is doing a slow motion move towards fascism. The very few property rights of individuals are controlled and those in the favor of the regime and its policies get rewarded… and those are usually least able to actually run an efficient business. In some ways the non-conscious direction of this towards fascism is harder to sustain than the 1920′-30’s conception of it as that was intrinsically supportive of Nationality and National identity. China is facing an information problem that is de-culturalizing its citizens as they move from the highly structured rural family life to the controlled but unstructured urban life. That movement and *internal* communications set-up is handing out information exchange power on a broad basis but with no underlying ethos to support it. That turns into an atmosphere of ‘anything that is not disallowed can be done’, so even with trying to shut down sites internal to the Nation that are critical to it, the information spreads and is backed up at multiple sites. Which includes cellphones, at this point in time.
Officials have gone into meetings to criticize their superiors and were told they could not say what they were saying… and the individual had already handed it out by text messaging to a few hundred of his ‘closest friends’ and it was rampant across urban China in days. Minor corruption becomes big news because the regime attempts to stifle it. Without an understanding of personal freedom and responsibility, however, the very basics of democracy do not get spread, while the utility of bashing the regime in ways that it cannot respond to move to the front.
On the industrial side this is even worse news as there are no imperatives to run businesses efficiently because the labor is not only cheap, but relatively expendable. With only minimal investment in human capital and potential, there is limited payback… why put in labor saving and enhancing devices to boost productivity when hiring on cheap labor is so much faster and easier?
A humorous side-light was running across an economics professor who has a talk on the worse job in the US: drug gang member. He had teamed up with a sociologist to do a study of the local Chicago gangs and one of the conclusions was very interesting. The gangs realized that they need a ‘board of directors’, even in a hazy way, to sort out who has what territory and what to sell and such. That is the most dangerous and least well paying job in America and even flipping burgers and McDonald’s gets more pay… and many of them *had* jobs like that, too. Considering that this represents the lowest echelon of income and education in the US, take someone from the equivalent echelon in China, which is the poor, rural farmer, and see if you can find out similar ideas on corporate structure and governance and why it is necessary….
Unconscsious shift into fascism is yielding the problems of it, stultified viewpoints and adherance to official dogma, but none of the benefits of a more coherent society and strengthening of internal bonds between people in the Nation. Add that to the NPLs and huge part of the GDP depending on that bad and unpayable debt, along with a liquifaction of social and societal bonds and the recipe is not a good one. Somehow expansionistic and hegemonistic does not come out of that mix… internal decay leading to fracturing of society looks far more likely, to me at least, than external threat. And the biggest place to watch is in the Western provinces which abut Kashmir, Pakistan, Afghanistan… a bit of a trouble spot in the world, that is. And China is neighbor to it all.
May 13, 2007 - 7:08 am 9. Captain Hate:This Oleg Atbashian has star power as a journalist. This is just incredible, on the topic at hand.
Thanks for pointing that out, Buddy; best thing that I’ve read on the interweb recently. Other than the comments here of course. His other articles are recommended also.
May 13, 2007 - 7:23 am 10. Roger:Thanks for the support of Atbashian, Buddy and C &H. We’re trying to deliver a lineup at Pajamas you can’t find elsewhere. And we’re very happy when people notice. Please pass the word.
May 13, 2007 - 9:22 am 11. Buddy Larsen:Pleasure’s all mine, and will-do–
May 13, 2007 - 10:21 am 12. markus:I was interest in Buddy’s first link, to a “commune” called Maggie’s Farm. Interesting that even though they are obviously conservative, in the contemporary usage of the term, they describe themselves as “politically centrist.”
For years, liberals ran away from the L word, while conservatives proudly proclaimed themselves to be conservatives. Are we beginning to see a shift whereby both sides are pretending to run away from the negative connotations of their ideologolical roots, and reclaim the “center.”
I wonder why that’s happening now?
May 14, 2007 - 6:35 am 13. Buddy Larsen:Offhand, I’d say because both camps have been rather successful at besmirching the other’s brand name. If liberals and conservatives both suck, how me & you being “centrists”, Markus (only I’m a “good” centrist, and you’re a “bad” centrist)?
May 14, 2007 - 7:35 am 14. markus:The Chinese revere Mao as a Chinese nationalist icon, not as a communist icon. And the present rulers of China revere him as the founder of their party. It has nothing to do with the ideology that Mao decided to adopt in the 1920’s. If you want to meet a “Maoist” in the ideological sense, you certainly won’t find them in China. You need to go to Nepal, or Peru, or certain cities and college campuses in the United States and Europe.
Buddy — I think that George W. and the Republican Congressional leadership over the past few years have given conservativism a bad name, alientating both conservatives and self-described independants and moderates.
Sullivan, a self-described “conservative”, has written an interesting article on this topic, and how it affects the Romney and Giuliani campaigns:
May 14, 2007 - 8:00 am 15. Buddy Larsen:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/andrew_sullivan/article1781399.ece
I could pick at that, markus, but for now will only say that you have something of a point, and that that point relates more to a “narrative” than to the facts.
And also, that it’s no great compliment for the Dem party to be so regarded that it suffers so little from underperformance on the ethics front. The reciprocal to that of course is that the “clean” party rightfully suffers, for brooking even the ad-hoc (as opposed to systemic) corruption in its camp.
May 14, 2007 - 10:21 am 16. Captain Hate:“Sullivan, a self-described “conservative”, ”
Randy Andy has gotten a lot of mileage out of that self-description but I’m not buying it. He’s fixated on a single issue which should really define his entire “philosophy”. Plus I think he calls himself a conservative so that all his journalism friends can claim to know one.
May 14, 2007 - 3:30 pm 17. Buddy Larsen:i think he’s a “conservative” because he was pro-OIF for a few minutes once upon a time.
May 14, 2007 - 4:28 pm 18. markus:Sullivan enthusisatically supported the ‘01 tax cuts, HOPING they would blow a whole in the deficit and thus restrain spending. He’s extremely hostile to government intervention in the health care. He was an eager early supporter of OIF as Buddy points out, and is still more angry that the operatiion has failed than the fact it was attempted in the first place. He’s your basic garden-variety libertarian.
May 15, 2007 - 7:01 am 19. Buddy Larsen:You left out a few words, markus. Between “has” and “failed” please add “according to markus”.
May 15, 2007 - 8:20 am 20. mint_tea:“indeed leftism in general to a great extent, has shifted over from a political ideology to a religion”
Just wow. Yes – universal healthcare, safeguarding of worker rights, the minimum wage, these things are religion, as demonstrated by the defacing of the Mao portrait in Tiananmen!
So I figured I ought to get a taste of what PJM was all about, despite my past aversion. I open Roger L. Simon’s page and stumble upon this little morsel.
Where to even begin?
“The defacing of the Mao portrait in Tienanmen Square, which I saw back in my more “fellow traveling” days, calls to mind what most of us are beginning to realize.”
No! No, it doesn’t. Imagine the reaction if Lincoln’s statue in Washington were defaced. Or if Ataturk’s portrait in his mausoleum was defaced. That is ALL this is, not some earth-shattering indication that leftism is a religion.
“Mao is almost inarguably the greatest mass murderer in human history.”
Alright. Based on this parochial blog post, you obviously have no idea what China’s history was like before Mao took over. For nightmarish decades, China was ruled by tens (possibly hundreds) of horrifically corrupt and brutal warlords, underneath the even more corrupt Guomindang.
Mao was no saint, his later years were a disaster, but he laid the concrete foundations of a unified, stable, secure country.
Unlike many of your PJM cohorts, you seem like a nice guy. But I shiver to think that this is passed off as wisdom, or that you were/are a hollywood screenwriter.
I am reminded of a certain hollywood actor, who was the most stunningly shallow person I have ever met.
May 15, 2007 - 10:07 am 21. Buddy Larsen:Mint_tea, that China is successful today in no way automatically validates Mao’s rule. That’s like saying a healthy cancer patient who has fought his disease into remission, is better off for having had the cancer. It just ain’t so.
China as late as the 60s was still having deadly famines related to “bad weather” ruining the latest “5 year plan”. These famines involved thousands of people starving to death, while meanwhile the free world was enjoying the Beatles and landing on the Moon.
With almost any form of government besides Mao’s, the country would’ve certainly fed it’s people–and modernized generally–far sooner than it did. Why anyone would want to apologize for the likes of Mao, is, all due respect, beyond me.
May 15, 2007 - 11:22 am 22. Buddy Larsen:You might as well thank Adolf Hitler for creating Israel. It’s bizarrely wrong-thinking.
The error is in the static analysis. It’s the same error that the left makes invariably on every issue–including the universal health care, worker’s rights, and minimum wage items you mention above.
The error expresses itself in your obvious believe in historical determinism (which in any event conflicts diametrically with the ‘great man’ theory of history); that because things were as they were, they could’ve been no other way.
FYI, the future will work that way too –unmoored utterly from the ‘inevitability’ of Marxist analysis. It always has, so far–a fact which for the life of me I cannot understand why the left ignores. Unless the left–and this may be seen in the physical fences around the flow of movement of people and information inside the “worker’s paradise”–the left is not “for” the people after all, but rather just “for” their control.
May 15, 2007 - 11:59 am 23. mint_tea:“With almost any form of government besides Mao’s, the country would’ve certainly fed it’s people–and modernized generally–far sooner than it did.”
This is an outrageous statement.
You have absolutely no way of knowing whether this is true.
And I wish it *was* true. I wish that democracies always outperformed dictatorships as well.
But in the real world, authoritarian, evil China has consistently outperformed quasi-democratic India, raising living standards for a billion people. Despite India having started off with a better British-developed infrastructure.
You don’t have to “apologize” for Mao to acknowledge the enormity of the Chinese Communist accomplishment. After years of famine, division, and utter chaos, they defeated a kleptocratic dictatorship (Chiang Kai-Shek) to finally bring unity, peace and stability to a destroyed nation.
May 15, 2007 - 12:20 pm 24. mint_tea:“These famines involved thousands of people starving to death, while meanwhile the free world was enjoying the Beatles and landing on the Moon.”
Seriously?
What on earth would possess you to believe that under some alternative form of government, China in the 1960’s could be enjoying the Beatles or a moon landing?
Certainly 1960’s India wasn’t enjoying the Beatles or a moon landing.
Given the sad, bombed-out state of 1949 China, only a Chuck Norris or Brian Boitano-led government could lead them to this level of affluence by the 1960’s. And Brian Boitano wasn’t skating at the time.
May 15, 2007 - 12:37 pm 25. Buddy Larsen:Oh, jeez, NOT the Brian Boitano argument. I surrender. Except, my hero Claire Chennault thought Chung Kai-Shek was the berries, because he didn’t murder 20, 30, 50 million innocent people. But, ya can’t have everything, i guess. Like you said, Brian Boitano wasn’t even skating yet.
May 15, 2007 - 12:54 pm 26. Buddy Larsen:But, mint_tea, I’m a China-phile. Don’t much like the gov’t’s residual ChiCom faction, but the people are just great–for starters, they’re keeping world inflation down almost by their lonesomes.
Funny that you think the form of gov’t has little to do with eco progress, since Chinese technology was the world leader for a thousand or so years, until bad gov’t set ‘em back a few centuries ago.
The Shanghai stock market is fueling a monster boom, alright–the index is up 50% in ‘07, and 60% above its 200 day moving average. Great work, for PRC AND the world.
Mao, though, would’ve put a bullet in anyone’s head, who ever mentioned a stock market.
May 15, 2007 - 1:14 pm 27. Buddy Larsen:Given the sad, bombed-out state of 1949 China, only a Chuck Norris or Brian Boitano-led government could lead them to this level of affluence by the 1960’s
’splain Japan & Germany, then, Einstein. Bombed out orders of magnitude flatter than the relatively light war damage to several Chinese coastal cities, but fully in the prosperous ‘first-world’ by the 60s.
Wot was the big diff wit China? Hmmm…couldn’t have been Mao, could it?
May 15, 2007 - 1:25 pm 28. Buddy Larsen:How ’bout Pol Pot? “Misunderstood” too?
May 15, 2007 - 1:27 pm 29. mint_tea:Please, I LOVE me some Pol Pot. I will not hear the bad-mouthing of Pol Pot.
The other day some salsa spilled on my Pol Pot shrine (ok, splattered), and from that I extrapolated that polpotology, and to a greater extent liberalism in general, has morphed into Vibeology. Paula Abdul never had it so good.
May 15, 2007 - 2:00 pm 30. Buddy Larsen:Okay, you’re right, we’re all dingalings without the slightest understanding of what we’re talking about. Mmm…Paula abdul….
May 15, 2007 - 2:17 pm 31. Captain Hate:“He was an eager early supporter of OIF as Buddy points out, and is still more angry that the operatiion has failed than the fact it was attempted in the first place.”
Yes, Nancy supported it for about a nanosecond before Abu Ghraib got sand in the thongs of all his NYT buds, and *poof* went his support. Did it ever make it deeper than his epidermis? Plus the GWOT isn’t nearly as important to the nation as gay marriage in Silly Sully’s mind.
May 15, 2007 - 3:09 pm