Useful idiots abroad
June 21st, 2010
Mao has a pretty good rep for a mass-murderer. If, heaven forbid, he was still with us, and had a cut of his international T-shirt sales, he’d be a richer man. He gets a pass from all the right-thinking people, and has, since his heyday of tyranny. But more on that in a minute.
I’ve been savouring the 600-page biography of the Great Helmsman by Jung Chang, a gift from the ever-reliable, ever-generous Mr.K. Savouring might not be the right word to describe the story of a maniacal psychopath, but it is instructive. It should be required reading at DFAIT (Department of Foreign Affairs, etc., etc.), but don’t hold your breath.
If you consider making Stalin look benign an accomplishment, Mao was accomplished. Each chapter speaks to his single-minded ruthlessness. In fact, his success can largely be attributed to the fact that he was simply more ruthless than his contemporaries.
The book is fairly easy going – I’m a slow reader – but I want to highlight one part for you, one I had to re-read. I had to re-read it not because it was badly written or obtuse, just because it was almost unimaginable.
Some publicity, but not much has been given to the famines which occurred under Mao’s regime. The recent, definitive study by Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng cites 36 million deaths from starvation. What Chang’s biography makes unequivocally clear is that the famines were caused by Mao’s policies, specifically his “Superpower program” in which he wanted to make a world power of China over a few years beginning in the 1950’s. He particularly coveted nuclear weapons, and was willing to do almost anything to get them. He also dreamed of supplanting the Soviet Union as the leading nation in the Communist bloc.
To achieve these aims he had precious little to exchange, except for food. Thus began the ruthless requisition and export of food, until literally millions of people were starving. Chang repeatedly reveals Mao’s callous contempt for the suffering of the peasantry with quotes like this one: “Peasants are hiding food … and are very bad. There is no Communist spirit in them! Peasants are after all peasants. That’s the only way they can behave …” During the height of the famine, an estimated 10 million kilograms of grain was used to make ethyl alcohol for use in the nuclear program. Chinese food exports allowed countries East Germany to end rationing for the first time since WWII.
The famine peaked in 1960, spreading from the countryside into the cities. The Black Book of Communism refers to numerous outbreaks of cannibalism - where parents sold children between villages to provide the meat some anonymity.
Then came the passage I had to re-read. While peasants were resorting to murder and cannibalism, in the cities, people were “told to eat ‘food substitutes’. One was a green roe-like substance called Chlorella, which grew in urine and contained some protein. Chou En-lai tasted and approved this disgusting stuff, it soon provided a high proportion of the urban population’s protein.” How far, from that, is it to the Soylent Corporation?
Even an apologist for the regime, Han Suyin, reported that urban housewives were getting an average of 1200 calories a day during this period. Chang notes that slave labourers at Auschwitz got between 1300 and 1700 calories per day.
It is into this horrendous maelstrom that Pierre Trudeau, with his fellow traveller Jacques Hebert walked in 1960, and recorded in their book - Two Innocents in Red China. As the title of this blog entry suggests, “innocents” might be too soft a term to describe them. As Jung Chang describes, most foreigners refused to visit China at this time, having at least an inkling of what was going on. Trudeau and Hebert, along with Francois Mitterrand, were exceptions; and dismissed reports of the famine.
It is certain the two “innocents” were deliberately misled by the Chinese, but it’s also clear (unlike others) they were ready, willing and able to be duped. More astonishing is Hebert’s continued endorsement of his original work, having attended the Shanghai launch of the Chinese language version in 2005. Accompanying him was Sacha Trudeau, demonstrating a similarly astonishing ignorance of history and/or lack of judgment.
They are, of course, far from alone. A gratuitous quote from Mao appeared in, of all things, a MacLean’s article on the World Cup. One wonders what the response would be if Mr. Marche had dropped an aphorism from Mein Kampf into his piece. Far from being rehabilitated, Mao clearly has never gone out of favour with many right-thinkers. Unlike the Holocaust, there is no need to deny the slaughter, it is just never mentioned or simply, deliberately, never learned.
Perhaps it’s a manifestation of the famous Stalin quote “One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.” The reality of the Maoist crimes - eating human flesh and scum from urine ponds - simply cannot register in the mind of the soft Left. But as we’ve seen, even if they could comprehend it, they wouldn’t want to. So the Mao myth persists. Chang finishes her book with these words:
“Today, Mao’s portrait and his corpse still dominate Tiananmen Square in the heart of the Chinese capital. The current Communist regime declares itself to be Mao’s heir and fiercely perpetuates the myth of Mao.”
