Something quite miraculous happened today. For the first time in as many years as I can remember, George W. Bush chose the right diplomatic move to make.
I don’t think the news is highly consequential, but the fact that I approve of something this President has done on the global politics front seems itself remarkable enough to be noteworthy.
I just finished a powerful, mind-bending history book, Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang (a Chinese novelist) and Jon Halliday (an American writer and historian). This thick but highly readable book chronicles Mao Zedong’s entire life, from his humble beginnings as a student, librarian and bookseller to his death in 1976. According to this book, it doesn’t matter how monstrous you thought Chairman Mao was; he was worse than that. The book reads like a diatribe, but the scholarship is persuasive. I did some fact-checking, and it appears that Chang and Halliday are simply laying out the sad truth: the political career of Mao Zedong was one of the great frauds of modern history.
The most surprising finding in this book is that Mao, who was never popular or highly regarded by his political peers during the Communist rise to power, ascended to party leadership by consistently sabotaging his partners. Mao was a ruthless “master player”, always looking beyond his organization’s immediate goals to calculate the long-term effects a military defeat or victory would have on his own position within the team. Chang and Halliday provide evidence that Mao regularly forced changes in battle plans or retreat plans, often with disastrous results, so as to deny his “comrades” great victories. This is most pronounced during the famous “Long March”, in which terrible decisions were made at great human cost, diminishing the size and strength of the escaping Chinese Communist Party until it was weak and fractured enough for Mao to begin to emerge as the party’s leader.
Sabotage seems to have been the sharpest tool in Mao’s toolbox, and he betrayed the trust of his colleagues over and over during his long career. I’ll never think of the Korean War the same way again, for instance; I’d always understood that the Chinese and North Koreans were close partners in this conflict, but Chang and Halliday lay out a strong case that Mao allowed North Korea to suffer a disastrous loss in a successful bid to raise China’s global profile and gain access to weapons.
The most upsetting part of the book deals with the agricultural collectivization project known as the “Great Leap Forward”, which caused the deaths of tens of millions of peasants from 1958 to 1961. Here, Mao’s personal perversity is clearly visible; he is unabashedly proud to have managed to have caused such extreme suffering and death, as if this proves his power and his determination. In an almost comic coda to this disaster (which was finally eased after other Chinese Communist politicians bravely defied Mao to end the horror), we see Mao reaching out to heads of state in Iron Curtain-era Eastern Europe by advising them to torment their own populations as successfully as he has in China. Not surprisingly, even the communist leaders of Eastern Europe found Mao’s instructions unappealing, except for the leaders of Albania, who fell for it.
I’m planning to read more about the Chinese peasant genocide of 1958-1961. As I read these chapters, the word “slavery” kept popping into my head. That’s the clearest description of what China’s government achieved during this program: a handful of coastal leaders managed to turn the world’s most populous country into a slave society. It’s quite frightening to see how easily this was achieved.
On an existential or psychological level, a portrait of Mao emerges. He was brave, ambitious and quite smart. He appeared to be a happy and lustful person, without a shred of idealism or humane warmth. Indeed, he mocked and denigrated anyone in his orbit who expressed idealistic or romantic notions, and this ability to undercut the idealism of his “revolutionary” party served him well.
The Dalai Lama bitterly referred to Mao Zedong as his “greatest teacher”, since Mao taught him how venal and destructive a single human being can possibly be. Based on this book, I’ve still got some learning to do.
Our inquiry into the meaning of “genocide” continues. Yesterday we looked at the most common template for genocide, in which a “suspect” minority is attacked in time of war. The Armenian massacre, the Jewish Holocaust and the Rwandan massacre all fit this pattern, and so do the the horrifying crimes Saddam Hussein committed against Kurds in northern Iraq during the final years of the Iran-Iraq War. Recent genocidal disasters in the former Yugoslavia (involving Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Croatia, Kosovo and Albania) fit this pattern as well, and so does the genocide currently raging in civil-war torn Darfur.
But it’s too early to conclude that war is the necessary and sufficient explanation for genocide, because (strangely enough) the two worst genocides of the last hundred years contradict this thesis completely. The two worst recorded genocides of all time took place during peacetime, and were targeted against utterly placid and defenseless people. I’m speaking of the two forced famines that decimated the peasantry of Russia in the 1930’s and the peasantry of China in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, and of the two incredible monsters who committed these acts. Ladies and gentleman, meet the two champions in the all time pantheon of bureaucratic murder: Joseph Stalin (7 million deaths in 2 years) and Mao Zedong (20 to 30 million deaths in 3 years).
Unlike the Jews or Armenians of Europe or Tutsis of Rwanda, the victims of the vast Russian and Chinese genocides never had the catharsis of victory or judgement against their persecutors. Joseph Stalin decimated his nation’s population and went on to rule as the Great Father of Russia for 20 more years until his death in 1953. Chairman Mao decimated his nation’s population and went on to rule as the mystical oracle of China for 25 more years until his death in 1976. Neither nation has ever mourned for its sins. You think Turkey is in denial? Let’s talk about China if you want to talk about denial …
But let’s start with Russia and Joseph Stalin, because his holocaust came first. Stalin, newly powerful as the sole leader of the fledgling Communist nation, embarked in 1931 on an aggressive program of farm collectivization designed to “increase productivity” and erase bourgouis notions of private ownership across the Russian countryside. Collectivization was a Marxist ideal, but in Stalin’s perverse hands the idealistic project never had a chance, because the farmers were essentially transformed into slaves.
They could not keep up with required yields, and the result was a national starvation. It’s not clear to what extent the government leaders in Moscow cared that the great agricultural project had failed, and to what extent they were actively scheming to trim their population by forced famine.
Thirty years later this pattern repeated itself almost exactly in China, which also suffered from economic problems due to population excess. The similarities between Russia’s “Five Year Plan” and China’s “Great Leap Forward” are quite stunning, though Mao’s scale was significantly larger.
Fifteen years later, yet another Communist dictator, Pol Pot of Cambodia, carried out a program of genocide against his own population that also resembled the Russian and Chinese atrocities. Victims were estimated at 1.7 million.
The Stalin/Mao/Pol Pot template — genocide for population control — provides a strong contrast to the more common war-based genocide template we discussed yesterday.
Despite the strong contrast, though, one principle stands: genocide always serves a functional purpose. Whether the purpose is economic (Russia, China, Cambodia) or military/strategic (Turkey, Nazi Europe, Iraq, the Balkans, Rwanda, Darfur), genocides don’t happen by accident. Genocides happen because governments plan them.
Comments welcome again … and I’ll write another installment on this topic tomorrow.
