I feel lucky that I’m not big on hero worship, religious or secular. Unlike Bob Dylan, I don’t believe we all have to “serve somebody.” But there’s no denying the human need to follow leaders of some sort. This report on Sunni Arabs applauding Saddam on television yesterday is creepy. But this one on Chinese revering Mao in a new era of “Red Tourism” is downright scary. Apparently the Chinese masses don’t realize the Great Helmsman knocked off fifty million or so of their own, give or take the population of Texas. He’s just a jolly old figure in a blue cap. Part of the reason, I suppose, is willed ignorance but part is also that such works as Jung Chang’s Mao: the Unknown Story are banned in China. [Maybe Google will scan it and make it available to them on line.-ed. I'm waiting.] The results are opinions like this one expressed to The Independent’s reporter at the end of his article:
People seem puzzled when I ask if they like Mao. “Of course we do,” says one woman. “All Chinese people like Mao Tse-Tung. He is the Chairman and the new China was built by him.”
Deng Xaioping might have had something to say about that.
It’s the same attitude one sees from millions of elderly (and not so elderly peasant) Russians, ie We Russians are incompetent at governing ourselves, we’re lazy and fractious and if left to our own devices would slaughter each other if we all didn’t die of drink first. Ergo, Stalin. If he didn’t exist, etc…
We should never forget that the American passion for self-government, and extraordinary success in achieving and upholding self-government over centuries, is a freak in history. Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor was probably closer to the truth on this– at least as regards peasant societies and one-generation-removed-for-the-farm peasant societies like today’s China and yesterday’s Russia.
Roger-
First time commenter here. I live in the PRC, and the consistent Mao worship despite his misdeeds has never ceased to amaze me. Even those Chinese brave enough to share their criticisms of the current regime with me still hold Mao in high regard.
I’ll take a stab at an answer, judging from what I’ve learned in over one year here.
Mao’s accession to power in 1949 ended more than a century of international humiliation for the Chinese, as foreign powers gained greater and greater influence. Mao was also a tougher foe of the hated Japanese than his opponent Chiang Kai-Shek, who seemed more intent on defeating the Communists than on defeating the invading island neighbor.
After his death, Deng proclaimed (famously) that Mao was 70% correct, and 30% incorrect. Most believe these delinations were chronological- after all, many suspect Mao had lost the plot by 1958.
The 30% represents, presumably, The Great Leap Forward and The Cultural Revolution, disastrous that Chinese people universally condemn. However, Mao even escaped full responsibility for those sins, unlike his ill-fated wife and the rest of The Gang of Four.
So- Mao became a hero for uniting China, and it’s difficult for his “children” to vilify him too much for his subsequent sins. I suspect that by questioning Mao too much, they’d have to question whether or not they’d be better off if he never took power- something they simply cannot do.
Sorry for the long-windedness- hope this sheds a bit of light.
He may be an oppressor, but at least he’s our oppressor.
It’s amazing how totalitarian mass murderers of the left get a pass, presumably because “their intentions were good.”
In Saddam’s case, this modern day King John seems to be lucky in his enemies. If a democrat president were pursuing this war, the coverage would be unrecognizable from what it is now.
The Sunni are just backing up their kinsman.
The interesting thing is that if anyone, Sunni or Kurd or Shai had been that public in their denunciation of Saddam they would have ended up in one of the numerous mass graves in the Iraqi country side.
No public displays for them.
As is typical of a ruling class they feel the rules that apply to others are there for them to violate.
It will take awhile for them to realize they do not run things in Iraq anymore.
It doesn’t surprise me that some Sunnis would applaude Saddam. It’s common for dictators to play one group against the others, offering them benefits that are denied to everyone else. This is especially true when the dictator comes from a relative minority group within the country. For example, in the Philippines, Marcos had plenty of supporters because he cut them into the action. Saddam did the same with his Sunni countrymen. Of course, they’d like the good times to continue to roll. That’s why so many of them weren’t in favor of the new constitution. We’ll see how the vote turns out in a few days.
Now, if the Sunnis keep supporting the insurgents, then they’re setting themselves up for the mother of all paybacks.
I would take the applause with a grain of salt. When Western reporters and, better yet, cameras are present, they induce reaction shots guaranteed to freak out the Americans. It’s getting old hat–sometimes they even show the “protestor” laughing after he gives a raised fist denunciation of Amerikka.
The New York Times Book Review has a front-page review of Jung Chang’s Mao bio, by one Nicholas D. Kristof.
Surprisingly for anything published by the Times, he addresses Mao’s bloodthirsty career in pretty frank terms. But his grand conclusion is right in line with the paper’s party line: yea, Mao was an unspeakable tyrant, but he did Good Things too. Probably made the trains run on time while he was at it.
William F. Buckley once wrote about an African tribe watching a movie. The plot dealt with the citizens overturning the dictatorial rule of their leader. At the end, the tyrant defeats this attempt at liberty—and the audience begins to cheer! It turned out that these tribal members believed in a strong leader who forces everyone around him to obey. This was considered to be the ideal situation for a viable social order.
Democracy demands maturity and a willingness to stand on one
thibaud:It’s the same attitude one sees from millions of elderly (and not so elderly peasant) Russians
True, but let’s not allow the intellectuals off the hook either. As John Lukacs and others have pointed out the early neocons waited a heck of a long time to fall out with communism, long after it was known many millions were killed.
I’d say intellectuals are more likely to excuse totalitarianism than ordinary people – at least here in the West. To most intellectuals and journalists the Cuban exiles are seen as the fascists, not the dictator in Havana. It wasn’t the ordinary people on both sides of the Atlantic that mourned the (deserved) deaths of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg but the supposedly educated crowd. Just recently Christopher Hitchens has been defending the Viet Cong calling it a liberation movement. It might well have been in terms of removing a foreign power but life would certainly have been better in South Vietnam if the Americans had won – just look at the two Koreas.
It’s true that the masses (especially in non-Western societies and Russia) often prefer a strong man. I can understand that, to a degree, especially when you see the kind of chaos there is in some parts of the Third World. The average Sunni minority looking at the history of the ME is understandably anxious about the future. But what excuses do pampered middle and upper class Western intellectuals have for their romantic attachment to Che, Fidel, and the rest of them?