For all its brutalities and failures, communism in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe and elsewhere delivered rapid industrialisation, mass education, job security and huge advances in social and gender equality. It encompassed genuine idealism and commitment, captured even by critical films and books of the post-Stalin era such as Wajda's Man of Marble and Rybakov's Children of the Arbat. Its existence helped to drive up welfare standards in the west, boosted the anticolonial movement and provided a powerful counterweight to western global domination.
It is mostly the usual tripe from communist apologists: we were wonderful idealists, so all those millions who died from torture, from communist created famine, from starvation and exposure after the communists put them in labor camps or exiled them to Siberia, well, don't look at that man behind the curtain.
But as one would expect from an apologist for mass murder, there are little dishonest games going on. For example:
[Swedish MP Göran] Lindblad and the Council of Europe adopt as fact the wildest estimates of those "killed by communist regimes" (mostly in famines) from the fiercely contested Black Book of Communism, which also underplays the number of deaths attributable to Hitler. The real records of repression now available from the Soviet archives are horrific enough (799,455 people were recorded as executed between 1921 and 1953 and the labour camp population reached 2.5 million at its peak) without engaging in an ideologically-fuelled inflation game.
(The report Milne is quoting is here.) I loved that parenthetical reference to famines, as if those do not count, being just the result of bad weather and all.
He is also more than a tad disingenuous about Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's biography of Mao.
[T]his is the 50th anniversary of Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin and the subsequent Hungarian uprising, which will doubtless be the cue for further excoriation of the communist record. The ground has been well laid by a determined rewriting of history since the collapse of the Soviet Union that has sought to portray 20thcentury communist leaders as monsters equal to or surpassing Hitler in their depravity - and communism and fascism as the two greatest evils of history's bloodiest era. The latest contribution was last year's bestselling biography of Mao by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, keenly endorsed by George Bush and dismissed by China specialists as "bad history" and "misleading".
The Bush reference is of course boilerplate, for the benefit of the creepy Guardian readers who hate Bush but offer up regular apologetics for Stalin and Mao. But the reference to "China specialists is dishonesty of the sort you might expect for an apologist for Soviet butchery. Curiously, the China specialist who reviewed the book for the Guardian, Michael Yahuda, started his review this way.
The author of Wild Swans and her historian husband, Jon Halliday, have torn away the many masks and falsehoods with which Mao and the Communist party of China to this day have hidden the true picture of Mao the man and Mao the ruler. Mao now stands revealed as one of the greatest monsters of the 20th century alongside Hitler and Stalin. Indeed, in terms of sheer numbers of deaths for which he responsible, Mao, with some 70 million, exceeded both.
Milne is correct that the book has been criticized by professional historians. But the Guardian's own story on the controversy points out what is and what is not at issue:
There are elements in the story on which there is general agreement. Nor do the book's critics deny that Mao was a monster. But a 14-page review article to appear next month in the China Journal, by Gregor Benton of Cardiff University and Steve Tsang of St Antony, Oxford, contends that the methods used by the authors 'make for bad history and worse biography'.
Andrew Nathan of Columbia set off the debate in the LRB with a review last month, headed 'Jade and Plastic'. He acknowledged that the 'unknown stories' in the book 'if true, will be big news for historians'. But he said it was difficult to know which of the multiple sources often given for an event were relevant. He claimed, 'that many of Chang and Halliday's claims are based on distorted, misleading or far-fetched use of evidence.'
So, the critics do not contest the claim that Mao murdered millions, contrary to Milne's implication. What are they disputing?
The academic critics have focused on around 20 specific events where the book provides a fresh account of events, including its sensational claim that the Chinese Nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek, intentionally let the Red Army escape on the historic Long March of 1934-5 when Mao led his communist forces across China to a safe haven in the north. . . .
Dispute also surrounds the book's account of the battle of Luding Bridge, during the March, celebrated in communist lore as a heroic feat by the Red Army.
Andrew Nathan, the first critic, after complaining about sourcing, summarizes his complaint about the book this way:
Of course Mao deserves harsh moral judgment. Too many previous accounts of his life, awed by his achievements, have overlooked their human cost. But this portrayal impedes serious moral judgment. A caricature Mao is too easy a solution to the puzzle of modern China’s history. What we learn from this history is that there are some very bad people: it would have been more useful, as well as closer to the truth, had we been shown that there are some very bad institutions and some very bad situations, both of which can make bad people even worse, and give them the incentive and the opportunity to do terrible things.
In short, Milne takes a dispute about sourcing, and about issues such as Mao's Marxism and his military prowess, and tries to pass it off as a suggestion that serious China scholars doubt that Mao was a monster.Posted by sjostrom on February 16, 2006 06:45 AM
