22 October 2014

Book Review: Mao: the Unknown Story (2005) by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday

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This huge biography of Mao Tse-tung (Zedong) is very well researched – 12 years in the making, interviewing scores of people who were on the scene in Mao’s circle as well as people connected with him from around the world, and consulting numerous archives.  Author Jung Chang was a teenage Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution (aka, the Great Purge), and her parents were both longtime cadres of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).  Her husband Jon Halliday is an Irish historian. 
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Mao Tse-tung comes out as an even more twisted mass murderer of civilians than I had thought.  In terms of sheer body count, he was worse than Stalin and Hitler -- combined -- and is without a doubt the top killer of all time.  Their evidence in this book caused R.J. Rummel – the renowned authority on “death by government,” i.e., the murder of civilians by their own government – to upgrade (to actually double) Mao’s murder count to well over 70 million Chinese citizens deliberately killed by his policies.  These were not war casualties; they were deaths of civilians by calculated government actions (such as deliberate famine, labor camps and torture as well as executions) with Mao in command.  It is a horror story, made worse because of its reality. 
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If Machiavelli had lived during the mid-20th century, he would have presented Mao as his prime example of power-by-all-devious-means, rather than Cesare Borgia.  Mao had an evil genius for power plays combined with a total lack of humaneness enabling him to follow through. 
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I heartily recommend this book, with one important caveat:  It does not mention the gross atrocities of Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist (KMT) enemy of Mao (and an ally of the USA) who retreated to Taiwan in 1949.  According to R.J. Rummel’s research program into civilian “death by government,” Chiang ranks number four among the all-time mass murders by government leaders, behind Mao (with over 70 million deaths), Stalin (with around 40 million), and Hitler (with around 20 million).  Rummel estimates Chiang’s number of killings to be 10 million Chinese civilians.  That is hard to ignore or sweep under the rug, but our authors do it. 
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Major myths surrounding Mao are exploded in this book.  E.g.: during the Long March, Mao didn’t march; he was actually carried on a litter, a sedan chair, by others for most of the march.  Mao was ignorant of most military strategy, and the way he wasted tens of thousands of his own Red Army soldiers was appalling.  He would frequently waste the lives of enormous numbers of troops solely to jockey himself into a better position of power over his rivals in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).  He routinely instituted terror for population control.  He was a monster who never thought twice about killing huge numbers of humans. 
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Red China (the PRC) and the CCP were creations of the USSR, and the documentation is here.  Soviet military intelligence (GRU) consistently aided the CCP with organizational guidance, with important intel, with technology, and arms.  Moscow consistently backed Mao, amongst all the other CCP leaders whom they had trained, because of Mao’s willingness to use extreme brutality, unspeakable tortures and killings.  Mao always looked to Moscow, because he knew the source for guns and money. 
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Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT allowed the Reds to go on their Long March when he could have crushed them at the time.  Chiang wanted the Red Army invasion of the Southwest provinces in order to scare the independent warlords into an alliance with him.  Also, Chiang had to appease the Soviets, who had his son hostage.  He “herded” the Red Army west. 
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From 1942, in Mao’s settled base at Yenan, Mao’s style of governance was apparent.  Humor was banned.  (!)  Everyone was required to write endless “thought examinations.”  A cult of personality was developing, terror as a means of control was increasing, and he quickly destroyed the local economy with absurd taxation and hyper-inflation policies.  And Mao would never learn from his mistakes, ever. 
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In the later post-WWII civil war with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists (KMT), Chiang’s army completely out-classed the Red Army and took over the industrial heartland of China in Manchuria.  The Red Army could very well have been finished off except for the good old USA.  General George Marshall brokered a truce, which gave the CCP and Red Army breathing space and the chance to be re-armed and trained by the USSR (with captured Japanese arms and pilot instructors).  Gen. Marshall had served in China in the 1920s and was “ill-disposed towards Chiang, mainly because of the corruption of Chiang’s relatives.”  (Or perhaps he witnessed Chiang’s own murderous history.) 
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By 1949 Chiang and the Nationalists folded and retreated to Taiwan, leaving Mao and company in charge of Mainland China as the People’s Republic of China (PRC).  Mao is so dependent on the USSR for arms that he begins what will be a long-term policy of exporting food to pay for arms, while Chinese people starve to death. 
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Mao’s terror amongst the peasants was from the same playbook as Lenin and Stalin:  he set quotas.  He decreed that 10% of the peasants were “land-owners” (“kulaks” in Russian parlance), and they were rounded up for expropriation of property, abuse and/or death. 
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Once the Reds were in charge, nationalization of larger private industrial property was postponed a bit at first, so business and agriculture started to recover from the chaos of war.  But censorship was total.  Public execution spectacles were designed to terrorize and brutalize the people.  Around 27 million people were executed or died in prisons or labor camps under Mao’s rule. 
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At the end of the Korean War, around 21,000 Chinese Red Army troops were POWs of the US and allies, and of these fully 2/3 of them refused to return to Red China, most of them going to Taiwan.  Mao’s drive to industrialize, militarize, and especially to get an A-bomb, meant that even more food was taken from the peasants and exported.  This was resisted by the Politburo (and by Chou En-lai, who was otherwise loyal to Mao), so Mao relaxed it a bit, making 1956 and 1957 relatively better.  But not for long. 
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In 1957 Mao laid a trap for intellectuals and dissidents, called “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom.”  People who wanted democracy and the rule of law were encouraged to express themselves in public.  Then Mao closed the trap, calling it the “Anti-Rightist Campaign,” rounding them up.  He again set quotas for arrest, just as Stalin had done. 
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In 1958, in his Great Leap Forward, Mao knowingly caused the worst famine in human history, from 1958 to 1961.  Huge amounts of food were taken from the peasants and exported.  He exported food to Russia in return for massive military assistance, including the means to produce atomic weapons, while nearly 38 million Chinese died from starvation and/or overwork.  In 1960 alone, 22 million died in this famine. Mao’s Number 2, President Liu Shao-chi, admitted to the Soviet ambassador that at least 30 million had died before the famine was over. 
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Then the president of the PRC, Liu Shao-chi, politically ambushed Mao at a huge CCP conference in 1962, damning the obvious carnage of Mao’s policies.  The Party cadres overwhelmingly agreed with Liu, and Mao had to back off, thus ending the worst of the famine.  Mao salvaged much of his power by being backed by the defense minister, Lin Biao, as well as Chou En-lai.  Mao would strike back with revenge later. 
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Meanwhile, the “Big Destruction” in Tibet was Mao’s drive to annihilate the Buddhist culture there after the 1959 invasion.  Monasteries were destroyed, monks and nuns were killed.  In 1963 in China proper, all art forms in all of the PRC were denounced.  It was declared that “people read too much.” (!)
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In 1966 Mao launched his Great Purge, the Cultural Revolution.  His main allies who helped him pull it off were the defense chief Lin Biao and the loyal Chou En-lai.  Madame Mao (Jiang Qing) spearheaded the “kill the culture” campaign’s beginning.  Students, the Red Guards, were given food and then encouraged to turn on their teachers.  They invaded homes, burning books and destroying paintings, musical instruments, etc.  To me, this defines barbarity
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(The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia adopted this Maoist philosophy, rhetoric, and policies in the late-1970s, and their murder rate, as a percentage of the population murdered, out-did Mao.) 
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Mao then turned the momentum of terror against Party members who had opposed him earlier.  Off to labor camps (often a death sentence) went artists, writers, scholars, actors, journalists, etc.  Education basically stopped.  Leisure time vanished, replaced by mandatory group study sessions on Mao’s “thoughts,” and group denunciations of members.  Sounds like Hell on Earth to me. 
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The Red Guards purged CCP president Liu Shao-chi and his wife as “capitalist roaders,” along with Deng Xiao-ping.  Liu died in 1969.  However, Deng will be a survivor. 
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In 1967 the Red Army commander at Wuhan opposed the Cultural Revolution.  Mao went there himself to reestablish control, but the up-surge of popular anger there was so overwhelming it threatened him to the point he had to flee for his very life via a very close-call airplane escape. 
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By the late 1960s, Mao’s worldwide revolutionary authority had waned.  US president Nixon visited and fed Mao’s superpower dreams, but later with Watergate and Nixon’s fall, these dreams ended. 
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The loyal Chou En-lai had cancer, and early treatment would have helped him, but Mao delayed Chou’s treatment.  For one, Chou was the smoothest diplomatic personality he had and was needed for the Nixon negotiations.  And Mao didn’t want Chou to outlive him.  Nice reward for a comrade for a lifetime of loyalty! 
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Mention must be made of Madame Mao, Jiang Qing, who was ascendant during Mao’s last years.  She was nuts.  A completely paranoid evil bitch.  She was active in the early Cultural Revolution, pushing all Chinese to ever more austerity while she lived an extravagant personal lifestyle.  Her special private train would often stop at her whim, completely clogging all regional railroad traffic; and she justified it thusly:  “In order for me to have a good rest, and a good time, it is worth sacrificing some other people’s interests.” (p.730)  (Oh, yeah! We's da rulers, and yous' da low-life scum!)
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Deng Xiao-ping, who had been purged earlier, had to be rehabilitated by Mao because Chou was so ill, but Mao countered him with the “Gang of Four” (which included Madame Mao).  Mao was failing physically.  He had lost control of the Red Army, but he stubbornly advocated the Cultural Revolution to the very end of his days.  Mao faded out to extinction, yet Deng survived and the Gang of Four were tried and executed.  Deng later started the process by which the economy of China was freed of its most insane restrictions, thus leading to the phenomenal unleashing of Chinese economic genius. 
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How shall I summarize Mao?  Since he personally loved scatological language, how about this:  “He was a sadistic, psychopathic, sack of shit.” 
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-Zenwind.
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11 October 2014

Movie Review: Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

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This is a really great action science fiction (SF) movie, capturing very well – through its sights, sounds, and story action – the authentic chaos, the confusion, and the quick, quick, too quick terror of immediate combat reality.  It puts you squarely into the war zone with no rescue possible.  It is one of Tom Cruise’s better roles in recent years, primarily because of the fine story writing history.  But for me it is Emily Blunt who really stood out as a warrior heroine, and seeing her performance here was the main event even though Cruise has the featured role. 
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The premise of Edge of Tomorrow is based on the short Japanese SF novel, All You Need Is Kill (2004), by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, which I thoroughly enjoyed.  The film also gives homage to other classic war movies, e.g., briefly to Platoon (1986) but more especially to Saving Private Ryan (1998). 
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Part of the story’s appeal is that it has a “time loop” somewhat like the film Groundhog Day (1993), always setting the protagonist (Cruise) back a day.  But it’s not funny.  It’s terrifying.  Cruise keeps getting reset back to the day before the combat action that he knows will certainly kill him in some ghastly new way each time.  Over and over again.  The only virtue of this repeated time loop is that he remembers each earlier time and thus may possibly learn from his past mistakes, kind of like one’s feeble attempts at karmic improvement while struggling and stumbling on through endless Samsara. 
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The human warriors fight ruthless alien invaders, and they are physically reinforced by powered armor exoskeletons as originally inspired by Robert Heinlein’s classic 1959 SF novel Starship Troopers (but it’s best to forget that dreadful movie with the same name).  The odds are against humanity, and it looks like extinction for us. 
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Emily Blunt is fantastic as a warrior who fights individually with a heroic ferocity that reminds me of Homeric times, e.g., the desperate combats on the beach at Troy.  An epic heroine, she kicks ass and inspires the human fighters in their grim defensive cause.  They call her the “Full Metal Bitch” and are in absolute awe of her prowess.  Her performance is one of the best female action roles I’ve seen in a while.  Still, as my cousin Holly remarked, Blunt’s character inevitably seems to play second fiddle to that of Cruise, the great established male Hollywood mega-star. 
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We need more heroines in literature and film.  Intelligent steely-eyed warrior women with individual courage, independent vision, and sovereign executive judgment.  In the Western tradition, we only have a few and their roles have been much too brief:  e.g., the Amazon queen Penthesilea, the Greek goddess Artemis, Joan of Arc, Spenser’s Belphoebe and Britomart, etc.  Even Ayn Rand dropped the ball when penning her great heroic females, having them bow too much to their men in the end. 
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(My perspective, above, is more of a long-range historical one.  However, isolated SF, action, thriller, and dramatic books and films in recent decades actually have produced some remarkably great heroines, and I would really like to recollect and catalog them into a personal Heroine Hall of Fame someday.  Any suggestions for my list?  Please help me here.) 
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Tom Cruise is best when he precedes his heroics by playing an unsavory person, in this case a cowardly weasel and a very reluctant hero.  (Tom is experiencing low ebb in his stardom these days, possibly because of the unpopularity of his real-life persona as a complete $cientology dickhead.  Katie showed him the door with great intelligence and resolve.  Go, Katie!) 
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This is science fiction, but when Tom shows up in the first scenes in a bastardized knockoff of a USMC officer’s uniform, it made me want to puke.  But the Corps et al is redeemed in the scene(s) when Tom wakes up handcuffed and disgraced, and an NCO with a naval-block cover yells at him, “On your feet, maggot!”  (Ah, sweet Parris Island nostalgia.) 
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And Bill Paxton gives a supporting performance here that is an absolute classic.  His role as Master Sergeant Farell is one with such an absurd mock-military attitude that it makes me want to smile with every bit as wide of a shit-eating grin as his.  He’s a master. 
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But it is Emily Blunt who steals the show.  See the movie on DVD. 
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-Zenwind.
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05 October 2014

Book Review: The Darkship Series by Sarah Hoyt

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Sarah Hoyt has written a series of three very fine SF novels which are recognized by the Libertarian Futurist Society (LFS) as either a winner or nominee for Best Novel.  Darkship Thieves (2010) won the LFS’ 2011 Prometheus Award, and its sequels, Darkship Renegades (2012) and A Few Good Men (2013) were nominee finalists more recently.  The love of freedom goes through all of these books.  Hoyt’s characters are always well-drawn, there are heroes and heroines aplenty, and her descriptions of family dynamics are always interesting.  Bio-engineering is a big controversy in this future world, as are the age-old arguments on Liberty vs. Power. 
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The first book, Darkship Thieves – which is dedicated to Robert A. Heinlein – introduces us to a far future where Earth is governed feudally by an oligarchy of 50 “Good Men.”  Our protagonist, the Patrician Athena Hera Sinistra is a heroic young woman with a lot of fight in her.  There is action and mystery right off the bat on her father’s spaceship out beyond Earth.  Athena must escape this ship because she is attacked by the bodyguard goons serving her father, the Patrician “Good Man” Sinistra.  (Everyone in her family lineage is left-handed.) 
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In her flight she runs into a Darkship Thief named Kat, who is from a society of refugees who had fled Earth centuries ago and who now inhabit an obscure asteroid named Eden.  It is a society without government, yet with traditions of justice.  Athena settles in on Eden but must go back to Earth for an emergency, and the tyranny on Earth puts her and Kat in grave danger.  [“Is there any other kind?”]  There is a ghastly family secret about her father and the other Good Men ruling Earth. 
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Darkship Renegades continues the story of Athena, Kat and his family, and it explores the political nature of Eden.  A tyranny is developing in Eden, although there is no legal system.  It is a tyranny of the Energy Board.  What makes the Board so powerful is that it is a traditionally inherited family monopoly of the directors’ positions of what is traditionally a collective-ownership of energy resources.  With no actual private property in energy, and no tradition of competition within the energy sector, the Board uses their monopoly directorship’s control of vital energy to threaten and control everyone in Eden.  And it’s getting grim and violent.  To break the monopoly by putting energy technology into private hands, Athena and friends must return to Earth to get long-lost info on energy tech – with troubles confronting them again on that planet of tyrants. 
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A Few Good Men is in the same world and timeline as the first two novels, but it shifts its focus onto different characters more this time.  All the action takes place on Earth, and there is revolution in the air against the Good Men’s oligarchy.  We have heroic characters again, and their basic principle is the individual’s right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  It is an excellent story.  The debates about freedom are believable – because they parallel in many ways the real historical debates among the American Founders.  Hoyt has one character give a very brief but vital distinction between the principles of the historical American and French Revolutions, and the results that followed from each. 
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Highly recommended.  I hope she adds more to the series in the future.  Read the novels in their proper order.  I could not find paper copies here, so I got them on Kindle. 
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-Zenwind.

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