One man's Mao is another man's Washington

David Seaton's News Links

It is interesting that in Russia, both Lenin and even Stalin are still revered and that in China Mao Tse-Tung remains the symbol of the nation, its power and its unity.

Book after book has appeared in the west, year after year denouncing Lenin, Stalin and Mao: their crimes, sexual perversions and even in Mao's case the subject of his personal hygiene (the "great helmsman" was apparently allergic to soap and water), but still the people that suffered them most still revere their memory.

Americans refer to other nation's patriotism as "nationalism" and see that as a bad thing. Great American patriots and founders of the nation like Washington and Jefferson owned slaves and Jefferson's only descendants are black because he sexually exploited the slave girls at his mercy. Revisionist historians are now trying to prove that Abraham Lincoln was gay. Still Americans revere them for the same reason this article in the Los Angeles Times says that the Chinese revere Mao: because "he won the civil war and united China" and "he is remembered for uniting China and setting it on a course for prosperity". The lesson would be that, if you treasure your identity, with a little imagination you will understand that others treasure theirs too... even Iraqis. DS

Mao marches on - Los Angeles Times
Abstract: During a recent visit to Beijing, I was looking at the sky on a clear night when I was startled to see the ghost of Mao Tse-tung staring down at me. The legendary tyrant's mellow, moon-like visage sparkled above a spanking-new shopping center while a hidden PA system amplified his high-pitched Hunan accent: "The Chinese people have stood up!"(...) Mao's space at The Place is both ironic and dead serious. Mao, who branded China with a sharp and cutting anti-capitalist philosophy, is now a brand name in his own right, bestowed with the pride of place in an opulent urban mall, occupying center stage in a slick piece of visual propaganda drawn from archival footage. The Mao show, exalting the lineage of China's Communist Party leadership as an important party congress approaches, is sure to stir a flutter of reflexive pride in the casual passerby, well-heeled shopper and barefoot rag-picker alike. Deng Xiaoping, the late strongman who overturned Mao's legacy and put the workers' paradise on the road to being a shoppers' paradise, is conspicuous by his absence.(...) By and large, the Mao statues that were once so ubiquitous in Beijing are gone, but Mao never really went away. In fact, one can hardly make a purchase in China without seeing his dreamy visage, especially on the 100-yuan bill, the bill of all bills at a time when making money is truly the lifeblood of China.(...) There have been periodic bouts of nostalgia for Mao before, none more potent than the spontaneous popular uprising at Tiananmen in 1989. The demonstrators, despite their media-pleasing democratic rhetoric, had a decidedly Maoist cast. No one understood this better than Deng, the man who ordered the crackdown in fear of being deposed in a second Cultural Revolution. Both Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, though anointed by Deng for succession, have done much to stabilize and secure Mao's reputation, in no small part to bolster their own communistic legitimacy while freeing themselves from the Dengist straitjacket. Mao might have been a tyrant, as aloof as an emperor, but he won the civil war and united China, not unlike a ruthless predecessor he was said to admire. China's founding emperor, Qin Shihuangdi, was not a nice man by any reckoning, but he is remembered for uniting China and setting it on a course for prosperity. Every time we utter the word China -- "land of Qin" -- we inadvertently invoke the tyrant's legacy. And so too will Mao's legacy be invoked again and again, rough edges gradually smoothed out over time, reduced to a rounded pebble in a turbulent, ever-changing stream. READ IT ALL

Losing it

"You run this town because people think you run it."
Miller's Crossing - quoted by Tony Karon in Haaretz

David Seaton's News Links
When we talk about the war in in Iraq being a disaster, we are talking about a lot more than the terrible suffering of the human beings directly involved, we are talking about the crumbling of a system in which we are all stakeholders. Make no mistake: this massive loss of international influence will directly affect the average American's wallet. He or she is going to be sore as hell. DS

Zakaria: Preview of a Post-U.S. World - Newsweek
Abstract: Two things were missing from this year's world Economic Forum at Davos: snow (which arrived eventually) and America-bashing (which did not). There were, of course, lots of American businessmen, activists and intellectuals filling the panels and halls of the conference. There were even a few senior American officials—though no star speaker. But, for the first time in my memory, America was somewhat peripheral. There were few demands, pleas, complaints or tantrums directed at the United States. In this small but significant global cocoon, people—for the moment at least—seemed to be moving beyond America. "There has always been a talk by a senior American official as one of the centerpieces of the Forum," said a European who has advised the Forum for many years—and who asked to remain anonymous because of his relations with U.S. officials. "And in the past, people eagerly anticipated who that would be—Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice. This year, almost no one inquired. We expected disappointment. But there was none. No one even noticed."(...) The ball for every problem is in everybody's court, which means that it is in nobody's court. The problem is that this free ride probably can't last forever. The global system—economic, political, social—is not self-managing. Global economic growth has been a fantastic boon, but it produces stresses and strains that have to be handled. Without some coordination, or first mover—or, dare one say it, leader—such management is more difficult. The world today bears some resemblance to the 1920s, when a newly globalized economy was booming, and science and technological change were utterly transforming life. (Think of the high-tech of the time—electricity, radio, movies and cars, among other recent inventions.) But with Britain declining and America isolationist, that was truly a world without political direction. Eventually protectionism, nationalism, xenophobia and war engulfed it. In a provocative essay in Foreign Policy three years ago, the British historian Niall Ferguson speculated that the end of American hegemony might not fuel an orderly shift to a multipolar system but a descent into a world of highly fragmented powers, with no one exercising any global leadership. He called this "apolarity." "Apolarity could turn out to mean an anarchic new Dark Age," Ferguson wrote, "an era of waning empires and religious fanaticism, of economic plunder and pillage in the world's forgotten regions, of economic stagnation, and civilization's retreat into a few fortified enclaves." That might be a little farfetched. But for those who have been fondly waiting for the waning of American dominance—be careful what you wish for. READ IT ALL