Brad’s Reviews > The Political Thought of Mao Tse-Tung > Status Update

An interesting comment. But why, I wonder, was it necessary to “humanise” Mao? It’s something I have often found intriguing. This is the fact that we are afraid of retreating from our own rhetoric.

It is known, for example, that Hitler was personally very charming, that he liked dogs, was a vegetarian and something of an aficionado of classical music. But one must be careful about how one mentions these facts.

There is an interesting article by Dominic Bryan who suggested journalists reported the processions of the Orange Order in Northern Ireland either as enjoyable family festivals, or as occasions for vicious riot, but never both – or never both on the same page. For one kind of person wanted to read about the family festival, and another kind of person wants to read about the riots. And it was difficult to do both all at once without upsetting somebody.

Or again, one party tends to report Castro as somebody who rescued his people from Batista and the American Mafia, and who established one of the best health care and educational services in the world; but another wants to see him as an enemy of freedom who runs prisons full of political prisoners.

The odd thing is that, with these people, we feel the need to show which side we are on when we talk about them. Giving a “balanced picture” – or, to use your word, “humanising” them - is an option to be taken up only with care. Thus do we deliberately falsify our own understanding.

It's almost as though - when we speak about such persons - we are more interested in displaying our own allegiances than we are about speaking the truth.

Excellent points all, Anthony, and all are things (apart from your Northern Ireland example, for which I know very little) that I have said myself to others.

I was making very short comment (as a reminder to myself for later) on the mythical qualities of Mao and the way historians and followers have tended to turn him into some kind of god, even when he was alive. So rather than offering a veiled allegiance (although I may have done so inadvertently), or even a suggestion that he should or shouldn't be humanized (with the underlying implications of good or evil, which I don't credit), I was simply struck by the fact that Schram is careful to make us see Mao as just a man. A smart man, a driven man, maybe even a genius, but a man with the capacities that we all share. I am really quite impressed with what he's doing (or what he did all those years ago. He wrote this in 1969, while Mao was still alive).

I particularly liked your point about Hitler, Anthony. I fear that by turning folks like Hitler, or Mao, or Castro, or Lincoln, or Churchill into embodiments of good or evil, devoid of human capacities that supposedly stretch beyond their polarities, we make it impossible to recognize both potentially dangerous leaders and potentially beneficent leaders. We expect to be able to just KNOW that they are evil or good because it MUST be obvious, thereby removing the possibility that human complexity can hide the potential in a person for any number of actions that may or may not be a benefit or even a crime.

I hope I can avoid displaying my allegiance throughout my comments and my eventual review of this book, although I will probably fail. One of the things that makes me sad about discussions of such figures, though, is that our supposed allegiance may not be an allegiance at all, but merely perceived as one by those who do have an allegiance because they see one's opinion as being "at odds" with their own.