A New Biography on Mao

choi

Andrew Roberts, Whitewashing Mao; A mealy-mouthed new biography goes immorally easy on the "Great Helmsman."  Wall Street Journal, Oct 6, 2012.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB ... 16243142147194.html
(book review on Alexander V Pantsov and Steven I Levine, Mao: The Real Story
Simon & Schuster, 2012)

Excerpt in the window of print: "The situation in the country is excellent," Mao reported, as somewhere between 36 million and 45 million starved to death during the Great Leap Forward (1958-61).


Quote:

"No one in the 20th century was responsible for more deaths that Mao Zedong (1893-1976), chairman of the Chinese Communist Party; not Lenin, Stalin or even Hitler. The sheer size of China meant that Mao's vicious, carefully premeditated policies led to more death, starvation, suffering and bloodshed than the work of anyone else in history's most cataclysmic century.

"The authors * * * have opened up the Russian archives and unearthed material on Mao that has hitherto been kept secret in Moscow. The Soviets' Mao dossier covers 15 volumes, including * * * family details (eg, the birth certificate of his previously unknown 10th son, who was born in Moscow).

"'The situation in the country is excellent,' Mao nevertheless reported to the Chinese people as somewhere between 36 million and 45 million starved to death. At the time, the American communist propagandist Edgar Snow wrote that 'I saw no starving people in China, nothing that looks like old-time famine. I do not believe there is famine in China.' The ability of Western intellectuals to deceive themselves about the great utopian did not end with Mao's death, but, as the left's reception of Ms [Jung] Chang and Mr [Jon] Halliday's book showed, carries on today.

"Historians should strive to be objective, of course, but any truly objective analysis of Mao's life must conclude that he was one of the most evil men ever to besmirch the pages of the story of mankind.

Note:
(a) Andrew Roberts
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Roberts_(historian)
(1963- ; British)
(b) mealy-mouthed (adj).
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=mealy-mouthed
("'afraid to say what one really thinks,' 1570s; first element perhaps from O.E. milisc "sweet," from P.Gmc. *meduz 'honey' (see mead (n.1)), which suits the sense, but if the Old English word did not survive long enough to be the source of this, perhaps the first element is from meal (n.2) on notion of the 'softness' of ground flour (cf. Middle English melishe (adj.) 'friable, loose,' used of soils)")

c) Capital University
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_University
( a private university of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America located in Bexley [a suburb of Columbus], Ohio, founded in 1830)
(d) Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Babington_Macaulay,_1st_Baron_Macaulay
(1800-1859; Scotosh historian)
(e)
(i) John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dalberg-Acton,_1st_Baron_Acton
(1934-1902; Catholic historian from England)
(ii) The English surname Acton is afte name of places in England: Old English ac ‘oak’ + tun ‘settlement.’
(f) The reviewer says sarcastically "the Führer built good autobahns."
(i) German autobahns
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_autobahns
(Just days after the 1933 Nazi takeover, Adolf Hitler enthusiastically embraced an ambitious autobahn construction project)
(ii) bahn (noun feminine): "fixed route"

(g) The "vacuity" in "moral vacuity" is a noun (from Latin vacuitas, from L vacuus empty) that is defined as:
"1: an empty space
2: the state, fact, or quality of being vacuous"