Just before going to bed, I like to listen to the radio. I tend to end up
listening to WFAN, the sports talk station or to the John Batchelor show on
WABC. Last night Batchelor interviewed Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, the
co-authors of Mao: The Unknown Story, a biography that amounts to this
years Black Book of Communism. Despite the fact that it is an assault on
Maos career, the general conclusion anybody would be left with is that the
Chinese people would have been better off under Chiang Kai-shek.
Jung Chang is the 53 year old author of a memoir about growing up during
the Cultural Revolution titled Wild Swans. Her hostility toward Chinese
communism seems to be cut from the same cloth as the sort of stuff that
comes out of North Korea on a regular basis. You know the drill. Kims
manicurist tells all: my boss forced me to wipe his ass after he took a
shit.
Although the book has received accolades from uncritical critics, there are
still some demurrers. Nicholas Kristof of the NY Times, an anti-Communist
whose family fled Russia in the 1920s, observed:
Another problem: Mao comes across as such a villain that he never really
becomes three-dimensional. As readers, we recoil from him but don't really
understand him. He is presented as such a bumbling psychopath that it's
hard to comprehend how he bested all his rivals to lead China and emerge as
one of the most worshipped figures of the last century.
And:
This is an extraordinary portrait of a monster, who the authors say was
responsible for more than 70 million deaths. But how accurate is it? A
bibliography and endnotes give a sense of sourcing, and they are
impressive: the authors claim to have talked to everyone from Mao's
daughter, Li Na, to his mistress, Zhang Yufeng, to Presidents George H. W.
Bush and Gerald Ford. But it's not clear how much these people said. One of
those listed as a source is Zhang Hanzhi, Mao's English teacher and close
associate; she's also one of my oldest Chinese friends, so I checked with
her. Zhang Hanzhi said that she had indeed met informally with Chang two or
three times but had declined to be interviewed and never said anything
substantial. I hope that Chang and Halliday will share some of their source
materials, either on the Web or with other scholars, so that it will be
possible to judge how fairly and accurately they have reached their
conclusions.
Sounds like Jon Halliday and Jung Chang picked up some pointers from The
Black Book of Communism.
Halliday, who is 66 years old and married to Jung Chang, is a horse of
another color. In 1975 he wrote A Political History of Japanese
Capitalism, a MR book that is must reading if you want to understand how
modern Japan evolved. Around this time he was also on the board of New Left
Review and Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars. How he ended up writing
such a book is a real mystery.
One supposes that it might be genetic since Fred Halliday, his brother, has
also broken with the left. In Freds case, the evolution has followed a
Christopher Hitchens trajectory with support for the US war on
Islamofascism. I deal with this at:
<http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/fascism_and_war/FredHalliday.htm>http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/fascism_and_war/FredHalliday.htm
A word or two about John Batchelor might be in order. WABC radio is the
most listened to talk radio station in the USA. It is the home of a rogues
gallery of rightwingers, including Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.
Batchelor has their politics but a different style and emphasis. To begin
with, he does not take phone calls and prefers to interview a fairly
interesting lineup of guests each evening, which makes the show somewhat
more tolerable than listening to a moron like Limbaugh and his dittoheads.
For example, liberal Sovietologist Stephen Cohen and his wife Katrina
Vanden Heuvel, the publisher of the Nation Magazine, are frequent
guests--Cohen more so than her. Cohen. Cohen no longer seems to be on the
A-list for shows like Charlie Rose or Nightline nowadays, so I guess that
he looks at the Batchelor show as an opportunity to educate the listener
about current events in Russia. I wonder if Cohen has any sense of whos
listening. Except for somebody with perversely eclectic tastes like my own
(I even listen to Christian evangelists when the mood suits me), most of
Batchelors listeners are hard-core reactionaries who hate any form of
communism--including post-communism.
Batchelor led off his interview with a brief introduction that went
something like this (no exaggeration): Tonight my guests are Jung Chang
and Jon Halliday who have written a powerful exposé of the 20th centurys
greatest tyrant and murderer, a criminal who tortured and imprisoned the
Chinese people, starved them to death and plotted to export his Red Mafia
system across the planet. A real Satan, a man without any redeeming
features who lived for one thing and one thing only: to achieve total
domination and exercise absolute power.
His first question to his guests was highly revealing. He asked them to
expand on a theme in their book, namely that the Korean War came about
because of a joint plot by Stalin and Mao expand their Communist empire. In
other words, the Readers Digest version of the Korean War. On this
question, Jung Chang had lots to say while Halliday remained silent.
Perhaps it was because there was still a tiny shred of integrity that
remained. After all, he is the co-author with Bruce Cumings of the 1988
Korea: the Unknown War that states:
The photographer Margaret Bourke-White did a feature for Life magazine in
December 1952 entitled 'The savage, secret war in Korea', in which she
described a powerful guerilla force - which included many women - still
highly active in mid-1952: 'Some of the guerrillas are converts who went
over to the Reds in their first great offensive. Thousands of others are
North Koreans bypassed in the UN breakout from the Pusan perimeter. Others
have filtered South through Allied lines' - in other words, a composite
force that could hardly have survived for two years, in harsh mountain
conditions and in the middle of generalized warfare, without some
substantial local support.
Full:
<http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/Vietnam/cumings1.html>http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/Vietnam/cumings1.html
So what could have happened to Jon Halliday over the past 27 years since
this was written to turn him into another David Horowitz?
To start off, it is important to understand that Hallidays Marxist
scholarship ended many years ago. Unlike his brother Fred, who still
maintains leftist pretensions in the Hitchens or Norm Geras style, there is
evidence that Jon simply became exhausted or something.
After the 1988 publication of Korea: the Unknown War, Halliday never
wrote another book. Furthermore, reviewers have noted that the new book on
Mao is mostly written by his wife and that his role has been mainly to
research Maos connection with Stalin. (They argue that Mao was always
completely subservient to Stalin, despite obvious evidence to the contrary.)
In addition, Halliday has shown signs from the beginning that perhaps
Marxism was just one interest among many. He is also the author of The
Psychology of Gambling and a collection of interviews with Douglas Sirk,
the Hollywood director who was responsible for lurid minor masterpieces
like "All That Heaven Allows," "Written on the Wind" and "Imitation of Life."
In some ways, Mao: The Unknown Story continues along the road he explored
with Douglas Sirk. Since there is every likelihood that Hollywood will make
a film based on this outrageously stupid book, they might as well use
Sirks purple melodramas as a model.
