Here's the beginning of Michiko Kakutani's review of Mao, the Unknown Story:
It has become fashionable to look at Hitler and Stalin as the twin monsters of 20th-century history. Entire volumes (like Alan Bullock's "Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives" and Richard Overy's "The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia") have examined these two tyrants through the lens of the compare-and-contrast school of history writing, and much ink has been spilled debating which of them was worse - never mind that such debates seem beside the point, indeed offensive, given the fact that both men were responsible for the deaths of millions upon millions of people.
In their new book, "Mao: The Unknown Story," Jung Chang and Jon Halliday make an impassioned case for Mao as the most monstrous tyrant ever. They argue that he was responsible for "well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other 20th-century leader," and they argue that "he was more extreme than Hitler or Stalin" in that he envisioned a brain-dead, "completely arid society, devoid of civilization, deprived of representation of human feelings, inhabited by a herd with no sensibility, which would automatically obey his orders."
I will do my best to resist a discussion of what's implicit at the end, wherein Mao's demon apotheosis is secured because, you know, at least Hitler liked art, a distinction as hilarious as it is absurdly inaccurate.
No, it's the beginning of the review that is more amusing in its banality, with its inverted Hammacher-Schlemmer view of evil: Worst. Tyrant. Ever. Order now!
It's the beginning I like better, with its historical lacuna leading shortly to a chasm. For it hasn't always been said in these parts that Hitler and Stalin were the big two; once upon a time, Hitler stood alone atop the pigpile of tyrants: the unopposed, the definition of evil, the popularizer of genocide. This was not so long ago; you or your parents were alive.
And then, at around the time of Michiko Kakutani's birth, it was found that Communism was just as bad as Fascism, that we could annex them both under the term "totalitarianism," and then it turned out that even compared to Hitler (against whom, for a brief while, it had been forbidden to compare anyone), Stalin was pretty bad too...maybe as bad...maybe worse!
Now the two of them have been eclipsed, it seems, as Worst Tyrant Ever. And this shift takes on the seeming of historical knowledge: as the review insists, the authors "drew upon newly available material from secret Chinese and Soviet archives for this volume, and they interviewed hundreds of people, including intimates, colleagues and victims of Mao. That does indeed sound just like what historians do, sort of.
Listen: I'm not here to rank the three Worst Tyrants Ever (all born within 15 years of each other, as it happens; that surely must count as an odd fact in world history). I mean only to ask Michiko Kakutani to do the most basic work of a book reviewer and to point out, as she briefly summarizes the "history" of Worst Tyrants Ever, that these rankings are not universally agreed-upon but projected from the United States; and that, moreover, by some incredibly odd historical hazard, each of the troika has ascended to the throne of Worst Tyrant Ever not at the time of their vilest deeds, nor of their most audacious and visible crimes, but at the exact moment that, whether or not they remain alive, the nation they led has lodged itself as the greatest threat to the United States' international supremacy.
Without debating the merits of dictators, what exactly do we gain by the absence of this fact? Why is this the knowledge that needs to be surpressed? Because history itself haunts modern society like a spectre, someone wrote, pseudo-histories are constructed at every level of consumption of life in order to preserve the threatened equilibrium of present frozen time...
Posted by jane at October 21, 2005 11:13 AM | TrackBack