Tibet

so maos not evil because....he tried to feed some of the starving peasants but alas , there was NO FOOD.....why was there no food ,kaiser ?
well it was because apparently some psychotic meglomaniac with absolute power ,ordered the farmers to ruin their own rice crops......he also ordered all the sparrows ,wrens ,blackbirds and any and all grain eating birds destroyed, the chinese gassed ,shot ,poisoned and netted every bird they could find and this great bird genocide caused a monster explosion in the insect population ....which of course brought on another famine...oops !! silly old uncle maos done it again...well we really cant blame him though ..he didnt personaly overseed the rice feilds and kill all avian life ..he merely ordered it...and if overseeding and wholesale bird killing seem criminally stupid to anyone with a 5th grade education ...disobeying the orders of the great cretin was likely to cause severe trauma induced by crashing rifle butts or ax handles...but i guess being a deranged killer and an idiot dosent mean one is also evil ..i think i see your point ,kaiser

 

Majorwoody,i didn't say don't blame him.As far as i am concerned,you can bring him to court if he's still alive.I'm just contending that he's not evil.
Why won't you simply understand my english?Or would you prefer i translate it into something more comphrehensible for you my good sir?

 

If you killed more than one person you can be found guilty of both. Thats why Mao can be found guilty of about 20 million counts of each (each charge relating to a different person)

But why not? Must a person be evil in character to be considered evil? A person could think evil thoughts all day and draw nasty pictures of dead people but never harm a fly, would they be considered evil? Or should the megalomanic who has killed millions who thinks about puppies and ponies be let off because he's a nice guy when you get to know him (really!)? Apparently Stalin was very nice to his daughters, yet you have said that you consider him much more evil than Mao. How come? The two really are not that different when it comes to personal lives and public 'reforms'...

No because the landlords didnt cause the starvation through their negligent acts... Sure, if you could prove that China was going to starve regardless of what Mao did, then I'd happily concede that he wasnt evil. However, that isnt the case, the fact is he deliberately caused the acts, he knew they would kill people, and they did... Why do you not consider him evil? Please tell us why he is that much different to Stalin whom you do consider evil.

 

kaiser ,if we take all the mao driven famine deaths off the table ,we are still left with millions of other murdered innocent chinese people ..shot ,beat to death ,worked to death ,whatever..so if we let mao off scott free on the famine deaths ,he still has plenty of evil capitol left over ,,right? ..enough to go to hell several million times over if one were a beliver in heaven and hell ...as are you ,right ,kaiser?

 

As far as i am concerned,everyone not a believer should be in hell.

But personal beliefs should not be brought in.

Majorwoody,pls bring in citations and actual figures of deaths actually caused by Mao.

 

If a person is evil in character,can u contend that he thinks nothing but ponies?Hitler was a vegetarian,and yet he killed 6 million jews in cold blood.Mao on the other hand,as i have repeatedly said ,is at fault and is to blame.However,if you want to bring in deaths caused by negligence,then almost every european kings and queens as well as american presidents will be considered evil.And why do we dwell on Mao in the first place?Is it because he is not white or is it just ebcause he's a commie?

 

IMHO Mao gets off lightly in the history books with the focus of genocide being relegated to Lenin, Hitler and Stalin (who are all white)... We don't dwell on Mao because we hate asians Kaiser, we dwell on Mao because he killed 40 million people... Its the scale of death as well as the nature which makes Mao evil... Sure, many died under Abraham Lincoln's presidency, however given the social circumstances of 1850's America much of it was really beyond Lincloln's control as he was only recognised in the North (and war really was inevitable). Mao however, was in full control of the country; he had the power to prevent the deaths, do you see?

For the billionth time, We are not a bunch of fairies contending that "alll killing is baad, make it stop". What I have repeated exhaustively is that there are certian elemets of Mao's rule which make him evil, I underlined them and put the in dot points but alas to no avial... so let me repeat them
there is no forumla for establishing what is evil, only contingent elements

Put simply,
Mao is evil for the following reasons
- He had absolute power
- He used that power to kill millions
- He did so largely on a whim and without necessity
- He delibratley caused death through his own actions
- He knew his actions were liekly to cause death
- He knew his actions were actually causing death
- He did nothing to prevent this (or if so, acted insufficiently)
- He owed a duty to his people to prevent harm coming to them
- He failed miserably to meet that duty

Nowhere in that list will you find
- He was asian
- He was a commie
- He killed people and killing is bad

You're right by saying that throwing big words like 'negligence' and 'mansluaghter' mean nothing... which is why we have specified the reasons why we think Mao is evil... Now compare those Mediaeval Kings and American Presidents with the "Why Mao Is Evil" list and you will find that not all points are satisfied, because there are things which make Mao different from them.

 

When I think of Mao, I think of the cultural Revolution.
Thousands of red-guard chidren purging the country of Capitalists.
Didn't Pol Pot use childern in the same way in Laos?

Tim

 

Would like to refer you to the Great Purge, which saw many bright officers vanish from the ranks of the army.

What do you think he would be able to do? Please elaborate what you think was feasible for him to do about the problem.

Actually like I said they believed that the crop would not compete with each other thus they did not know it was to cause death.

Sending farmers to the cities has little to do with it. And you are also incorrect about food production, it did occur. Farmers that stayed increased the size of the farm and put in a half dozen more seeds than ussual for the same area of agriculture. They did not think that the crop would compete with each other which lead to the failure of the crop. So there was food production its just the crops had failed.

This is very vague and can be interpruted to the extreme that it is the governments fault for you jumping of the roof of your house and hurting yourself.

I will awnser it like I did 3 times in this post . They over seeded the farmland, the crop competed and it failed.

Incorrect they did not believe the crop would competed thus it was their own ignorance of farming. Chariman Moa was a Military Tactician not an Agricultural expert.

Sounds like he was trying to prevent birds from eating the crops just like farmers use pesticides on their farms.(does not apply to all but most in at least North America)

Why ask a question if you know the awnser? Also the government and the people for the most part did not believe that putting so much seeds would cause the crops to fail.

I would like you to build an army that at the begining used bows and arrows that became so large that it took control over all of China, just think about it because I dont think most people including myself could do that.

Simply because he planned the murders of millions unlike Mao which was not his intention.

You have given no proof for this statement it is purely subjective.

I never heard genocide being used with either Lenin or Stalin. Heard mass-murder with Stalin but not with Lenin(voted Greatest man of the 20th century by the Russian people). There was genocide in Armeria but you could ask 1000 people on the street and I doubt most could evan point to the country on a map of the world yet know about the genocide that occured. Also them being white is of little relevance.
Sure, many died under Abraham Lincoln's presidency, however given the social circumstances of 1850's America much of it was really beyond Lincloln's control as he was only recognised in the North (and war really was inevitable).
War was not inevitable they chose to go to war. It would be like saying if Quebec held a reforendum to leave Canada and succeded that Canada would be forced to delcare war. Bunch of rubbish.

He did not delibaratly kill his people and I have not seen any evidence to it. What did you expect him to do? There is little he could do as the crops failed. If you don;t know Chineese history they have a history of large famines that kill thousands if not millions. If I jump off a bridge and hurt myself of Stephen Harper to blame? I certainly hope not.

I hate to make lost posts like this becuse I am certain some people involved in this debate will not read half of it.

 

This author disagrees:

History: Mao by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday
REVIEWED BY SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE



MAO: The Untold Story
by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday

Cape £25 pp814



For generations, Mao Tse-tung was the acceptable, even fashionable face of communist tyranny. Since the 1930s, those who wished to know have been aware that Stalin was a homicidal monster. Since 1945, nobody has doubted Hitler’s genocidal evil. But as I sit here, I am looking at the Little Red Book (the Quotations of Chairman Mao) that I proudly bought as a 10-year-old schoolboy without much comment from my elders, and also at the bestselling, sympathetic biographies of Mao by Edgar Snow (1938) and Han Suyin (1972). Why was Mao so fashionable that Warhol could choose him as an icon? Perhaps it was because China remains a distantly obscure country, because Mao was a master of propaganda and secrecy, and, finally, because his party still rules China.

Ever since the Soviet archives started to reveal the intimate story of Stalin’s tyranny, people have been tempted to compare Hitler and Stalin. Who killed more people? Who was more depraved? These ghoulish questions have also given rise to another silly but sinister argument: “Stalin was worse than Hitler. Why have we heard so much about the Holocaust, so little about the Gulags? ” Mao is never mentioned — but he will be now.

Mao: The Untold Story exposes its subject as probably the most disgusting of the bloody troika of 20th-century tyrant-messiahs, in terms of character, deeds — and number of victims. This study, by Jung Chang, the author of Wild Swans, and her husband, the historian Jon Halliday, is a triumph. It is a mesmerising portrait of tyranny, degeneracy, mass murder and promiscuity, a barrage of revisionist bombshells, and a superb piece of research. This is the first intimate, political biography of the greatest monster of them all — the Red Emperor of China. Using witnesses in China, and new, secret Chinese archives, the authors of this magisterial and damning book estimate that Mao was responsible for 70m deaths. He boasted he was willing “for half of China to die” to achieve military-nuclear superpowerdom.

Nikita Khrushchev said: “I look at Mao, I see Stalin, a perfect copy.” Their attitudes, even their style of dress, their refusal to earn money or work on anything except their own power, their obsessional reading of imperial history, poetry writing, swaggering disdain for human life, their worship of violence, their loathing of peasants, their superpower ambitions, their jealousies, their self-belief, secrecy and paranoia, their loathing of their fathers, respect for their mothers and their destruction of their own wives and children were almost identical. The authors point out two key differences: they believe that Mao was never a Marxist, simply an opportunistic egomaniac. They record his frenzied womanising: Stalin was far less of a sensualist.

Mao was born in 1893 in Hunan. His father was outraged by his young son’s reading and refusal to work. In a revolutionary China dominated by warlords (the emperor had been overthrown in 1911) Mao soon joined the Communist party, partly to get money to avoid working. After Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist leader, had slaughtered the communists in 1927, Mao emerged as a Red lead er. At 24, he recorded his amoral philosophy: “People like me only have a duty to ourselves.” He worshipped “power like a hurricane arising from a deep gorge, like a sex-maniac on heat . . . We adore times of war . . . We love sailing the sea of upheavals . . . The country must be destroyed then re formed . . . People like me long for its destruction”.

Mao was happy to murder, blackmail and poison his rivals. He had the same political gifts as Stalin: a will for power, ruthlessness, addiction to the drama of turmoil and an ability to manipulate. In his communist enclaves, between 1931 and 1935, he oversaw the killing of 700,000 people. Like Stalin, Mao poisoned everyone whose lives he touched: many went insane.

By the late 1930s, using gullible writers such as Snow, Mao had created his legend as a peasant leader and a guerrilla-maestro — the hero of the Long March. Jung Chang and Halliday shatter these myths, revealing military ineptitude and deliberate wastage of whole armies to discredit his communist rivals. The greatest heroics of the Long March were invented; the suffering was unnecessary. As the Japanese advanced into China, Mao persuaded historians that, while he fought the invaders, Generalissimo Chiang was cowardly and corrupt. Actually, it was Mao who refused to fight Japan. His sole obsession during the second world war was persuading Stalin to bankroll and arm his conquest of China. In 1945, Stalin entered the war against Japan, providing assistance to Mao. Nonetheless, Mao had virtually lost the civil war — and was saved only by colossal Stalinist aid. The authors also reveal how many Nationalist generals were communist sleeper-spies. In 1949, aided more by Russia and these moles than by his own devices, Mao conquered China, embarking on an imperial reign of wilful caprice, messianic egotism, vast incompetence — and mass-murder.

The myth claims that there was no Great Terror in China: the authors show Mao constantly declaring: “Too lenient, not killing enough.” In 1949 alone, 3m people were murdered. While Mao lived like an emperor on 50 private estates using military dancing-girls as “imperial concubines”, he drove China to become a superpower. He deployed Chinese troops against America in the Korean w ar as a way of persuading Stalin to give him military (especially nuclear) technology. After Stalin’s death, he regarded himself as peerless.

Emulating Stalin with his manmade 1932-33 famine, Mao in his Great Leap Forward of the 1950s sold food to buy arms, even though China starved in “the greatest famine in history”: 38m people died. The famine caused a political crisis, and his deputy Liu Shao-chi stole power from him in 1962.

Mao waited, and avenged himself by taking control of the army through the talented, neurotic and sinister Marshal Lin Piao, and of the state through the craven, brutal, sophisticated premier, Chou En-lai. Then he launched a Terror, the “Cultural Revolution”, in which he attacked the party and the state using gangs of students, secret-policemen and thugs to humiliate, murder, destroy lives and culture, a nightmare that Jung Chang experienced and recounted in Wild Swans: another 3m were killed between 1966 and 1976.

The ageing Mao fell out with Lin Piao, his chosen successor, the creator of the Little Red Book, who died fleeing in 1971. The authors found Mao’s orders that denied his veteran premier Chou En-lai medical treatment for cancer — to ensure Chou would not outlive him. This left Mao with his grotesque, vicious wife, Chiang Ching (whom he loathed), the leader of the Gang of Four, whom Mao used to enforce the Cultural Revolution. Having fallen out with Moscow, Mao pulled off one final coup: Richard Nixon visited China. But Mao was disappointed: America would not intervene against Russia. Dying, he restored, then again purged the talented, formidable Deng Xiao-ping, who outmanoeuvred the Gang and Mao and started reversing Maoist insanity. Mao died in 1976 and is still worshipped in China.


link:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2102-1626700,00.html

 

ok, greg ...so he was fond of butchering ,rapeing and starving millions of simple peasants and he liked to poison ,blackmail and asassinate his rivals ...just because he did his very best to destroy and discredit the ancient wisdom and culture of one of the world first civilizations ....i dont see how one could say he was evil ..after all ,if you want to make egg fu yung ,you got to crack a few eggs...

 

Really?So what is ur stand then my good sir?

Such comments really do nothing to add to the intelligence and objectivity of the debate.Grieg has lectured me on this before during our debates on Vietnam(haha do you still remember it my good ol'friend?).

 

I never said he could do any better. Perhaps he could not have; however that does not change the fact that Mao is evil; why should it?

Starving is different to jumping off ones roof, because one relies upon the government to starve, wheras they rely on no-one but themselves to jump. I find it hard to believe that 40 million people 'accidently' straved themselves by screwing up their crops... It was the governments fault; Mao's fault

Then he should not have given agricultural orders. That fact does not excuse him... If I beat someone to death with a cricket bat, could I defend myself by saying "Sorry! I don't know how you're supposed to play cricket"

No-one is disputing that Mao was a great man who did tremendous things... We are just pointing out that he did terrible things also

Really? That suprises me!

40 million in a natural famine? I think not

Cultural Revolution

Ironically he would not have been evil if he had done nothing... I think Mao, in the long run, was a good thing for China. But that does not change the fact that he was an evil man

 

Well then may i say then it's a very different perspective then?

You see, Chinese or Asians have a rather distinct way of seeing evil and good.No doubt as i have said Mao should have been brought to justice for the things he did,however it is unfair to call him evil base on his mistakes.

The way i see it and what Roel has said,we hold different moral values as well as the measure with which we measure someone.

Personally,i have made my points.I do not see any conclusion to the matter if we were to keep putting up arguments which would anyway be recycled.

Let's just agree to disagree before more words get put into our mouths all right?

 

kaiser, how would you characterize the japanese occupation china ,the phillipines , sumatra and singapore in ww2 ...in the eyes of the natives ,would you describe it as good and benign or bad and evil..good times or bad times...from the chinese -asian perspective?

 

Yes but you said the government has a duty to protect the citizens which I have shown can be taken to the extremes have I not? If no one relies on the government to starve than it would be like saying it is not the governments fault but I see the point you are trying to make.

I don't believe but that is common sense, what the Government thought on the other hand was not as I said the government did not believe that the crops would compete with each other. I dont believe I said that less than 4 times.

I don't think you realize this but there are cultural revolutions occuring everyday how come not everyone sheds blood? Only because it is minor does not mean it didnt have an impact no matter the size.

I think I am done with this topic and follow Kaiser's suggestion.

 

I don't see how this is related to the topic we have on hand.But since i'm the history student here,let me just give you a very simple judgement.

The characteristics of the Occupation differs from place to place.Of course,war is always bad.But without the war,Decolonisation wouldn't have happened on the speed it had.So can i still call it bad times or good times?It depends on whose eyes are you looking at the matter from.

I THINK that you intend to show me that evil is definitive but all i can tell you is not everything is as simple through your eyes.There's no clear fenition of evil or good during the JO.With regards to tibet and Mao, it's the same thing:From whose eyes are you looking at it from?

 

I quite like the argument that the Japanese Occupation (while unpleasant at the time) had a positive long-term effect.

However, I will be amazed if you can find a positive spin on the Chinese occupation of Tibet from the viewpoint of the Tibetans. They fought to keep their nation, their Spiritual leader is in exile, their religion presumably banned, and their nation sucked into Communist China with no appreciable chance of getting out. The only possible good point is that Tibet *might* receive a slight economic benefit from being part of China.

 

Using that kind of end justifies the means logic one can claim that the Jewish Holocaust was a good things for Jews since it eventually brought them together and resulted in the state of Israel or that WW II was a good thing because of the economic prosperity that followed it, despite the deaths of 55 million people. IMO it makes more sense to look at it from the standpoint of those who endured it rather than succeeding generations. I might be happy to have 50 people suffer in the past so that I might be wealthy and safe today but that doesn't mean that the involuntary sacrifices made by those hapless 50 souls are then in retrospect a "good" thing.
No human being should have to endure the terror and brutality such as was inflicted by Imperial Japanese forces on occupied people such as the Chinese(Nanking for example) and the Phillipinos.

 

Of course my previous post must inevitability lead to the question: What then about the bombing of civilians in WW II? That is a complex question for several reasons and the ultimate answer will depend a great deal upon the perspective of those viewing it.
One way to view it is that if harm must be done to innocent people then the course that leads to the least harm is the moral one. The bombing of Japan without doubt hastened the end of the war and helped to bring down the militarist leaders of Japan that had led her into ruin and suffering, not to mention the suffering inflicted on others who stood in her way.
If say a half million Japanese died in the bombings and a million Japanese and a like number of American soldiers would have died in an invasion then the course with the least harm to people would be the bombing, thus the moral course.
It gets more complex if one considers a third or fourth alternative that excludes both courses already mentioned. The problem there is that it becomes highly theoretical and doubtful whether such speculative actions could have been maintained for both practical and political reasons.