Over at The New Criterion, Keith Windschuttle's article Mao and the Maoists makes worthwhile reading. It details the new biography Mao: The Unknown Story, authored by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, which reveals, as the title suggests, heretofore unknown facts about Mao's reign--in particular, his brutality.

Chang and Halliday calculate that over the course of his political career from 1920 to 1976, Mao was responsible for the deaths of 70 million Chinese. This is more than the total killings attributable to Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin combined. The biggest single number of Chinese dead was the 38 million who perished in the famine of the four years from 1958 to 1961, during the so-called Great Leap Forward. Westerners have known since Jasper Becker’s path-breaking 1996 book Hungry Ghosts: China’s Secret Famine that the famine killed between 30 and 40 million people. Becker attributed this to Mao’s ideological folly of conducting an ambitious but failed experiment in collectivization. Chang and Halliday produce new evidence to show it was more sinister than that.

Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, though offering high praise for Chang and Halliday's book, has reservations:

I have reservations about the book's judgments, for my own sense is that Mao, however monstrous, also brought useful changes to China.... Mao's legacy is not all bad.

"Mao's legacy is not all bad."

Fr. Richard John Neuhaus of First Things roundly criticizes Kristof for this "morally repugnant" comment, one which he deems "a last-ditch defense for the many Western admirers of Mao and Maoism." The French left--including Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre--were happy supporters of the dictator (whom Beauvoir outrageously compared to President Franklin Roosevelt in power-wielding). To be fair, many were misled as to the dictator's means of governing (for instance, because of government propaganda, almost nobody outside of China knew about the widespread famine within its borders). According to Windschuttle,

In France, the intellectual center of Maoism from the late 1960s to 1976 was the journal Tel Quel. This publication was the focus of much of the theoretical activity that emerged in Paris at the time and was responsible for launching the careers of many of the luminaries of the French intellectual Left [including notably Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, and Julia Kristeva]. Tel Quel began as a Marxist-Leninist journal but became influential in shifting the Western Left away from old Marxism, with its emphasis on the blue-collar working class as the bearer of social revolution, and towards the new Leftism of the post-1960s period, with its emphasis on feminism, anti-racism, gay liberation, and anti-colonialism.

Unfortunately, we continue to have groups like the Maoist International Movement that "struggles to end the oppression of all groups over other groups...through armed struggle."

Although Mao: The Unknown Story may do little to change MIM's self-contradictory stance, it is a book with the power to change history--if there are enough willing to listen.

Pity Mark Morford, who's written an article condemning Michelle Duggar for bearing 16 children:

Why does this sort of bizarre hyperbreeding only seem to afflict antiseptic megareligious families from the Midwest? In other words — assuming Michelle and Jim Bob and their brood of cookie-cutter Christian kidbots will never be allowed near a decent pair of designer jeans or a tolerable haircut from a recent decade, and assuming that they will all be tragically encoded with the values of the homophobic asexual Christian right — where are the forces that shall help neutralize their effect on culture? Where is the counterbalance to offset the damage?

That's easy: you are your ilk are busy aborting them. (Oops, I'm not supposed to say such things...)

Note, further in the article, that Morford buys into the overpopulation myth (he's in good company; the People's Republic of China bought into it, too--thus the two-child policy)--which reminds me of a quote by P.J. O'Rourke: "Fretting about overpopulation is a perfect, guilt-free--indeed, sanctimonious--way for 'progressives' to be racists." In Morford's case, anti-Christian. (Garrett Hardin was particularly creepy when he opined, in his famous article, The Tragedy of the Commons, that "Freedom to Breed Is Intolerable.") In O'Rourke's book, All the Trouble in the World: The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague, and Poverty, he devotes a chapter to the myth (titled Just Enough of Me, Way Too Much of You). He visits both Bangladesh (a problem spot for overpopulation groupies) and Fremont, California--both places with the same number of people per square mile--only one is teeming with brown, odor-challenged poor, while the other with middle-class Caucasians.

Is the problem really overpopulation, dearies, or is it...something else?