[PEN-L:7529] Re: RE: DeLong Compares Mao to Hitler

[Brad De Long <delong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>Who is this ultra-rightist idiot Delong? First of all, the use of the
>disingenuous Kirkpatrickian term "Totalitarian" versus "Authoritarian" is
>the first give away. If you have a society of despots and death squads that
>is anti-communist, monopoly or dependent monopoly capitalist and a
>whore/toady of US imperialism, it is "Authoritarian"; if it is nominally
>socialist, even more advanced in respect for basic human rights, it is
>"Totalitarian."
>
>Next, let's explore the logic. Jews of the Warsaw ghetto employed violence
>to resist genocide and the nazis employed violence to conduct genocide
>therefore Jews = Nazis because they both employed "violence"? Or Mao
>"killed" over 30 million Chinese (assumption to be summarily
>asserted/accepted) and Hitler "killed" over 20 million "therefore" Evil of
>Mao > Evil of Hitler?
>
>This is a good example of why the Cultural Revolution in China, depsite its
>excesses and crimes, was fundamentally a sound idea--send hacks, toadies,
>sycophants and ideologues/scholar despots like this Delong to the
>countryside to slop hogs; get some of the scholar despot/whore profs off
>their asses to do a decent days work. Since the poor have to work hard and
>produce surpluses for the Philosopher Kings, it is legitimate to ask what of
>value the Philosopher Kings and Scholar Despots are producing.
>
>And what makes this Delong worth even reading? Why does a long CV
>automatically qualify someone (quantity versus quality) as an "established
>scholar" or "notable scholar" without any reference to the quality of the
>work or the experiencial-as well as theoretical--basis for any purported
>quality or work.
>
>A Cold Warrior without an enemy is like a hooker without a motel or space to
>sell his/her wares. And the sad part is that the universities are full of
>these petiti-bourgeois self-appointed "scholars" and "experts" who turn out
>even worse shit than this Delong is apparently turning out.


Let's back up a little. Let's establish the context.

In response to:

>I find the lumping together (persistently) of Mao with Hitler and the KKK a
>bit much.  Mao's works on philosophy and his political analyses cannot be
>compared with the drivel of Hitler, no matter how brilliant some of the
>early victories at war of the Germans were (how much of these could be
>attributed to the ideology of Naziism?

I wrote:

	Alas! The fact remains that Mao Zedong was (along with
	Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler) the head of one of the very,
	very few regimes that managed to kill more than thirty million
	people in this century. Mao's Great Leap Forward and the
	Cultural Revolution these count as among the greatest human
	disasters of this century...

And later on I wrote, about the above paragraph:

	There is no denial that there have been brutal dictatorships
	of the right (in fact, by any measure Hitler's was much *more*
	brutal [than Mao's]: consider what would have happened had
	Hitler won World War II). There is no claim that communism
	was "uniquely evil." There is no defense of Pinochet or of
	Galtieri--no claim that their crimes ought to be excused
	for reasons analogous to those Trotsky advanced in "Their
	Morals and Ours."

	I think that communism was not "uniquely evil" in the
	history of the twentieth century (although I will admit
	to sometimes thinking that "totalitarianism" is a useful
	concept and that there are powerful links--that I do not
	understand--running from the Leninist project to "totalitarian"
	outcomes). I do not think that brutal dictatorships are
	found only on the left. I think that the U.S. government
	has no business taking as its "friends" those who throw
	people out of airplanes into the South Atlantic, or who
	herd people into soccer stadiums and shoot them down with
	machine guns...


And for this I am tried, judged, and sentenced as an:

	--(i) ultra-rightist
	--(ii) idiot
	--(iii) supporter of despots and death squads
	--(iv) believer that all "violence" is equal: that Jews who resist
		Nazi slaughter are as bad as Nazis.
	--(v) believer that  Evil of Mao > Evil of Hitler?
	--(vi) an example of why the Cultural Revolution in China was
		a good thing
	--(vii) someone who ought to be sent off to the countryside to
		slop hogs, and deprived of all writing materials
		(by the way, Mr. Craven seems to imply that there
		is something degrading about being a farmer; my
		mother fed pigs while she was growing up; what is
		degrading is low agricultural productivity and thus
		rural poverty--not farming)
	--(viii) a social parasite
	--(ix) someone who writes too much
	--(x) someone who has no experiential basis for anything he writes
	--(xi) a hooker without a hotel (once again I do not like this
		implicit ranking of human occupations in some great-
		chain-of-status-and-being)

All in reaction to a relatively simple observation that the Great Leap
Forward and the Cultural Revolution were not bright lights on the tree of
good policies that governments have adopted in the course of the twentieth
century...

On one level it is funny. And I am tempted to plead guilty to (ix) (or why
would I be writing this?) and (ii) (or why would I be bothering to write
this?)...

On another level it is not funny at all.

I believe that anyone who cannot--at this late date--admit to him- or
herself that the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were great
human disasters has no business doing anything political at all. We who do
politics have a hard enough time keeping our own gross mistakes to a
minimum: we do not need to add to our mistakes by repeating the mistakes of
the past too. And yet that is what we will be condemned to do if we cannot
bear to be reminded of or to remember the mistakes of the past...


Brad DeLong




-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
"Now 'in the long run' this [way of summarizing the quantity theory of
money] is probably true.... But this long run is a misleading guide to
current affairs. **In the long run** we are all dead.  Economists set
themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can
only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again."

--J.M. Keynes
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
J. Bradford De Long; Professor of Economics, U.C. Berkeley;
Co-Editor, Journal of Economic Perspectives.
Dept. of Economics, U.C. Berkeley, #3880
Berkeley, CA 94720-3880
(510) 643-4027; (925) 283-2709 phones
(510) 642-6615; (925) 283-3897 faxes
http://econ161.berkeley.edu/
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