[PEN-L:7700] Re: Bozofilter time

[Brad De Long <delong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>...for some petit-bourgeois scribbler/parlor dilettante who has
>obviously never seen or experienced the horrors of fascism, racism or the
>horrors the Chinese people faced/face to utter Mao's name to be compared
>with Hitler is disgusting, a/anti-historical and typical of the
>ultra-rightist filth that passes for/defines bourgeois "scholarship".
>
>That is my opinion with less invective.
>
>Jim Craven


I take it that I am the "petit-bourgeois scribbler/parlor dilettante"
referred to here.

I truly am an idiot for participating in this. But let me, once again,
repeat what 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 count as among the greatest human
	disasters of this century...

In this context, I take Mr. Craven's post to be a claim that the Great Leap
Forward and the Cultural Revolution were great triumphs, glorious victories
for utopia--and that any denial of this is "disgusting" "anti-historical"
"ultra-rightist filth."

I no longer find it funny that there are people who find it psychologically
impossible to admit to themselves that the Great Leap Forward and the
Cultural Revolution were great human disasters. I find it pathetic. Perhaps
most pathetic--and least funny--is Mr. Craven's assertion that in Mao he
sees "someone... who urged the opposite of the Cult of Personality."

As I have said many times before, our only chance of getting the
twenty-first century right is to look the disasters of the twentieth
century squarely in the face.

But Mr. Craven is right in at least one thing: I am an idiot for
participating in this. It's bozofilter time.


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/
<delong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>