Mao’s 70 million (Ralph R. Reiland, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review)
I bring up all this history because I was halfway through reading “Mao: The Unknown Story,” the new book by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, when The New York Times published Nicholas Kristof’s review of the book.
Now it’s true that Kristof, an op-ed writer at The Times, judges the book to be a “magnificent biography,” and he does at least whistle past the graveyard, pointing out that Mao had slaughtered a quarter of the entire Red Army, “often after they were tortured in such ways as having red-hot rods forced into their rectums.”
Still, Mr. Kristof worries that Chang and Halliday might have painted too dark a picture. He wonders if the 70 million number is “accurate,” and if the book unfairly excludes “exculpatory evidence” about the upside of Mao’s rule.
Arguing that “Mao’s legacy is not all bad,” Kristof pays tribute to Mao’s successes with land reform and women’s rights. “Land reform in China,” he writes, “like land reform in Japan and Taiwan, helped lay the groundwork for prosperity today.”
What he doesn’t say is that land reform in Japan and Taiwan was accomplished without the slaughter of millions of people.
Regarding women’s rights, Kristof asserts that Mao “moved China from one of the worst places in the world to be a girl to one where women have more equality than in, say, Japan or Korea.”
The perfect example of this enhanced equality, perhaps, is that the Chinese government has just banned this new book on Mao, for both men and women.
Kristof just can’t help himself.
9 comments On Never A Dictator The Times Didn’t Like
Kevin: Reiland mischaracterizes Kristof’s review.
From Kristof’s second paragraph:
Based on a decade of meticulous interviews and archival research, this magnificent biography methodically demolishes every pillar of Mao’s claim to sympathy or legitimacy.
How much more bluntly and prominently could he have put it?
Yes, Kristof does have reservations about certain claims and what he sees as omissions in Chang’s work. But Kristof makes it very clear that he thinks Mao was an evil man.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005…
Kristof’s own words:
No wonder the Chinese government has banned not only this book but issues of magazines with reviews of it, for Mao emerges from these pages as another Hitler or Stalin.
In that regard, I have reservations about the book’s judgments, for my own sense is that Mao, however monstrous, also brought useful changes to China.
and
Finally, there is Mao’s place in history. I agree that Mao was a catastrophic ruler in many, many respects, and this book captures that side better than anything ever written. But Mao’s legacy is not all bad.
How did the Reiland excerpt I provided distort those words of Kristof’s?
Kristof wants to have it several ways. He seems to agree that Mao is a brutal murderer. Yet he seems to want to rehabilitate Mao from the criticism of the authors. One wishes he’d make up his mind!
We can selectively quote all we like, but the Reiland excerpt accurately captures the weaknesses of Kristof’s review, and the quotes above.
Too many people have difficulty coming to grips with the fact that the heroes of their college years (and perhaps beyond) were immoral murderers. It often leads them to some really sloppy writing. I think that’s probably one of the influencing factors here.
Kevin: Reiland vastly understates the degree to which Kristof in his review agreed with Chang and praised her book.
To read Reiland’s summary of Kristof’s review, and then read Kristof’s review itself, is to conclude that Reiland had an axe to grind rather than a truth to tell.
Where are the untruths?
Kristof wants to have it both ways. Reiland called him on it. So did I for that matter.
Kevin: Almost all of Kristof’s review was a catalog of the evil deeds and the lies of Mao, as re-told by Chang.
Reiland dismisses that almost all of the review in one artfully written paragraph, then spends the next five paragraphs focusing exclusively on the fact that Kristof makes relatively minor criticisms of the book and believes that there are some positive legacies of Mao’s rule.
That six-paragraph summary gives a picture of Kristof’s review that is imbalanced and incomplete to the point of being dishonest.
Frankly, I don’t see how someone can read Kristof’s review and walk away with the idea that Kristof likes Mao, or the idea that the New York Times, by running the review, likes Mao.
I’ll ask again — where are the untruths?
I don’t see a single untruth in the paragraphs I produced from Reiland. Indeed, I’ve supplemented them with Kristof’s own words that support Reiland’s assertions.
Reiland’s review is a bit of a polemic, and you apparently disagree with the polemic. You really need to be more careful in assertions of intellectual dishonesty, however. Disagreement does not dishonesty make.
Kevin: One doesn’t need to tell an untruth to be dishonest. One needs only to select his truths in a way that misleads. See How to Lie with Statistics, by Hoff.
I agree with you that Reiland’s review is a bit of a polemic. When a polemicist is speaking about his own views, the results can be both enlightening and entertaining. When a polemicist tries to summarize an opponent’s views, however, the results are usually unfortunate. Such was the case here.
One doesn’t need to tell an untruth to be dishonest.
But that’s not what you said above. You said Reiland was not engaged in truth telling. Yet when pressed, you cannot show that the excerpt I’ve produced — the heart of Reiland’s criticism — contains untruths. It can’t be shown, as the quotes above from Kristof demonstrate.
Kristof wants both to agree with the authors on Mao and to say that Mao brought useful changes and that his legacy is not all bad. Reiland criticizes the latter. If Kristof didn’t want that to happen, perhaps he shouldn’t have written it! But it is true that he wrote it. It is true that Reiland called him on it. And it is true that I posted excerpts here for that reason.
Reiland could have pointed out the inconsistencies in a dry, less polemical matter, but who wants to read that on the op-ed pages (or on blogs, for that matter)? Not me. I could have stayed in academia if tedious reading appealed! That’s probably also why I’m more of a Brothers Judd reader than a Volokh reader — but I don’t regard Brother Orrin as any less honest than the Volokh crew simply because their blog styles are radically different.
To follow up on this dishonesty bit, I’d be curious if you found this dishonest:
http://www.brothersjudd.com…
Or this:
http://www.washingtonpost.c…
Krauthammer of course fleshes out where I wanted readers to go on their own, but in both cases, we jumped on specific things that Scowcroft had written or said.
Scowcroft would respond that stability trumps our concerns. Fine. He can beat that drum all he wants. Are we dishonest to focus on the parts of his thought we find objectionable?
I don’t think so.
Likewise, I don’t find Reiland’s objecting to quoted portions of Kristof’s review dishonest.
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