In my classes, I try to explore the "great personality" theory of history versus "masses make history" and variants in-between. One thing for sure, is that any event, any crime, any policy cannot be fully or meaningfully understood in isolation--without reference to contextual forces, conditions, imperatives, contraints contradictions etc. This is not to "excuse", but to understand. The Chinese people suffered untold horrors: being carved up like a turkey and partitioned by "extraterritorial" imperialist powers; being ripped apart by warlordism and other factions/contradictions exacerbated by imperialist powers; being threatened repeatedly with nuclear weapons and subjected to repeated isolation, destabilization, imperialist machinations etc; grotesque legacies of extreme poverty, drug addiction, mass prostitution, conflicting national minorities, different languages, shifting centers of power etc; imperialist-sanctioned/conducted isolation from trade, commerce,,, diplomacy etc with significant portions of the community of nations; massive destruction from WWII and after coupled with repeated provocations/attacks from many fronts: Kuomintang, Japanese Imperialists, American Imperialists etc; a long history with foreign commodities, "aid", trade, ideas, religions and machinations used as instruments of penetration, plunder and imperial control. In the context of all of the above and much more not listed, making revolution, dealing with counter-revolution, pulling up the weeds of capitalism (what socialism is supposed to be about), dealing with imperialist encirclement, dealing with massive poverty and destruction etc is not some parlor exercise and some kind of abstract game for parlor academic debate. You are dealing with very ugly, very dangerous, very determined imperial and genocidal forces that can only be dealt with by very ruthless--often self-damaging--means. Indeed SOME ends do justify--even demand--SOME means. (My mother used to call "bleeding heart liberals" those who sit in their parlors and "bleed" with other people's blood). I have read the stuff about Mao and young girls and supposedly VD and all of that. But as I survey what little I know about Mao's life and contributions, what I see is essentially an honest servant of the Chinese oppressed; a resolute fighter against fascism and imperialism; someone who made some unique contributions to the development and application of Marxism and Leninism to the concrete conditions of China; someone who was very bright and could have made millions had he sold out and yet remained relatively poor for his station and who refused to sell out his core ideals; someone who was tactically compromising in order to be strategically uncompromising; someone who said himself that he didn't have all of the answers and who urged the opposite of the Cult of Personality and who repeatedly write and said that the masses not great "leaders" are the true makers of history; someone who had to juggle myriad contradicitions, pressures, contending factions, national survival imperatives etc. Whatever mistakes or even crimes Mao may have committed (I say may because crime is often a relative thing) should be seen contextually and in balance with all that he sacrificed and accomplished. In many ways, I would disagree with Mao for being sometimes too soft. Sometimes he forged alliances with elements of the national bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie that only in some theoretical sense could have been objectively progressive, but in a concrete sense those forces were incapable of doing anything progressive and should have been seen as such. I know among my mother's people, we didn't kill enough missionaries, white racists, colonizers, developers, BIA types, imperialists etc. that is why Blackfoot are almost extinct. Blackfoot were simply not ruthless enough and now they are suffering and almost gone as a People. But whatever Mao did or didn't do, he was a resolte fighter against fascism who made concrete contributions--alone and with many other heros--against the forces and evils of fascism and 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
