Henry Kissinger has added yet another sin to his already grievous record, in the form of a fat tome, ponderously titled On China.* Because there is no way that I’m going to put another penny in Dr. K’s pocket, I’ll quote extensively from Michiko Kakutani’s review in the Times. Kakutani calls the book” fascinating, shrewd and sometimes perverse,” but also notes the following:
Mr. Kissinger is even more chillingly cavalier about the tens of millions of people who lost their lives during Mao’s years in power and the devastating fallout of his Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. [That is, even more chillingly cavalier than he is about the fate of the Tiananmen Square protesters. AV NOTE] Mr. Kissinger writes about what he describes as a “poignant” scene in which “Nixon complimented Mao on having transformed an ancient civilization, to which Mao replied: ‘I haven’t been able to change it. I’ve only been able to change a few places in the vicinity of Beijing.’ ”
Mr. Kissinger then, startlingly, adds: “After a lifetime of titanic struggle to uproot Chinese society, there was not a little pathos in Mao’s resigned recognition of the pervasiveness of Chinese culture and the Chinese people.”
Buying into many of the myths Mao promoted about himself, Mr. Kissinger describes him as “the philosopher king.”
“Mao enunciated the doctrine of ‘continuous revolution,’ but when the Chinese national interest required it, he could be patient and take the long view,” he writes. “The manipulation of ‘contradictions’ was his proclaimed strategy, yet it was in the service of an ultimate goal drawn from the Confucian concept of da tong, or the Great Harmony.”
For some people, Mr. Kissinger acknowledges, “the tremendous suffering Mao inflicted on his people will dwarf his achievements.” But he also delivers this coldblooded rationalization: “If China remains united and emerges as a 21st-century superpower,” many Chinese may come to regard him as they do the early emperor Qin Shihuang, “whose excesses were later acknowledged by some as a necessary evil.”
If Dr. Kissinger had bothered to consult the historical record instead of his own metaphysical (or is it pathological?) obsession with amorality and even cruelty not as a means to an end but rather an end in itself, he might have noticed that Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” initiated in the late 1950s, cost between 18 million and 32 million lives while (not too surprisingly) reducing economic growth. His “Cultural Revolution,” initiated in 1966 largely to destroy those who dared to criticize, or even notice, the disasters of the Great Leap Forward, had a body count of “only” a million or two—or three, or four—but included ghastly programs of torture and even ritual cannibalism, where the liver, hearts, and genitals of “counterrevolutionaries” were publicly consumed. The Cultural Revolution brought China’s educational system to a virtual halt for a decade and sent literacy rates plummeting throughout China.
As any idiot—but not Henry Kissinger—could testify, it was the abandonment of Mao’s grandiose monstrosities that enabled China to become the modernizing nation that it is today—the prosaic devices of the free market rather than the frenzied schemes of an aging egomaniac, raging against the dying of the light by making the lives of hundreds of millions of people a living hell.
Henry Kissinger said of his father Louis Kissinger that he was “a gentle man in a world with no place for gentleness.” Well, we all bear a grudge of one sort or another against the old man. Maybe Louis Kissinger was an ineffectual dreamer, a failure, a quitter, and a loser. But I doubt if he would have gotten down on his knees to admire a man on the basis of his body count. And maybe History won’t remember Louis Kissinger the way it will remember Henry. But God will, and that makes all the difference.
Afterwords
I reviewed a documentary telling the story of one survivor of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, The Gentleman from Shanghai, here.
*Hannah Arendt had a habit of writing essays “On Revolution,” “On Violence,” “On This,” “On That,” “On the Other.” It seems to be a bit of a tic with Germans, who want to show off their classical learning. Back in the day, I suffered through Cicero’s “De Amicitia” (“On Friendship”) and “De Senectute” (“On Old Age”), among others. Cicero probably got it from the Greeks, but I don’t go back that far.
