Mao: The Untold Story

[Patricoo]

This is an interesting book that I was able to grab my hands on.

I spent about 20 minutes searching and browsing this area for anything about this particular piece and found nothing. I'm quite surprised! I picked it up in January and finished it in March and found myself pleasantly surprised. The research in this biography is amazing, though quite bias to the evil. The authors hesitate very little to toss in their own assumptions based on personal feelings. The way I figure, if your very aware of the bias, then who really cares? It adds some feeling to the story of Mao's life, rather then the mundane textbook manner that you'll normally find.

Did anyone else get their hands on this? I figure if I could find any group of people that did, it would be here.

[Shi Tong]

I bought it for my dad and am waiting for him to finish it so I can steal it and read it.

I think he's struggling with it because he thinks it's pretty depressing! TBH, I feel like nicking it now!

[Patricoo]

I bought it for my dad and am waiting for him to finish it so I can steal it and read it.

I think he's struggling with it because he thinks it's pretty depressing! TBH, I feel like nicking it now!

Two months later and I can reply to this.

Go for it! Hope you stole it already.

[Mistelten]

I read the book a couple of years ago and thought it was great. It should be required reading for the history of the 20th century.

All of the Amazon reviewers who claim that it is too biased or unbalanced are missing the point. You don't try to write a balanced book about a monster. Nobody would do it for Hitler or Stalin.

Author Jung Chang has done a great service. Between her work and that of Thomas DiLorenzo, they have torn two of the most obscene personality cults off of their marble thrones for the benefit of all.

[WeiWenDi]

Author Jung Chang has done a great service. Between her work and that of Thomas DiLorenzo, they have torn two of the most obscene personality cults off of their marble thrones for the benefit of all.

Surely you must be referring to a different Thomas DiLorenzo, because the only Thomas DiLorenzo I'm aware of is an intellectually-bankrupt shill for the Ludwig von Mises Institute, who tends to rely on personal prejudice and blanket assertion rather than actual evidence when discussing the tyranny and despotism of... Abraham Lincoln? (WTF?)

What's obscene is the suggestion you seem to be making that one of our greatest orators and political leaders in time of war is morally equivalent to a psychotic mass murderer like Chairman Mao.

[Mistelten]

Read the Lincoln book for yourself and make a decision. I don't care if he was a great orator - DiLorenzo gives him full credit for his abilities. He was a mass murderer and a criminal who subverted the American Government. His facts are indisputable, which is why organizations such as the SPLC and other radical leftist/racist groups attack his character or his economic beliefs rather than his work.

[WeiWenDi]

What the hell is the SPLC? I don't know about any left-wing groups who want to discredit DiLorenzo, unless you're willing to call the Claremont Institute a left-wing organisation (which is ludicrous). They dissected most of DiLorenzo's vaunted 'facts', which really amount to little more than quotes taken out of context and a decidedly revisionist historical bent (to put it politely).

EDIT: Apparently the Southern Poverty Law Centre is not a radical left-wing group, but a think tank dedicated to uprooting racism of all flavours, including white supremacism, anti-Semitism and black supremacism. They seem to lean left, but more because most of the groups they investigate are themselves right-wing groups than on account of any agenda of their own.

[Mistelten]

Have you ever noticed that "anti-racist" groups are usually quite racist in their own ideology? The SPLC tries to slander DiLorenzo in order to censor him just like they try to censor anyone else they don't agree with. Racism is irrelevant until people start dying, and they are on the wrong side of racial violence as well.

Unfavorable reviews such as the Claremont Insitute's that you believe in are nothing but the inevitable responses of the Lincoln apologists. DiLorenzo calls Lincoln a cult of personality and he is completely right. You go through his political life or even take issue with anything he's ever done, and someone will fall back on the official truth in opposition to you. That alone is proof that his is nothing if not a cult of personality - you can criticize ANY president but him. Washington is reviled in almost any public school in America. FDR and Kennedy are fair game. Radicals were given a pass in calling for Bush's assassination for the past eight years. Really there are no rules: only don't tell the truth about the most tyrannical President in American history, although I wouldn't give him the dignity of the title. He was not elected by the country he conquered and he stole the second election by shipping his opponent off to Canada under an armed escort (and still nearly lost to the hugely unpopular McClellan).

[WeiWenDi]

Have you ever noticed that "anti-racist" groups are usually quite racist in their own ideology? The SPLC tries to slander DiLorenzo in order to censor him just like they try to censor anyone else they don't agree with. Racism is irrelevant until people start dying, and they are on the wrong side of racial violence as well.

I call bullshit. Inequality and injustice are not 'irrelevant' until people start dying. When people start dying, that's an indication that the inequalities and injustices have gotten way too far out of hand.

Unfavorable reviews such as the Claremont Insitute's that you believe in are nothing but the inevitable responses of the Lincoln apologists. DiLorenzo calls Lincoln a cult of personality and he is completely right. You go through his political life or even take issue with anything he's ever done, and someone will fall back on the official truth in opposition to you. That alone is proof that his is nothing if not a cult of personality - you can criticize ANY president but him.

I'm calling bullshit again. I've read some very pointed criticisms of Lincoln that didn't involve him being a 'mass murderer' or a 'despot' - I think there is some truth to the assertion that he was a political chameleon who adopted views as they became expedient, but I have yet to see any factual basis for 'despotism' or mass murder on Lincoln's part.

Lincoln was definitely considered a martyr, but that was nothing of his own doing - indeed, he was a fairly unpopular president in his own time both among Democrats and Democrat sympathisers (for his anti-slavery stance) and among hardliners in his own party (for his conciliatory stance toward the Border States and toward the South after the war). However, the assassination of Lincoln, and the public outrage which followed, was in some measure responsible for his resulting popularity (much like Kennedy in that regard, actually).

Radicals were given a pass in calling for Bush's assassination for the past eight years.

False moral equivalence - in no moral universe that I know of is saying that someone ought to die the moral equivalent of actually assassinating him.

Really there are no rules: only don't tell the truth about the most tyrannical President in American history, although I wouldn't give him the dignity of the title.

Which DiLorenzo doesn't.

And the last part makes your stance more pitiable, but it has nothing to do with actual history (in which Lincoln was President whether you like it or not).

He was not elected by the country he conquered

False. Lincoln was elected by the United States by a clear plurality in the first election. In no way was conquest involved.

he stole the second election by shipping his opponent off to Canada under an armed escort (and still nearly lost to the hugely unpopular McClellan).

Also false. Lincoln won a landslide victory over McClellan (by 191 electoral votes and over 400,000 popular votes), and McClellan remained a commissioned officer in the United States Army right up to the day of the election, never going to Canada (though he did end up going to Europe after the election was over).

Though perhaps you could be referring to the case of Representative Clement Vallandigham of Ohio, who was exiled - but not to Canada, rather to the South. He was never a contender for the presidency, but rather for the Ohio governorship (from Canada), which he lost miserably.

[Mistelten]

Again, read the book because most of the lies that you are repeating are disproven there. For clarity: I don't mean that YOU are a liar, but you are repeating the same lies that some very sick people tried to force on me for my whole life as well.

And the last part makes your stance more pitiable, but it has nothing to do with actual history (in which Lincoln was President whether you like it or not).

I think the case is very strong that he actually was never president of the United States. He was a dictator of the North, and their president perhaps, but he ruled over a united country only after having conquered it, and during the occupation (and for years afterwards), they lived under a military dictatorship, not a republican form of government which allowed for the office of president. If you want to have pity, have pity for the republic he destroyed.
On his plurality: He was a 40% president who had not a single electoral vote from the South.

There is more I would say in the defense of a Constitutional Federative Republic and of secession, but I don't want to take this tangent any further. Suffice to say, Lincoln and Mao were the worst tyrants of their respective centuries and both are held in high esteem by many of the same people. The important part of destroying the cult of personality is to achieve a kind of awakening: Shame is one weapon used to keep us in bondage when bayonets and bullets cannot. Take away the obscene false god and we remove the shame of opposing him with principle.
I think both writers were heroic in destroying the image of these tyrants because that actually leaves people with a choice: Do they join the side of the victor to have the satisfaction of putting their boot on the face of the defeated forever, or do they make the choice to resist? We shall see in the days to come....