President Obama's acting chief White House communications advisor, Anita Dunn has been much in the headlines of late, owing to her comments during a CNN interview last week branding Fox News as an arm of the Republican Party.
Interestingly, Dunn delivered a commencement address in June in which she named Mao Tse Sung, the genocidal founder of Communist China, as one of her "two favorite philosophers," with the other, she chirpily noted, being Mother Teresa.
Mao and Mother Teresa are, Dunn explained, "the two people that I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point, which is to say you are going to make choices, you are going to challenge, you are going to say why not." She then quoted an alleged Mao statement about winning the Chinese civil war his way: "You fight your war and I will fight mine."
She could as easily have encouraged the newly minted college graduates to take inspiration from Frank Sinatra's memorable pop hit, "My Way." At least Sinatra was not a genocidal killer of millions, as was Mao, which is what make Dunn's choice of heroes so utterly perplexing.
Rather than the truth about the choices Mao made, it appears that all Dunn knows about Mao are the Potemkin Village myths sown by his apologists among the U.S. and European intellectual elitists in the 1950s and 1960s. This mythical Mao was wise, kindly, and selfless, a veritable Chinese Jesus.
But it is impossible to accept that vision of Mao after reading the full account of the Chinese dictator's political career in British historian Paul Johnson's "Modern Times," the definitive, stark account of the rise, rule and ruin of totalitarianism throughout the 20th Century.
Here are just a couple of passages from Johnson that reveal the murderous truth about Dunn's hero. First, Johnson describes Mao's actions in the weeks immediately after winning the civil war: "Mao's first act was to extend his 'land reform,' already begun in the North, to the entire country, It was aimed at 'local bullies and evil gentry' and he urged peasants to kill 'not one or two but a goodly number of each.' At least two million people perished, half of them the tyrannical owners of less than 30 acres."
Mao thus, Johnson observed, "launched the largest nation on earth into a frenzy of violent activism which was to rival the social engineering of Hitler and Stalin."
That systematic genocide was among Mao's routine policies is seen in the continuous tragedy that was "land reform." During the years between 1951 and 1953, for example, Mao conducted these campaigns with what Johnson describes as "great savagery." Millions died after being convicted as "counter-revolutionaries," an all-purpose criminal classification used to make short work of anybody who came under suspicion.
"All major towns held mass rallies at which social "enemies" were publicly denounced and sentenced," Johnson wrote. "Over a few months, nearly 30,000 such meetings were held in Peking alone, attended by three million people. The papers published long lists of names every day of executed 'counter-revolutionaries.' In October 1951, it was stated that 800,000 cases had been dealt with in the first six months of the year."
Estimates of the total number of people killed in these land reform campaigns of extermination ranged as high as 15 million, though Johnson cautions that "a figure of one to three milion is more likely."
In any case, these two passages make clear that Anita Dunn's hero was a man who thought nothing of decreeing the deaths of millions of people for no reason other than suspicion that they might not accept his ghastly totalitarian vision for China. To fully grasp what Mao did, just imagine here in America today millions of non-political middle-class Americans suspected of being Tea Party sympathizers being rounded up, tried, sentenced and executed merely on suspicion of their being opposed to "change we can believe in."
You can view the referenced portion of Dunn's commencement speech here, courtesy of Michelle Malkin, who also provides a host of additional facts about Dunn's career as a flak for such notables as Tom Daschle and Nancy Pelosi. The White House has claimed Dunn was joking in her reference to Mao. Judge for yourself.
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