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February 04, 2005

Mao Betta Blues

Reader Corey from Minneapolis writes:

I was in the Uptown transit station and on the bench, laid for anyone to find - not unlike a Christian tract laid in phone booths, bus seats, utility bills by believers with a zeal for evangelism - was...

could you guess?

... a copy of "Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung"

Is this the famous little red book all citizens of Communist China were required to carry and read periodically?

It also had a sticker which read as follows:

"Howdy! Hola! Bonjour!Guten Tag!
I'm a very special book. You see, I'm traveling around the world making new friends. I hope I've met another friend in you. Please go to www.BookCrossing.com and enter my BCID number (shown below). You'll discover where I've been and who has read me, and can let them know I'm safe here in your hands. Then ... read and release me!"

Now, I knew the Twin cities was a bastion of leftists, but I thought they'd try to be a LITTLE more subtle than this!

Well, to be fair, they've never had to be - and they rarely feel the need to be.

I remember in the late eighties - around the time of the end of the Cold War - some group of Twin Cities communists plastered "Communist Party of Minnesota" stickers around the U, Dinkytown, Uptown, all the usual haunts.

The stickers had a phone number, which I promptly called, and called several times over a few months, which was never answered and had no answering machine...

Upside, Corey; Mao probably is a more appealing leftist than Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi.

Posted by Mitch at February 4, 2005 05:17 AM | TrackBack
Comments

I'd be rather tempted to replace it with a copy of "Free to Choose"...

Posted by: Jay Reding at February 4, 2005 07:22 AM

The title is, however, today's worst pun in the blogosphere.

Posted by: Joe G at February 4, 2005 08:13 AM

"Mao probably is a more appealing leftist than Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi."

I understand the impulse to snarky humor, but how is this better than the Bush=Hitler stuff from the left (neglecting the issue that Hitler belongs on the "left", of course)? I'm afraid that this sort of discourse defines evil down every bit as much.

Pelosi and Reid have the "banal" part of "the banality of evil" down pat, but as to the "evil" part, they're still playing in Pop Warner. Frankly, they don't even rise to the level of Robert Byrd, though I don't know whether that is caused by a lack of desire or a lack of native ability. (Perhaps I should say upbringing rather than native ability? That whole nature vs. nurture thing is complex; I'd hate to be politically incorrect.)

Perhaps the saddest thing to me is that far too many on the left wouldn't understand why they should be mortally offended to be compared to a dictatorial mass murderer like Mao.

Posted by: Doug Sundseth at February 4, 2005 12:03 PM

Doug,

You're right on pretty much every count.

Lefties, be advised: Nancy Pelosi is neither evil, nor worse than Mao.

Posted by: mitch at February 4, 2005 12:22 PM

You obviously have no idea what BookCrossing is. It's not a Communist plot. It's a way to randomly share books with strangers.

In other words, the message on the sticker has nothing to do with the contents of the book.

By the way, I think it is important that people read the Little Red Book, for the same reason I think it's important that people read Das Kapital and Mein Kampf. We need to understand these ideas if we are understand their appeal and prevent them from reoccurring.

P.S.: Doug -- are you seriously suggesting Hitler was a leftist? I suggest you read less NewsMax and more history books. Just because "National Socialist" has "socialist" in its name doesn't mean the Nazis were leftist, any more than having "Democratic" in a country's name makes it a democracy.

Posted by: Luke Francl at February 5, 2005 10:12 PM

Luke,

I agree, we SHOULD read books about philosophies we loathe. I've read LRB, Kapital, Mein Kampf (German and English), Freud, Nietzche, Marx - I have a shelf of "enemies" in my bookcase.

However, the "Hitler was right-wing" meme is one you might want to re-examine; just because he murdered Communists and fought the Russians doesn't make him right-wing. He (and Mussolini) both learned a lot from observing Lenin. And perhaps a more useful metric for determining left-ness and right-itude than titles and enemies is the overall goal of the movement. Right-wing autocracies control the nation, frequently exalting the nation or attributes of the society in the process; left-wing ones try to remake the nation and society from the core. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot were all leftists; Mussolini was more ultra-right. By that standard, Hitler borrowed heavily from both; Nazissm exalted and mythologized aspects of traditional German society (its Carolingian and pre-Roman past, as well as the concept of "Volk", something that is very hard to explain to Americans, even for a guy with undergrad minors in German and History), while also seeking to radically re-engineer German society in a way more consistent with Lenin and Stalin than with Mussolini.

In other words, Hitler was a moderate. ;-)

Posted by: Mitch at February 6, 2005 03:11 PM
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