Tuesday, April 28, 2015

“Mao: A Life”, by Philip Short


798 pages, Henry Holt and Co., ISBN-13: 978-0805031157

Choosing from this list of dictators, who was the most evil: Adolf Hitler, Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin, or Mao Tse-tung? For those in the West, Hitler would take the top spot, while Stalin would be second but, amongst our academic literati, with reservations (sure he murdered millions upon millions of his own people, but he was trying to create a better world, damnit!) But what many of these self-same smart people would declare is that, for all his faults, Mao is the least deserving to be on this list, for while his “achievements” are relatively well-known, his many MANY crimes are not and, thus, it is easier to make the case that he was, in the end, just a great big cuddly butterball…absolute dictator.

Philip Short is a British journalist and author who, while not strictly a historian, has spent a lot of time in China, and his take on Mao – like his later take on Pol Pot – is unique because of it. In Short’s telling Mao was a canny backwoods operator whose sentiments held sway over his intellect and, subsequently, who fell badly out of touch with reality once his power became so great that his advisors were no longer able to reel in his fancies. For all that, Mao (and Pol) didn’t seem to have really meant anybody any harm; rather, it was the religious-like devotion to doctrine (and a childishness of mind that grew out of a complacent over-reliance on doctrine) that made him the architect of the most fatal period of misrule that China has ever seen: once he got an idea in his head – on generalship, politics, law or agriculture – he simply couldn’t be persuaded to let it go (this is, to say the least, a rather forgiving analysis of a man who is responsible for the deaths of anywhere from 49 to 78 million people). Upon seizing power, Short recounts, Mao carried on the struggle as though the fronts had merely shifted, beginning a campaign to resolutely eliminate bandits, spies, bullies, and despots (which eventually claimed more than 700,000 lives) and becoming embroiled, for ideological reasons, in the Korean War (which claimed 148,000 more). Short argues that the important distinction that needs to be made between Mao and the other dictators is that the overwhelming majority of deaths under his rule were the unintended consequence of policies, not the deliberate genocide of a class of people (like the Jews or the Kulaks). Mao’s cavalier attitude towards deaths on a massive scale is acknowledged as, to him, a million deaths was merely a part of the dialectics of revolution. In this sense he was indeed a monster.

When the time came to focus on domestic policy and economic development, he developed increasingly unrealistic ambitions and an increasingly forcible style of carrying them out, culminating in the “Great Leap Forward”, the massively botched scheme that was intended to transform China overnight from a struggling peasant economy into a powerhouse of technology and production. The plan was based on ideological principles rather than practical ones, but at that point Mao was beginning to find it hard to distinguish between the two. Short quotes a 1958 speech: “When we study a problem, we must subdue the facts … The relationship between politics and numbers is like that between officers and soldiers: Politics is the commander.” History would record the results, and Short’s biography shows Mao, after having been scorched badly by the refusal of facts and numbers to kowtow to his notions of ideology, crossing over into a condition indistinguishable from paranoid dementia. By the time of the Cultural Revolution, in the mid-60s, that chubby, smiling face on the posters belonged to a disheveled, peevish man lounging in bed all day amid a pile of books as he systematically plotted to take out everyone in China who might disagree even inwardly with his notions of Mao Thought.

This book is a good look at one of the most vile men in the world. Mao was the consummate manipulator of other humans who did more to hurt the Chinese people than any of the ancient rulers, and I doubt that we will ever know the cost in human lives that this man caused.


Friday, April 24, 2015

“Gilded Youth: Three Lives in France’s Belle Époque” by Kate Cambor


336 pages, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN-13: 978-0374162306

Ah, La Belle Époque – that era in French and European history that began with the defeat of the French by the Germans in 1871 and ended with the onset of the Great War in 1914 that say that defeat, ultimately, avenged. In Kate Cambor’s book Gilded Youth: Three Lives in France’s Belle Époque the author attempts shows us this world through the lives of three of its blessed members: Jeanne Hugo, granddaughter of Victor Hugo; Léon Daudet, political provocateur and son of the writer Alphonse Daudet; and Jean-Baptiste Charcot, polar explorer and son of the pioneering neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. All three subjects were childhood friends, whose fathers (or grandfather, in the case of Jeanne) were such famous people that all three found it difficult to make an independent way in life (another link is that Jeanne married first Léon, divorced Léon, and subsequently married Jean-Baptiste; ah, the French). All three were also born and died within a few years of each other; their long lives spanned, and were framed by, France’s Third Republic (in this respect he book’s subtitle is a little misleading, as the milieu of this book is the entire Third Republic as mentioned above, not just the Belle Époque; so you might say that the book delivers twice as much history as its title promises).

The linkages among Cambor’s three lives provide a rich vein of psychological, biographical, and historical material for the author to exploit; complex personal and political relationships, substantial career achievements (in the case of the two men), and the almost unimaginable changes in France (from horse-drawn carriages to radar) that formed the backdrop of their lives. It’s an embarrassment of riches, from which Cambor extracts much gold while remaining unavoidably selective. There is plenty of history here, although with many gaps and jump-cuts; the artistic milieu is subordinated to the political, and the children-of-the-rich-and-famous theme is subordinated to both. However, I found the book to be rather disorganized and overwritten, and Cambor writes it as if she were the omniscient narrator of a novel, making one impossible presumption after another about what characters were thinking (and these thoughts were embellished with excessive prose). It was irritating and distracting, but didn’t have to be, as the author shows flashes of excellence, as the passage about Daudet’s defamation trial, which was well-written and concise; had the entire book been written with the same focus, I would have enjoyed it much more. Some of the stories are elliptical – although the divorce between two of the protagonists would be seem to be relevant to the story, she passes over it quickly and then tosses in a hundred pages later that Jeanne Hugo left Charcot for her third husband. A more robust discussion of the divorce would have been far more relevant than the excessive detail about polar expeditions other than Charcot’s.

While a learned a great deal about these three persons of whom I was ignorant, Gilded Youth could have been so much more: better organized, more concise, and less opinionated. Still, as a primer of the Belle Époque, one could do worse.


Monday, April 20, 2015

“The Ottoman Centuries: The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire” by Lord Kinross (John Patrick Douglas Balfour, 3rd Baron Kinross)


638 pages, William Morrow and Company, ISBN-13: 978-0688030933

I acquired The Ottoman Centuries: The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire from the publisher overstock section at Borders (ah, Borders; how I miss ye…) on a whim and thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Unless you’re an absolute Turkophile, this one-volume history of the Ottoman Empire should suffice to fill in the blank space where knowledge of this fascinating and important culture should be. Rivaling (if not surpassing) the Roman Empire in secular magnificence, imperial domination, artistic accomplishment, political corruption, sexual deviancy, and bizarre characters, the Ottoman Empire is far less known to the average person inasmuch as it was basically an Eastern/Islamic culture. But at a time when Europe was a disunited shambles, the Ottoman Turks were an important factor in world history. It is, for the most part, well written, though Kinross’ phrasing is often quaint, and some of the passages require re-reading to figure out what the author is trying to say. I found his viewpoints to be objective: not tainted with the Anglocentric cultural bias that many British authors of his generation have been afflicted with.

The book focuses-on the political and military history of the Ottoman Empire and, thus, is centered on the lives of its rulers and their court. Kinross includes a fair amount of information on how the Empire’s society and economy were structured and functioned, but this is presented mostly as background information in support of the main narrative. The book filled in many gaps for me in terms of European history and described many historical episodes I was unaware of, as well as being a good analysis of the factors and personalities involved in the Empire’s rapid rise to prominence followed by its centuries-long decline. There are some discussions of the Empire’s interactions with the Tatars and Persians, but only a few brief mentions of the Empire’s history and exploits in Africa or the Middle East. I was fascinated with Kinross’ detailed discussions of the many interactions the Ottomans had with nearly every major and minor European state over the centuries; it was also interesting to see how the nature of these interactions changed as Europe evolved from a collection of Feudal Kingdoms into modern Nation-States, while the Turkish state stagnated and was eclipsed. His analyses of the military tactics and strategies and innovations employed by the Ottomans are very good, as is his examination of how their social, economic and political systems gave them a competitive advantage early in the Empire’s history, but became an impediment that contributed to the decline, and also impeded attempts to reverse that decline.

I was impressed with the open-mindedness of most of the Sultans in terms of not only tolerating, but promoting Christians and other religious minorities to the point where populations of Orthodox Christians often favored being conquered by the Ottomans in preference to being dominated by Christian rulers affiliated with Rome (who were often very intolerant of the Orthodox Christian tradition). But Kinross, as with so many scholars of Islamic rulers of the past, never bothers to mention that it was the condescending toleration of an all-power majority (the Muslims in general and the Turks in particular) towards a powerless minority (Christians, Jews, and others).

There are, no doubt, other, more scholarly books written on the Ottoman Empire, filled with more statistics and sociopolitical detail than The Ottoman Centuries, but for conciseness and readability I wager that there are few than can match it. The interested reader can use this book as a springboard for further study if something here catches his fancy, while for those seeking primarily an informative overview of the Ottomans from their rise to their fall, this book should do the trick.