The Most Dangerous
pp. 101-102 · Read in the full issue
The Month's New Reading
Man On Earth
With Judy Tudor
Few recent books are more conducive to international horrors or more terrifying in implication than Mao Tse-Tung —Emperor of the Blue Ants, by George Paloczi-Horvath, re formed Hungarian Communist.
USING, almost entirely, Russian, Chinese and other Communistic sources, he traces the life of the Chinese dictator from humble peasant childhood through his revolutionary years until he becomes the demi-god dictator of the largest nation on earth.
Against this background of what Mao has been able to do with the 800 million people of China, and what he still plans to do with them and the rest of the world, the ideological struggle between the forces led by Russia and the United States is reduced to insignificant proportions.
The writer attempts to explain the paradox of Mao’s 20 revolu tionary years, including the Long March of 1934-35, when only adaptation to stern realities allowed him to escape the nets of Chiang Kai Shek’s Kuomintang and later the Japanese, against character develop ments since achieving absolute power after 1949.
The Mao-cult Mao, he says, drew his own portrait as a ruler and the fact that the Mao-cult so speedily developed after he came to power, showed his own tremendous conceit. News papers wrote about him as the Saving Star of China, the Sun that Never Set; people were encouraged to speak or write to him as omnipotent, omniscient and infallible—because Mao believed it himself.
In his omnipotence he has robbed the Chinese people of individualism and personal freedom, destroyed the family unit, outlawed most things that make a human life tolerable.
Extraordinary ceremonies in which, with chanted liturgical pledges and red hearts cut out of cloth, he has had 700,000,000 of them “surrender their hearts to him” has merely strengthened his gigantic ambitions: “His determination to make China the greatest military and industrial power in the world, and then to
remould the world at gunpoint to the image of his version of Com munist utopia”.
Food shortages and a population explosion to an estimated 2,000
million by the year 2,000, are so far the only elements he has not been able to regiment at home and for these reasons Mao is the one world leader not worried by the prospect of a nuclear war.
A bomb that could wipe out 30 million people at one blow might, under China’s circumstances, be one solution to population control. Or failing this, the launching “of a new total campaign, this time against the sexual instinct”.
“The 700 million blue ants,” says the writer, “safely regimented into
rural and urban communes, would be defenceless against such a cam paign ordering the physical isolation of tens of millions of men and women. The propaganda against the reactionary and selfish individualistic nature of both romantic and sexual love may be the introduction to such measures.”
Woven into this story of Mao, the most dangerous statesman of the age, is an account of the relationship be tween the two great Communist powers, China and Russia, and the basic ideological conflict between the two.
Although the picture Paloczi- Horvath draws of present day China and its meglomaniac leader is night marishly grim, all is not yet lost: In 1962 it is still an open question whether the future will see Mao Tse-tung’s rule as the most portentous event of the 20th century; or as an interlude of pointless mass-suffering soon to be forgotten in the milennial flow of Chinese history. (MAO TSE-TUNG. Published by Seeker & Warburg. 52/-.)
Yoga exponent Michael Volin shows how This is an eagle pose.