John Batchelor meets Jon Halliday
Posted to www.marxmail.org on
Just before going to bed, I like to listen to the radio. I tend to end up listening to WFAN, the sports talk station or to the John Batchelor show on WABC. Last night Batchelor interviewed Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, the co-authors of “Mao: The Unknown Story,” a biography that amounts to this year’s “Black Book of Communism.” Despite the fact that it is an assault on Mao’s career, the general conclusion anybody would be left with is that the Chinese people would have been better off under Chiang Kai-shek.
Jung Chang is the 53 year old author of a memoir about
growing up during the Cultural Revolution titled “Wild Swans.” Her hostility
toward Chinese communism seems to be cut from the same cloth as the sort of
stuff that comes out of
Although the book has received accolades from uncritical
critics, there are still some demurrers. Nicholas Kristof
of the NY Times, an anti-Communist whose family fled
“Another problem: Mao comes across as such a villain that he
never really becomes three-dimensional. As readers, we recoil from him but
don't really understand him. He is presented as such a bumbling psychopath that
it's hard to comprehend how he bested all his rivals to lead
And:
“This is an extraordinary portrait of a monster, who the authors say was responsible for more than 70 million deaths. But how accurate is it? A bibliography and endnotes give a sense of sourcing, and they are impressive: the authors claim to have talked to everyone from Mao's daughter, Li Na, to his mistress, Zhang Yufeng, to Presidents George H. W. Bush and Gerald Ford. But it's not clear how much these people said. One of those listed as a source is Zhang Hanzhi, Mao's English teacher and close associate; she's also one of my oldest Chinese friends, so I checked with her. Zhang Hanzhi said that she had indeed met informally with Chang two or three times but had declined to be interviewed and never said anything substantial. I hope that Chang and Halliday will share some of their source materials, either on the Web or with other scholars, so that it will be possible to judge how fairly and accurately they have reached their conclusions.”
Sounds like Jon Halliday and Jung Chang picked up some pointers from “The Black Book of Communism.”
Halliday, who is 66 years old and married to Jung Chang, is
a horse of another color. In 1975 he wrote “A Political History of Japanese
Capitalism,” a MR book that is must reading if you want to understand how
modern
One supposes that it might be genetic since Fred Halliday,
his brother, has also broken with the left. In Fred’s case, the evolution has followed
a Christopher Hitchens trajectory with support for the
http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/fascism_and_war/FredHalliday.htm
A word or two about John Batchelor might be in order. WABC
radio is the most listened to talk radio station in the
For example, liberal Sovietologist
Stephen Cohen and his wife Katrina Vanden Heuvel, the publisher of the Nation Magazine, are frequent
guests--Cohen more so than her. Cohen no longer seems to be on the
A-list for shows like Charlie Rose or Nightline nowadays, so I guess that he
looks at the Batchelor show as an opportunity to educate the listener about
current events in
Batchelor led off his interview with a brief introduction that went something like this (no exaggeration): “Tonight my guests are Jung Chang and Jon Halliday who have written a powerful exposé of the 20th century’s greatest tyrant and murderer, a criminal who tortured and imprisoned the Chinese people, starved them to death and plotted to export his Red Mafia system across the planet. A real Satan, a man without any redeeming features who lived for one thing and one thing only: to achieve total domination and exercise absolute power.”
His first question to his guests was highly revealing. He
asked them to expand on a theme in their book, namely that the Korean War came
about because of a joint plot by Stalin and Mao expand their Communist empire. In other words, the Readers Digest version of the Korean War.
On this question, Jung Chang had lots to say while Halliday remained silent.
Perhaps it was because there was still a tiny shred of integrity that remained.
After all, he is the co-author with Bruce Cumings of
the 1988 “
“The photographer Margaret Bourke-White did a feature for
Life magazine in December 1952 entitled 'The savage, secret war in Korea', in
which she described a powerful guerilla force - which included many women -
still highly active in mid-1952: 'Some of the guerrillas are converts who went
over to the Reds in their first great offensive. Thousands of others are North
Koreans bypassed in the UN breakout from the
Full: http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/Vietnam/cumings1.html
So what could have happened to Jon Halliday over the past 17 years since this was written to turn him into another David Horowitz?
To start off, it is important to understand that Halliday’s Marxist scholarship ended many years ago. Unlike his brother Fred, who still maintains leftist pretensions in the Hitchens or Norm Geras style, there is evidence that Jon simply became exhausted or something.
After the 1988 publication of “
In addition, Halliday has shown signs from the beginning that perhaps Marxism was just one interest among many. He is also the author of “The Psychology of Gambling” and a collection of interviews with Douglas Sirk, the Hollywood director who was responsible for lurid minor masterpieces like "All That Heaven Allows," "Written on the Wind" and "Imitation of Life."
In some ways, “Mao: The Unknown Story” continues along the
road he explored with Douglas Sirk. Since there is every likelihood that