To Mao: From Ethiopia With Love

I was stung by the number of commenters on my blog and correspondents who criticized me for being harsh on Mao by comparing him to Meles(or something like that). Since the version of Chinese history that EPRDF supporters peddle is very similar to the official line of the Communist Party of China(CPC), I was not surprised that they were fawning all over Chairman Mao. Their objection to my article was not for comparing their dear leader to the chairman, but calling both incompetent while it is self-evident that they cannot be:) What I did not for this earth expect was the soft spot for Mao from the “pro-democracy” army. Since this issue is literary a matter of life and death for me, it is time to dig in my heels. I do not want to slip into comparative analysis of Meles and Mao inadvertently. That was not, as I clarified repeatedly, what the original article was intended to do. I just want to point out my irreconcilable differences with the commenters on Mao.

1. First and foremost, I expect a reflexive distaste(no, actually an outrage) to killings, torture, mass imprisonment and disregard for human lives from people who openly claim to support democracy unless the democracy they refer to is Mao’s New Democracy. Mao did not just do all those things. He did them in historically unmatched proportions. “China is such a populous nation, it is not as if we cannot do without a few people” may be a quotation falsely attributed to Mao, but in spirit and deeds, he followed that as a dictum.

2. Mao was a nationalist. How can you mention Meles in the same breath as this nationalist leader?

I have heard this “nationalism triumphs over anything and everything” argument raised to give Mengistu Hailemariam some credit. No, I do not subscribe to Herder on steroids. There is good nationalism and bad nationalism. Killing and torturing thousands of people in the name of nationalism is bad nationalism. It is that simple for me. I got my nationalism from the enlightenment. That is the whole purpose of my political involvement: to see a nation that treats its least fortunate, weak, powerless, out-of-power and dissenting members humanely.

3.Mao was a man of principle

People who think that Mao was a man of principle should consult their history books more carefully. Mao was a rigid man who experimented with untested wacky ideas on his own people. But he was also suspicious of comrades who believed in his ideas as rigidly. The rectification movement was awash with the killing and torture of thousands who took Mao for his words and worked for the realization of the things they thought he believed in. One of my political heroines is Lin Zhao who was tortured and starved to death in Mao’s prison because as a student revolutionary, she was too eager to execute the chairman’s plans. Yet if people see no difference between rigidity and principle, I say the Keynesian “when the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” school is much more heroic than the Maoist “when the facts change, I kill people because there are too many of them” philosophy.

4. Mao had done some great things for China

We may disagree on what great things mean. As I said above, nothing, nothing can justify the human costs of Mao’s experiments. But even leaving the costs aside, these were what Deng inherited as basic features of the Chinese economy from Mao when he took office:

(i)Dismal agricultural output
(ii) heavy-industrial sector that creates negative value
(iii) gigantic scientific projects which gave a superficial sense of great achievement but were sad cases of resource mismanagement.
(iv) A citizenry demoralized by years of repression and famine

I have long time ago stopped thinking of the Ethiopian “pro-democracy” movement as a monolithic group or, even more cynically, as a group whose members are mainly pro-democracy. Democracy is just a uniting public slogan. It did not, however, cross my mind that some of them would write publicly(albeit in pseudonyms) and unapologetically about the great things Mao had done. But hey, what do I know about Ethiopian politics?