Lying, the Essence of Communism

Lying, the Essence of Communism

Moscow. “Here men determine what is true and what is false.”

                                                                                       George Kennan

“Yesterday I was lying. Today I’m telling the truth.” 

                                                                               Bo Arum, fight promoter    

Communism, having entertained many suitors during the twentieth century, continues to be a romantic attraction in spite of all of the atrocities that Communists have committed and the ruin they have presided over. To comprehend how disastrous Communism has been in the course of the twentieth century and the boundless tragedy that has floated out of its wake, it is necessary to begin with the understanding that it is a system of belief and practices that is completely rooted in dishonesty.  Communism is theoretically premised on a false notion of human perfectibility and limitless benevolence. Because human beings and their societies are not and can never be perfected, and because their benevolence will always be limited, the “new’ person predicted to emerge from a private-property-less society can and never will. From the false theoretical premise then, follows in the practice of Communism a result that completely belies the romantic image of the egalitarian society of abundance and harmony.  One cannot practice Communism, that is, one cannot govern a Communist society, without constantly resorting to lies.  To say this is simply to state a fact that can be amply verified and historically documented.  Communism’s history in the twentieth century includes the multiple histories of its implementation and the vast apologetics of the chattering class that ignored, excused or justified its crimes and its abject failures. Communism was in place in many different places for decades. That history is one of broken promises and the inevitable and relentless lying that followed in the wake.

The twentieth century became Communism’s grand opportunity to achieve its goals, to move from aspiration to reality.  Its theorists suddenly and unexpectedly turned into practitioners as they took power, in most places violently. They dismantled the old order and ruled for decades in many parts of the world and over two of the world’s largest, most populous countries.  Communist governments and functionaries ordered and arranged the daily lives of tens of millions of people. They tolerated no political opposition or competition. They abolished the market, private property and profit-seeking, the principle sources in their view of human misery and inequality and replaced them with centrally planned systems.

 Now we can look back, contemplate both their words and their deeds and note the staggering disparity. We can also see how many of the people who were forced to live under Communist governments reacted to them. As it was in Cuba and in East Berlin before the wall went up, whenever most people had the opportunity to choose, they fled. Many risked their lives to flee. They forsook their possessions, their families, their native lands to escape from the social equality promised by the “Peoples’ Democracies.”   We can see that fraud, dishonesty and coercion were the central features of Communist rule – they lied and they lied repeatedly. They punished and ostracized people who told the truth.   Where they are still in power they continue to lie and punish those who dare to speak the truth. If they told the truth they could no longer rule. And so it is good to begin by looking closely at the activity of lying which can us understand better the nature of Communism.

Honesty is and has always been the bedrock of human decency and goodness.  No one can ever be good without being honest.  A dishonest person cannot ever hope or claim to be decent. Dishonest people, no matter how talented, intelligent, high minded or greatly intentioned they may otherwise be, corrupt themselves, soil their surroundings, and ruin the lives of people close to them and often beyond.

Lies tear open holes in human relationships into which burrow copious forms of malignancy and perversity. Lies destroy the good things that take long, serious effort to build such as friendship, trust, cooperation and affection. Lies harden the hearts of the deceived and turn the willingness to forgive into grudging suspicion and implacable resentment.  Liars are reluctantly if at all forgiven because any confession or apology itself may likely fall under suspicion as a lie or a pose.  A plea of “I am sorry” from a habitual liar elicits from the petitioned rejection or cynicism, not forgiveness.  Marital infidelity, a crooked business deal, the betrayal of a promise – with each, someone looks into the eyes of someone else who trusts them, then lies.

Truth remains forever intrinsically superior to falsity, a fact the underlying reality of which gives the formation and telling of the lie a paradoxical twist. The liar wants and needs to be taken as a truth-teller.  The official Soviet news organ which for seven decades consistently lied and distorted about nearly everything the government did was called Pravda, the Russian word for “truth.”  The lie succeeds only if it evades its essence and fronts itself as the truth.  To be successful, that is to believed, a liar must be perceived to be the opposite of what he truly is. Yet, the liar cannot help but fear and shun the truth. He inevitably comes to the loath the truth-teller for being what he himself can never become and thus, the self-righteous indignation, the resort to defamation and vituperation that are the stock of the inveterate liar.  The truth-teller becomes the object of fear and resentment because he threatens to expose and undo the liar. To be called a liar is a gross insult.  To be exposed as a liar brings abject humiliation. So, the liar, knowing what exposure means to him, harbors malice toward truth-tellers, those he willfully impersonates, but those whose ranks he can never join.  The liar, whose nemesis is the truth teller, turns into a hater and maligner as well. Communism’s long history of defamation and hatred comes from its lying and the natural fear and loathing of the liar for the truth teller.

The liar, however, like everyone deeply resents being lied to, another indication, ironically laden, that truth remains inherently superior to falsity.  The liar will always demand the truth from others, but reserve for himself the advantages and flexibilities of deceit. [Sissela Bok, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life, New York, Pantheon, 1978, p. 23.  “Liars share with those they deceive the desire not to be deceived.”]  The liar himself will never cease to employ the opprobrium, “liar” even though he is one himself.

 Lying is also a parasitic host for other vices. To a lying disposition many other character defects, failings, and corruptions are attached and feed off of it—cowardice, envy, greed, opportunism and arrogance. Lies advance the schemes of cheaters and smooth the way for the vengeful, the fakers, and shirkers of responsibility to have their way and to evade detection and condemnation.  Lies are essential to the success of collusion, bribery, political corruption and tyranny. They are indispensible tools of criminals used to set up their victims and to shield their deviance from scrutiny. The child-seducer, the con artist, the fraudster, the swindler, the bribe-taker, the perjurer, all resort to lies in order to achieve their ends, to gratify gross impulses, to trample, to defile, to steal and to escape detection and rightful punishment.  Lying is also closely linked with fanaticism because the fanatic subordinates everything, including a regard for facts and for truth, to the advancement of his cause. 

Everyone lies sometimes.  Most people, I believe, lie sparingly, reluctantly, with embarrassment, with fear of detection, and most are probably poor at it. Physiology, the blush, makes it especially hard for some.  “Good lying” usually requires practice, although like many other human activities, some people are naturally better at it than others. Some even seem to be born liars.

Everyone at some point in their life has likely lied. Not everyone, however, is a liar.  Some lies are benign. Some are even kind. Some are necessary.   A liar, however, is different sort of creature, someone who has lying embedded firmly, deeply into his character. The confirmed, artful liar achieves his success and builds his life around lying. He cannot breathe without routinely mangling and twisting the truth. I have met and observed people like this, some in very high places. They are often intelligent, charming and even charismatic, but virtually everything they say in some way effaces the truth, distorts reality and deceives. Liars achieve success, that is, the lies they tell are taken to be true, and they are perceived as truth-tellers because most people operate on a daily course with the assumption and the trust that those around them are in fact truth tellers. Thus, one grimly contemplates and rues the opportunism and predation of the liar who takes full advantage of the natural and routine trust of others.  All successful liars are in a sense “confidence men”, individuals who prevail in deceit because they usurp the trust and good faith of others and turn them into lamentable defects of good faith or lapses of judgment.

The real liar lies reflexively but with skill and audacity.  He performs with ease, confidence, and at times evinces a self-righteous indignation to help sell his evasions and deflect scrutiny. Successful lying and the confidence that arises from it breed arrogance, and so sometimes the liar lies even when he does not need to, from habit, for practice or just for fun. The career of the accomplished liar often follows a trajectory of increasingly ambitious mendacity fueled from his growing confidence in his lying skills, his imagined superiority, and his disdain for those dupes who believe him.  In contemplating such an individual over time one can observe a mounting arrogance, a personal recklessness and contempt for the boundaries of conduct that with most people are enforced by probity and integrity.   

When liars, however, face exposure for what they are, they often turn emotional.  Sometimes they go on the offensive. They fume with a feigned indignant posture. They accuse and malign those who have exposed them, more lying.  Or, they resort to defense.  Arrogance collapses into abject self-pity.  They cry. They blubber. They talk incessantly as if the inflated verbiage they emit will undo the lies that have trapped them.

The liar’s exposure is two-layered:  the fact that he lied, and the lie itself.  To watch a liar exposed is a singularly pathetic and revolting experience. The character of the exposed liar open for inspection often reveals itself in its ruptured, conflicted state as he attempts at the same time both to deflect and bear responsibility.  One then may likely hear, “I made mistakes” a complete and deliberate perversion of the term, continuing even in confession the liar’s resolute dishonesty with his evasion of responsibility.  Lies are released intentionally while mistakes may be due to a myriad of factors such as carelessness, misperception, poor ability or lack of competence.    Or, “mistakes were made”, the resort to the passive voice and the implicit denial of an intentional agent.  One rarely hears a direct confession to a lie – “I lied about that” or, “I was a liar,” or, even less likely, “I am a liar.”  You will never hear this from anyone.  It seems easier for someone to admit to almost anything else, or confess to any other defect – “I cheated on my wife,”  “I stole the money,”  “I am an alcoholic,” than to confess to being a liar.

Honesty is also the bedrock of institutional and organizational decency and integrity.  Institutions and organizations that are led by liars amplify and compound the personal dishonesty of the leaders and stamp it upon the operations. A large part of organizational success depends upon mutual trust both within the organization and in the external relationships.  Lying breaks that down. Institutionalized lying pushes the institution into dysfunction, and sometimes into fatal pathologies.  Institutional missions are eroded. The goals are compromised and the achievements are tainted or fail to materialize. The dishonesty leads to intrigue, creates layers of mistrust and openings for opportunism.  Cynicism abounds. 

            Not surprisingly people who are lied to turn bitter and mistrustful. When lying becomes routine and expected, the purest, rawest cynicism inevitably follows in the wake.  Cynicism is indiscriminate revenge taken against liars and institutions and practices that are immersed in lies.  A lied-to-spouse may not just give up on the deceitful mate, but may turn against the institution of marriage. The lying spouse has injured his mate and soiled the institution.  A cynic is one who has given up on the truth.  He sees everyone as a liar, a fraud or a dupe.  The cynic, unlike the skeptic, is a believer, but can only bring himself to believe the worst of others.  The dupe’s failure is one of excessive credulity, an eagerness to believe a lie, a lack of critical judgment.  The cynic’s failure is to give up on the possibilities of honesty and integrity, to needlessly concede the entire expanse of humanity to the liar and his dupes.

When fundamentally dishonest people acquire political power they usually do catastrophic damage.  The history of the twentieth century is awash with depressing confirmation of this observation. The actual amount that they do depends upon the range of power they possess, the institutional and organization limitations that are in place and other external contingencies that may either limit or exacerbate the damage.  Constitutional governments, with the limitations they place on the organs of power, generally do better at limiting or mitigating the damage that lying leaders do than authoritarian governments which are more vulnerable to the contingencies of personalized leadership and to the arrogance of power.  The least distinguished of republican leaders, a Warren Harding or a Herbert Hoover is far superior to the widely admired and highly lauded Mao, Castro or Stalin.  Charismatic, romantic leaders are always dangerous and should never be trusted.  They almost always bring destruction and depredation because they tend to be arrogant, reckless and amoral.  They become magnets for power and use that power to make sweeping, highly disruptive changes.

The philosopher, Karl Popper, has argued that the best way to think about how to build a good government is not to attempt to answer the question: who are the best people to rule?  The better question to pose is: what kind of government best withstands leaders who are bad?  “How can we so organize political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage?” [Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies: the Spell of Plato, Princeton, 1966, v.1, 120]   Popper came of age in Vienna during the early part of the twentieth century and was a perspicacious observer of the methods of both the Nazis and the Communists. He was initially drawn to Marxism, but came to reject it.  He watched the Nazis and Communists up close in action, in competition with each other for followers. Popper’s profound insight, so obvious in a sense that it escapes almost everyone, turns on his observation that the “who should rule?” question is always the wrong one to ask and attempt to respond to.  It is both prudent and realistic always to assume that leaders, like everyone else, are limited, fallible and open to corruption, and that all political leaders at times will often lie whenever it is expedient.  Therefore the best way to reduce their lying and to limit the damages of the lies they do inevitably resort to is to keep them under constant vigilance, and more importantly, to limit their power.  Lying is too pervasive a human vice and power is too enticing and alluring a good not to believe that those involved with getting and keeping power, even the purest and best-intentioned, will be sometimes be drawn into mendacity.  No one with power should ever be completely trusted. Those with vast power will be the worst of liars: there is extensive historical confirmation for this prediction.

Politicians rightfully provoke harsh, unremitting cynicism from those whom they claim to serve, whose interests they represent and whose support they seek because political ambition and veracity are so often in conflict. Thus, politicians lie routinely and copiously. They tell lies, big and small.  They tell them shamelessly.  When they are come under scrutiny they shrug, they temporize, and they throw out diversions. They blame and defame their opponents and critics.    Politicians frequently make promises that they know that they will not keep as the price they must pay to get the power they want.  This is why no one in power should ever be completely believed or trusted and why individuals who are long time in power should be particularly regarded with suspicion.  Power comes at a high cost.  It is often paid through the forfeiture of honesty.  No one who pays less than the slightest attention to the behavior and practices of political office seekers and political parties and groups would remark otherwise, and anyone who easily believes the promises and assurances of a political aspirant is a naïf or a fool.

In Lenin’s Tomb, David Remnick writes of the final depressing days of the Soviet Union, a dying land where every piece of traditional life had been torn up and reconstructed by the “moral” engineers that composed the Bolshevik ruling class.  All cultural endeavors and practices came to be manipulated and regulated by the Party ideologues.  Art, music, science, philosophy and technology were sculpted into an integrated, comprehensive sphere of Bolshevik propaganda.  Party hacks, sycophants, and mediocrities pushed aside and took the place of real artists, writers, scientists and philosophers.  Independence of thought, integrity and probity could never be anything but an anathema to the ruling class.  Reality was severely bent and distorted to mirror the Leninist fantasy of Communism’s superiority, and so the regime invested itself heavily in a systematic program of lies, manipulations and distortions.

The philosopher, Harry Frankfurt writes that “lies are designed to damage our grasp of reality.  So they are intended, in a very real way, to make us crazy.” [Harry Frankfurt, “On Truth, Lies, and Bullshit,” in The Philosophy of Deception, edited by Clancy Martin, New York: Oxford, 2009, 38]  Lies were one of the few activities the Soviets chiefs excelled at from the very beginning, besting their ruling counterparts in the West who were boxed in by custom, law and constitutional restraints.  They were master-designers of lies since lying was essential both to the acquisition and preservation of their power. Lenin’s highly successful mobilizing slogan in 1917, “All power to the Soviets” was an orchestrated deception for the outset. He never intended for the party to relinquish power to any independent governing body.  The Stalinists were in effect engineers of collective dementia grounded in the pernicious ideology that was the source of their power and their claim for legitimacy.  Soviet propaganda, writes Anne Applebaum, “was blared from radios and televisions, posted on walls, printed in newspapers, repeated at party and Komosol meetings. It was constant, it was repetitive, it was specific.”  [Anne Applebaum, review of Children of the Gulag, by Cathy Frierson and Semyon S. Vilensky in the New Republic, May 21, 2010, 4]   These propaganda techniques were highly successful in rendering and sustaining for the millions of people subjected to it a highly damaged grasp of reality, one that did in fact result in a collective craziness.  

From Remnick’s remarkable, sometimes comedic account one gathers that this country with its corrupt, moldering regime may have been the most cynical, morally desolate place ever on the planet.  The glaring failure of the grand promises of Communism were increasingly obvious as they bumped into and crumbled against the stony reality of the inescapably dreary, hopeless daily lives of the people who were supposed to be contentedly ensconced in a socialist workers paradise. Here was a quotidian, cumulative repetition of little disappointments and pervasive incompetence – sour milk from the long waiting lines, new shoes that immediately fell to pieces, television sets that tended to explode, even when shut off  -- steady and relentless misery.  All of this was in the face of the growing recognition that life for the inhabitants of the decadent, cutthroat, vicious capitalist world was in fact gentler and better, much better. The shabbiness, boredom and emptiness of everyday life may well have been some of the major instigations of the ubiquitous alcoholism that scourged the Russian people and underscored the hopeless and dreary state of Communist existence.  

Remnick captures for the reader the utter saturation of the Soviet citizens with a stultifying, corrosive and hopeless cynicism, the inevitable culmination of decades of forced participation in an elaborate institutionally sanctioned, bureaucratically maintained fraud.  Here was a big, powerful nation with leaders whose names, statues and images were everywhere on ostentatious display.   They trod imperiously across the geo-political landscape proclaiming the moral and economic superiority of their “system,” periodically announcing the sclerotic state and inevitable demise of the capitalist order.  Yet the Soviet people for much of the twentieth century were forced to pretend to believe what everyone, including their leaders, eventually knew were lies. (“We pretend to work; they pretend to pay us.”) Alexander Solzhenitsyn in this Letter to Soviet Leaders in 1974 poured out his revulsion with this lying, corrupt regime. “This universal, obligatory, force-feeding with lies is now the most agonizing aspect of existence in our country – worse than all our material miseries, worse than any lack of civil liberties.”  It is staggering to think of a society where the assault on the truth would have become universal and obligatory.  Yet, it was so. The pervasive lying was the source of the internal moral rot that could not be reversed or even arrested and brought about the collapse of a system that was put into place by bold and confident men who had promised to transform the world, to remove the oppressors and exploiters and make life better for everyone.  Solzhenitsyn was one of the heroic truth tellers of the century, the classic voice bravely announcing the nudity of The Emperor.

Edgar Snow, Holocaust Denier

I was able to check up on many of Mao's assertions
            and usually found them to be correct. 
                                                                                        Edgar Snow (Red Star Over China)



Edgar Snow was to Mao what Walter Duranty was to Joseph Stalin. His journalistic writings gave a favorable impression of Mao and Chinese Communism to millions of Western readers. He continued through the years long after Mao Tse Tung was in power to ignore and downplay the human disaster that Maoism brought down upon China similar to the way Duranty continued over the years to soften for his readers the brutal reality of Stalinism.  The difference between Duranty and Snow is that Duranty appeared to be a cynic and a self-promoting opportunist while Snow was a true believer, a Leftist who believed that Socialism would deliver more opportunity and goods than capitalism.  He ended up reporting what he liked to believe rather than what was occurring.

Snow corresponded for the New York Herald-Tribune, the Saturday Evening Post and other publications. Born in Kansas City, he attended the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism and became a highly celebrated journalist who moved in a tumultuous international setting, much like Walter Duranty. Like Duranty, he worked as a foreign journalist in close personal proximity to an emerging Communist dictator in a huge country embarking on a massive, world-altering political revolution about which the West knew little, in a unique and extraordinary position to influence opinion.

Red Star over China was published by Snow in 1937.  It is a famous book and universally regarded as enormously consequential not only in the West where it was the first on-site journalistic account of the Communist resistance to the Kuomintang led by Mao Tse Tung, but in China as well where its highly idealized presentation of Mao and the CCP was quickly translated and greatly contributed to the recruitment of Chinese young people into the Communist party.  

Snow in the Preface to the Revised Edition of Red Star wrote that this work “provided not only for non-Chinese readers, but also for the entire Chinese people – including all but the Communist leaders themselves – the first authentic account of the Chinese Communist Party and the first connected story of their long struggle to carry through the most thorough-going social revolution in China’s three millenniums of history.” [Edgar Snow, Red Star over China, Revised and Enlarged Edition, New York, Grove, 1968, 16, emphasis, mine]   What jumps out at the 21^st century reader of this modest self-assessment is the self-congratulatory and tendentious phrase “authentic account”.   This Preface was written some thirty years after the initial publication of Red Star and almost twenty years after Mao and the CCP had taken power in China.  Also, six years had elapsed since the conclusion of the famine produced by Mao’s own Great Leap Forward, a period of mass starvation brought about by an ideologically-driven man whose real character and persona never matched up with the pristine Communists whom Snow had met and idealized for the outside world in the 1930s.

When he returned to China in 1960 at the height of Mao’s famine, Snow would deny that people were starving.   In Red Star Today Snow wrote:  “I diligently searched without success, for starving people or beggars to photograph. Nor did anyone else succeed… I must assert that I saw no starving people in China, nothing that looked like old-time famine and I do not believe that there is famine in China at this writing.” [Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine, Henry Holt, New York, 1996, 277]  Snow wrote this while approximately 25 million people were dying of starvation in the worst famine in China in 2000 years, a famine that was caused by Mao’s policies. [Becker, Hungry Ghosts, 177]   It never occurred to Snow that the Chinese government might be trying to shield a prominent western reporter from the evidence of starvation.   Like Duranty, Snow was a real holocaust denier, unlike British historian, David Irving, who dared to cast doubt on the numbers and  and was thrown into an Austrian jail, they were accorded fame, honors and distinction.

  Snow’s false testimony to the absence of Chinese starvation was practiced by other notable Westerners.  Anna Louis Strong, an American journalist, deserves special mention in this regard for services rendered to both Stalin and Mao as a falsifier of the facts of mass starvation. She went to the USSR in the 1930s and wrote to inform the west that it was famine-free.  She then in the 1960s traveled to China and there again lied to readers in the west about another Communist regime that was starving its own people. [Becker, Hungry Ghosts, 45]  

Early in 1961 François Mitterrand toured famine-stricken China. He spent two hours with Mao and emerged to announce to the outside world that “Mao is not a dictator” and in fact was a “humanist, a new type of man…in whom doctrinal rigour was allied with vigilant realism.”  And so, after a three week Potemkin tour and a total of two hours under the spell of the Chairman, the future French Socialist President with no hesitation declared that Mao’s veracity could not be doubted, that “the people of China have never been near famine…I repeat in order to be clearly understood: there is no famine in China.”   [Quoted from Becker, Hungry Ghosts, 293]  With Mitterrand’s coda “I repeat…” etc. we know, of course, that somewhere, somebody was telling the truth about what was happening, hoping, perhaps, to put some international pressure on this “new type of man” and his humanist colleagues who were pell-mell turning the Chinese countryside into a vast cemetery and forcing the Chinese people toward cannibalism.  But the predictably perfidious Mitterrand self-righteously insisted on being “clearly understood.” He was eager to play the role of Gaul’s jester in Mao’s Court and to leave for history the sorry evidence of his own highly developed capacity for aligning “doctrinal vigour with vigilant realism.”

In Red Star Snow related his impressions and experiences as he moved in 1936 through country controlled by the Chinese Communists.  Here he reports on an encounter with some children during a rest stop.

On the last day, we stopped for lunch at a village in a green valley, and here all the children came round to examine the first foreign devil many of them had seen. I decided to catechize them.

‘What is a Communist,’ I asked.

‘He is a citizen who helps the Red Army fight the White bandits and the Japanese,’ one youngster of the nine piped up.

‘What else?’

‘He helps fight the landlords and the capitalists!’

‘But what is a capitalist?’  That silenced one child, but another came forward; ‘A capitalist is a man who does no work, but makes others work for him.’ Oversimplification, perhaps, but I went on:

‘Are there any landlords or capitalists here?’

‘No,’ they all shrieked together. ‘They’ve all run away.’ [FN: Snow, Red Star, 85] 

Snow’s choice of the word “catechize” is quite remarkable. One wonders what he thought he was doing with this homiletic script and what he hoped the readers would take away from it. The reported exchange, sounding more like the stilted boilerplate of a hack propagandist than an observation from a clear eyed investigative journalist, is more revealing of Snow’s ideological mindset than anything that was actually occurring in China. Show uses these children to channel his moralizing message.  These innocent and guileless children, as he presents them, simply and clearly distinguish the good guys from the bad ones, the good Communists who fight the evil landlords and capitalists. The reader cannot but help being impressed with these youngsters, but even more importantly, sympathetic with their perspective.  Snow’s ideological affinity with his attentive hosts is clearly obvious and his insertion of this chirpy exchange illustrates it. What becomes unavoidable to the reader early in this book is the sense that Snow was completely enthralled with the “Red” movement that he was observing. He had surrendered any professional skepticism or reservations that might have help make his account even more “authentic” and had set about to romanticize and idealize every aspect of what he was witnessing.  Of a young Chinese vanguard group that he meets:

“I had never before seen so much personal dignity in any Chinese youngsters.  This first encounter was only the beginning of a series of surprises that the Young Vanguards were to give me, for as I penetrated deeper into the soviet districts I was to discover in these red-cheeked  -- ‘little Red devils’ – cheerful, gay, energetic and loyal – the living spirit of an astonishing crusade of youth.” [Snow, Red Star, 70]   

            Here Snow is positively moonstruck. One can easily see why this book was so successful in drawing the Chinese youth into the Communist party.  Mao himself could not have been more enticing and convincing.   Shortly after this encounter Snow had an opportunity to meet and join up with Mao, spend time with him and get a measure of the man.  Snow’s opportunity was unique and extraordinary.  He was the first Western journalist to gain access to a single individual whose actions would change the fate of a huge country and affect the lives of millions of people.  Snow’s account would be widely read in the West and become highly influential.    

            From his initial encounter Snow came away deeply impressed with Mao, infatuated one might say, an infatuation that was translated into a deeply lasting and widespread impression.  In reading his account one has to wonder how much if any consideration Snow gave to the fact that Mao knew that Snow would be conveying to the rest of the outside world his impressions of him and his revolutionary movement, and that Mao, of course, was investing a great deal of effort in his communications with Snow with the object of having him create an benevolent image, one that would lead to sympathy and support in the West.  

In fact, as we now know, Snow’s time spent with the future dictator was completely and astutely managed by Mao who had selected and approached Snow as a potentially friendly and sympathetic journalist. Mao knew exactly what he wanted out of this Western reporter. Snow was being set up and primed from the beginning of his carefully managed tour.  Mao could even turn on the tears for the impressionable Snow when necessary. “Mao impressed me as a man of considerable depth of feeling.  I remember that his eyes moistened once or twice when he was speaking of dead comrades, or recalling incidents in his youth, during the rice riots and famines of Hunan, when some starving peasants were beheaded in his province for demanding food from the yamen.” [Snow, Red star, 95]

Snow’s interview questions for Mao were given to him in advance and his written account of his time spent with Mao was reviewed and even edited by Mao. Mao was ready and waiting for Mr. Snow to appear. [Keith Windschuttle, “Mao & the Maoists,” The New Criterion, October 2005.] “Mao checked everything Snow wrote and amended and rewrote parts himself.  After Snow left to arrange publication, his wife, Helen, remained in Yenan, mailing him further corrections to the manuscript made by the Communist leadership.” [Windschuttle,  “Mao and the Maoists,” 5] None of this “editing business” is mentioned in Red Star. Its absence is an indication of a fundamental journalistic dishonesty that Snow knew that he was practicing, the broad knowledge of which would lose him credibility with his readers. 

            By the time he sat down to interview Mao in 1936 Snow was already living in a binary moral universe of Fascism (evil) versus anti-Fascism (good) and operating with the doctrine of the superior virtue of the oppressed. Capitalism, the exploiter and oppressor of the working class, had been linked by Communist propagandists since the 1930s to Fascism.  Capitalists thus who would naturally be resistant to the Communist vision of a society free of private property would be anti-Communist and thus Fascist or Fascist sympathizers. Snow saw Communists as well intentioned because they claimed to act on behalf of the exploited working class, and in the case of China, the exploited peasants. Therefore, anyone who opposed the Communists must have been against progress. 

 Snow’s biographer writes that Snow “came to see unrestrained capitalism the way many Chinese intellectuals did, as imperialism – an evil negating positive American values about independence and economic opportunity.” [John Maxwell Hamilton, Edgar Snow, a biography, Indiana University Press, 1988, 287] The sub-text of this comment seems to be an effort to exonerate Snow’s uncritical shortcomings with respect to Chinese Communism with the baseless suggestion being that capitalism in the U.S. was without restraint or regulation. Indeed, Snow was a man of the Left and saw in socialism human escape from poverty.  “Coming of age at a time when fascism loomed as the chief enemy, he saw socialism as a logical answer to poverty and oppression.” [Hamilton, Snow, 289] Mao as a fellow Leftist represented for him the forces of righteousness resisting the Asian agents of reaction.  He was a man who would overthrow the evil and corrupt landlords on behalf of the oppressed peasantry.  From the beginning Snow always viewed Mao as an extraordinary man who would make life better for the Chinese people.  

The observations that Snow makes in Red Star of Mao’s character and personality are astonishing in their blindness and willful self-deception.  Of the man who soon after taking power would be erecting a mindless cult of personality and putting into place policies that would kill millions of Chinese, this was the Mao that Snow captured for his readers. “There seemed to be nothing in him that might be called religious feeling. He was a humanist in a fundamental sense; he believed in man’s ability to solve man’s problems.  I thought that he had probably on the whole had a moderating influence in the Communist movement where life and death were concerned.” [Snow, Red Star, 95]

            Snow offers no specific details to support his view of the “moderate” Mao, but it is difficult to understand how he could not be ashamed and mortified in 1968 to be putting out a new edition of this book containing such ludicrous and grossly perverted observations, particularly given the fact that by this time Mao had obliterated all opposition and made himself into quasi divinity. Eleven years earlier at a world Communist summit in Moscow the delegates got a good sense of Mao’s “moderating influence…where life and death were concerned” as he addressed the issue of potential conflict with the U.S. and the possibilities of nuclear war.

“Let’s contemplate this, how many people would die, if war breaks out. There are 2.7 billion people in the world.  One-third could be lost; or, a little more, it could be half…I say that taking  the extreme situation, half dies, half- lives, but imperialism would be razed to the ground and the whole world would become socialist.” [Chang and Halliday, Mao, the Unknown Story,  Random House, New York, 2005, 403]  

This was shocking even to Mao’s fellow Communist delegates. A group as hard-bitten and cynical as the French Stalinists could hardly believe what they were hearing. [Chang & Halliday, Mao, 403] Whatever the sources were of the “moderation” Mao may have revealed to his interlocutor in the cave in 1936, they were long gone by the time by the time Snow was issuing his revised edition of Red Star.

As for Mao’s “humanism” in a “fundamental”, solving-man’s-problems sense – at the same summit when the topic of poverty came up, Mao’s humanistic, problem-solving response was:

“People say that poverty is bad, but in fact poverty is good.  The poorer people are, the more revolutionary they are.  It is dreadful to imagine a time when everyone will be rich… From a surplus of calories people will have two heads and four legs.” [Chang & Halliday, Mao, 403]

How could anyone react to this and not be aghast.  In this comment there is a disgusting and revealing aspect of psychopathic insanity and amorality.  Mao, of course, did not permit himself the self-improving experience of poverty. As we read today in the accounts of his biographers, always enjoyed the best food, living accommodations that could be found in China.  One can still hardly believe that the revered leader of the world’s most populous country would actually believe much less say something like this.  Mao’s boastful disregard for human life and welfare, and his insistence in seeing his own people driven by poverty toward revolution, make him, like Lenin, an individual who viewed human beings purely as means, as gross, raw material to achieve the ends of his ideological whimsies and fantasies.  Mao was not as the dewy-eyed Snow opined a humanist in any sense whatever; he was in fact an unabashed anti-humanist with contempt for human life, empty of any elemental sense of empathy or compassion.

            Mao, Snow goes on to write, “appeared to be free from symptoms of megalomania, but he had a deep sense of personal dignity, and something about him suggested a power of ruthless decision when he deemed it necessary.” [Snow, Red Star, 94]  Snow was partially right with this observation.  Mao was certainly a ruthless man. However, Mao’s recent biographers and historians now confirm that China’s future when Snow wrote his impressions was to be ruled by one of the most megalomaniacal personalities in all of history. During the Cultural Revolution, occurring at around the time Snow was composing the Preface to the Revised and Enlarged edition of the “first authentic account” of Chinese Communism, Mao was presiding over perhaps the most spectacular cult of personality that has ever come into being, one that reverberates to this day in China.  During this time 1.2 billion portraits of him were printed, 4.8 billion badges of Mao’s head were made, an excess of six for every living soul in China. Every Chinese possessed their own copy of the Little Red Book and everyone was expected to pull it out, waive it around and quote extensively from it in public gatherings.  Failure to do so could be dangerous, branding one as a counter-revolutionary and subject to a myriad of serious reprisals. [Windschuttle, “Mao & the Maoists,” 8] Moreover, Mao gave ample encouragement to the blind, fanatical and at times murderous devotion to him that was so much a feature of the Cultural Revolution.

            The Mao Tse Tung that Snow met and enthused over in 1936 was a disaster for China and the Chinese people. Edgar Snow helped to put him in power and continued to write favorably about him over the decades. Snow, as noted above, blithely denied the reality of the famine in China when he was there in 1961, which makes him a holocaust denier. What makes him even more reprehensible than current day Jewish holocaust deniers like David Irving and Northwestern University’s Professor Arthur Butz is that Snow was actually physically present during the event, and, he was as journalist, supposedly by his profession a man skilled at sorting out the truth, not simply accepting at face value the reports of the elites who were courting him and determined to put a happy face on what was for most Chinese a protracted nightmare.

            But Snow’s reputation remains intact and he still is an admired author and journalist.  The University of Missouri’s School of Journalism, proud of its former student, puts this on its website: “Snow was a person who knew how to break loose from cultural bonds and create a life and work that he defined as meaningful and important.  In that attribute alone he remains a model for young journalists, and certainly at Missouri and Beijing.” This is a curious tribute – so oblique that it invites a parsing that can be flattering neither to Snow nor to how the Journalism School’s publicists view the practice of journalism in a free society.  It is not at all apparent what the “cultural bonds” were that Snow broke loose from and just what it was that this breakage let him achieve in his life and through his work. Moreover, the encomium seems strangely solipsistic with its statement that he created “a life and work that he defined as meaningful and important.”  Exactly what about them was “meaningful and important”? Since when does someone get to define their own public life and professional work apart from its impact and it integrity?  That would seem to be a task for others.

Snow clearly loved China and the Chinese people but he let himself become a tool of Mao and utterly failed to comprehend the horrors that would descend upon them under Mao, even though he had opportunities that few others from the West would have to get a close, critical look at him. Then, after his initial and early encounters he remained impervious to the crimes and depredations.  How then Snow “remains a model for young journalists” is an even more perplexing question, particularly in reference to those aspirant-journalists in Beijing where journalistic output remains to this day under the corrective supervision of the CCP editors – protectors of the Maoist myth, sponging away the nasty truth of his crimes and folly – and where, it might be fair to say, real journalism is not even permitted and even severely punished.