Defending The Indefensible

Will Hutton, writing in the Guardian, has an astonishing piece of moral relativism that is difficult to comprehend. While insisting that he is not apologizing for Mao's depredations in China, he proceeds to apologize for them anyway. He informs readers that Mao's cruelty laid the groundwork for modern China.

Nobody wants to be an apologist for Mao. Even the Communist party, five years after his death, delivered the verdict that his crimes during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution meant that he had been 30% wrong. Mao was undoubtedly responsible for monstrous crimes, but if today's China ever completes the transition to a more plural economy and society it will be more obvious than ever that he was the man who partially laid the platform for today's China. And from this may one day emerge a country with the liberties of the rest of Asia and the west.

In the first place, there is context. Life in the China of the first half of the 20th century was cheap, as writer Lu Xun wrote after witnessing the nationalists clinically murder students in Shanghai in 1926. After the imperial throne fell on New Year's Day 1912, China imploded into territories dominated by warlords over whom the nationalist government never established proper dominion.

Let's just mention that Hutton is extremely selective in his recounting of history. He completely neglects the fact that the situation in China after the fall of the last emperor was a bit more complicated than he paints it. There were other players and an internal civil war going on between the Kuomintang and Mao's communists. The nationalists were actually making progress against the warlords until Japan invaded.

No, let's go on to the one true test of this kind of relativism. Substitute Hitler for Mao. Or Stalin for Mao. Or Fidel Castro for Mao. Substitute any dictator; substitute any country. Hitler paved the way for modern Germany, right? Does that excuse the other things he did? This kind of reasoning is disingenuous and serves only to whitewash the murderous legacy of the cruelty of dictators like Mao. Sure, there are always a few good things if you look hard enough or twist things around. But the devil's ledgers cannot be balanced with this kind of bookkeeping.