Mao-Maoing the Flack Cachers, Mossadegh, &c.
The Conservative retired diplomat and old China hand George Walden, reviewing books on the cults of Mao and Stalin:
... At times theory and iconography make Mao Cult hard going, and overshadow the cult's effects on living people. The Hebei Party Committee must have felt a similar frustration: "Chairman Mao's remark about leading and at the same time not leading is a very dialectic expression", it reported, before pointing out that either the Party leads, non-Party people do, or no one does. The Chairman clarified the position in his inimitable style when he said there were two kinds of personality cult: the correct and the incorrect. "The problem does not rest with the cult of the individual but whether it represents the truth or not." You can't get clearer than that. Mao's blithe narcissism (discussions on the personality cult were held in the 1950s in his bedroom, with the emperor in his pyjamas while the Standing Committee of the Politburo formed a semi-circle round his bed) renders much of the ideological pinhead-dancing Leese describes somewhat redundant, except for the historical record.
One of Leese's best chapters is on efforts to wind down the cult's excesses (not the cult itself) at the Ninth Party Congress in 1969. Leese tells a good story based on internal documents, including a remarkable exchange between the lugubrious security boss Kang Sheng, Prime Minister Zhou Enlai, Mao's wife Jiang Qing and her henchmen. Here only the surreal text will do, of which these are selected lines:
"The Loyalty Dance" by Comrades Without Heads
Revered Kang: At present the loyalty dance is being danced everywhere. It is something completely normal. They say it is loyal to Chairman Mao but in reality it is opposed to Chairman Mao ...
Jiang Qing: The present loyalty dance has been completely stripped of class content. It is loyal to whom?
Premier Zhou: Clarify these things first then report to the Centre.
... The Russians rightly accused the Chinese of scholasticism, and Jan Plamper's The Stalin Cult: A study in the alchemy of power is accordingly less abstract than Leese, though the subjects of both books involve some painful locutions. In China, I recall Red Guards referring to individuals as yige qun zhong ("a mass"): a chilling neologism. Soviet Russia invented such terms as kultbytraskhody ("cultural-everyday expenses") for workplaces to buy portraits, reminding us of Vladimir Nabokov's prophecy that no regime could maltreat the Russian language the way the Communists did and survive.
... Like Mao (and unlike Churchill) Stalin's speaking style was artless, and he had the advantage of what a sympathetic caricaturist called his "peace pipe", around which many a myth was woven. It is good to learn that after their 1939 pact Hitler banned the reproduction of a photograph of Stalin with a cigarette, on the grounds that it detracted from the respectability of his new ally. There is also a nice list of foreign gifts on Stalin's seventieth birthday, including a headdress of an Indian war leader from admirers in the USA.
Like Mao (who once disapproved of "rampant worship"), Stalin played the modesty card. Newly released documents show him censoring his own cult. In 1938 he recommended that a new book Stories of Stalin's Childhood be burned, struck out fawning phrases from stage or film scripts, and said he was against dedications in books. Plamper is sceptical. The reasons for this ostentatious bashfulness, he suggests, were that a Bolshevik personality cult was an ideological oxymoron, and because the modesty of the Leader was part of his self-promotion.
I recalled Richard Pipes in 2004, reviewing Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by the English writer Simon Sebag Montefiore:
Stalin hated it if anyone disagreed with him, yet he admired the courage of those who did: ''Having created an environment of bootlicking idolatry,'' Montefiore writes, ''Stalin was irritated by it.''
If there's one thing I can't stand, it's a yes-man! Get out!
Khrushchev dealt Stalin's cult a blow, though it was not terminal. Most students I knew during a postgraduate year at Moscow University five years after his speech joked about his regime freely ("How do you catch a lion? You catch a hare and beat it till it confesses to being a lion"), yet there were recalcitrants, especially among ultra-nationalists. It would be pleasant to believe that all this belongs to a long-gone era, though whether it is Bo Xilai's milking of Maoist nostalgia in Chonqing or the ambiguities of the Putin regime on Stalin, in softened forms the cults live on. Postscripts about their tenacity would have helped round off these books. There were Mao and Stalin cults in the West, not least in universities, where Maoist hocus-pocus held particular appeal ...
Also from the TLS for June 29 - Wm. Roger Louis (UTexas-Austin), doyen of US historians of the British Empire, on Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Very British Coup by Christopher de Bellaigue:
The caricature of him in the British and American press as a bald, huge-nosed, tearful, bedridden maniac has prevented balanced assessment. In Patriot of Persia Christopher De Bellaigue uses Iranian sources for the most part to reveal a man of “truculent honesty” who “personified constitutionalism”. It is conceivable, though perhaps improbable, that without Western interference, Mossadegh might have reduced the Shah to a constitutional monarch and thus prevented the Iranian Revolution of 1979.
Along with Gandhi in a loincloth, Mossadegh in his pyjamas represented a generation of anti-colonial nationalists who transformed the world.Mossadegh was born in 1882, the year Britain occupied Egypt, and died eighty-five years later shortly before the Arab–Israeli war of 1967. His principal political legacy is in Iran. The dominant influence in his early life was his mother, Najm al-Saltaneh, a Qajar princess with a salty tongue (“I’d prefer to be sexually abused”, she once said to another member of the family, “than to be fucked [as] you have been by the papers”) ...
There is little new in Patriot of Persia about Kim Roosevelt and his CIA team in bringing about the fall of Mossadegh in August 1953. Much of it reads as melodrama, with Mossadegh as the hero, the British as villains, and the Americans as bumbling interventionists, to good and readable dramatic effect. But De Bellaigue’s book is unsurpassed as a rounded portrait of Mossadegh, “a visionary and a fusspot” with a flair for weeping and fainting to make his arguments dramatic and persuasive. Mossadegh, even in times of crisis, could give long and boring speeches and was capable of sulks on the magnitude of Edward Heath’s. In fairness to Mossadegh, he suffered from a chronic nervous illness that caused him to faint at times of tension. But his critics believed his weeping and fainting to be intentionally dramatic ...
De Bellaigue explains that the origins of the plan to topple Mossadegh began with the guidance of Nancy Lambton, the foremost British scholar of Iran, and Robin Zaehner, who became the operations officer in the British embassy charged with planning the overthrow. Lambton believed that lawyers, doctors, professors and businessmen as well as activists in street mobs could be rallied into an anti-Mossadegh movement. Zaehner was fluent in Persian and easily won allies in the Majles by distributing biscuit tins full of cash. Above all, Zaehner sustained the British connection with the three flamboyant and wealthy Rashidian brothers. The Rashidians were the operational arm of MI6 in Iran.
And stars of the early kinescope reality series, Couping Up With the Rashidians ...
Zaehner paid them £10,000 a month to influence thugs and others in the bazaar and to provide anti-Mossadegh articles and lampoons in the press. Zaehner, however, was temperamentally not the right man for the job. He drank heavily, he enhanced occasional mystical insight with opium, and he became politically indiscreet. He left Iran eventually to become Professor of Eastern Religions at All Souls College, Oxford. He later acquired a certain notoriety by burning down his rooms in the college and writing a book rebuking American hippies for believing they could understand religious mysticism by taking LSD rather than by studying the ancient texts – but he was nonetheless a scholar of distinction.
Zaehner’s successor was C. M. Woodhouse, a veteran of the Greek civil war, and later, among other things, head of Chatham House and a Member of Parliament. De Bellaigue does not relate this part of the story but it is critical to the book’s subtitle, A very British coup. Woodhouse, by his own testimony, consciously exaggerated the danger of communism to the Americans. When Mossadegh expelled the British and closed down the British embassy in October 1952, Woodhouse turned over control of the Rashidians to the CIA. The question then turned on whether the Rashidians would be willing to act under CIA command. According to the CIA’s own internal report written after the event, “the Rashidians did display such a willingness”.
Mossadegh’s own response to the crisis is ultimately puzzling. He reacted lethargically, even though he had advance warning of the plot. Perhaps he simply suffered from nervous exhaustion. He failed effectively to rally his own security forces and in any event did not rise to the occasion of mob violence. Mossadegh had ambivalent views about political violence. Indeed, he possessed a lasting streak of pacifism. Taut and emotional, he lapsed into a fatalistic view that he was doomed.
At his trial, his compelling personality reasserted itself. He eloquently demonstrated his commitment to democratic or constitutional practices and the rule of law. He made clear again that he wanted a strong democratic government to check the Shah and the army, reiterating that the Shah should reign and not rule. He left the impression of an old-fashioned hero telling the truth. He was sentenced to death. The Shah, wary of making a martyr of a figure of such national strength and principle, commuted the sentence. Mossadegh served three years in prison and then lived under house arrest for the rest of his life. The Shah went on to build a police state with American backing and with close links between the Iranian intelligence service, the Savak, and the CIA. One of the ironies, perhaps amounting to the ultimate Iranian conspiracy theory, is that Mossadegh’s enemies attempted to portray him as a British agent.
Mossadegh’s integrity, patriotism, and self-sacrifice live on in public memory. And not only in Iran. Earlier this year, US presidential candidate Ron Paul of Texas restated the popular belief that the people of Iran embrace a “theocratic dictatorship” because of “the CIA backed-coup”, which led in turn to the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
... At times theory and iconography make Mao Cult hard going, and overshadow the cult's effects on living people. The Hebei Party Committee must have felt a similar frustration: "Chairman Mao's remark about leading and at the same time not leading is a very dialectic expression", it reported, before pointing out that either the Party leads, non-Party people do, or no one does. The Chairman clarified the position in his inimitable style when he said there were two kinds of personality cult: the correct and the incorrect. "The problem does not rest with the cult of the individual but whether it represents the truth or not." You can't get clearer than that. Mao's blithe narcissism (discussions on the personality cult were held in the 1950s in his bedroom, with the emperor in his pyjamas while the Standing Committee of the Politburo formed a semi-circle round his bed) renders much of the ideological pinhead-dancing Leese describes somewhat redundant, except for the historical record.
One of Leese's best chapters is on efforts to wind down the cult's excesses (not the cult itself) at the Ninth Party Congress in 1969. Leese tells a good story based on internal documents, including a remarkable exchange between the lugubrious security boss Kang Sheng, Prime Minister Zhou Enlai, Mao's wife Jiang Qing and her henchmen. Here only the surreal text will do, of which these are selected lines:
"The Loyalty Dance" by Comrades Without Heads
Revered Kang: At present the loyalty dance is being danced everywhere. It is something completely normal. They say it is loyal to Chairman Mao but in reality it is opposed to Chairman Mao ...
Jiang Qing: The present loyalty dance has been completely stripped of class content. It is loyal to whom?
Premier Zhou: Clarify these things first then report to the Centre.
... The Russians rightly accused the Chinese of scholasticism, and Jan Plamper's The Stalin Cult: A study in the alchemy of power is accordingly less abstract than Leese, though the subjects of both books involve some painful locutions. In China, I recall Red Guards referring to individuals as yige qun zhong ("a mass"): a chilling neologism. Soviet Russia invented such terms as kultbytraskhody ("cultural-everyday expenses") for workplaces to buy portraits, reminding us of Vladimir Nabokov's prophecy that no regime could maltreat the Russian language the way the Communists did and survive.
... Like Mao (and unlike Churchill) Stalin's speaking style was artless, and he had the advantage of what a sympathetic caricaturist called his "peace pipe", around which many a myth was woven. It is good to learn that after their 1939 pact Hitler banned the reproduction of a photograph of Stalin with a cigarette, on the grounds that it detracted from the respectability of his new ally. There is also a nice list of foreign gifts on Stalin's seventieth birthday, including a headdress of an Indian war leader from admirers in the USA.
Like Mao (who once disapproved of "rampant worship"), Stalin played the modesty card. Newly released documents show him censoring his own cult. In 1938 he recommended that a new book Stories of Stalin's Childhood be burned, struck out fawning phrases from stage or film scripts, and said he was against dedications in books. Plamper is sceptical. The reasons for this ostentatious bashfulness, he suggests, were that a Bolshevik personality cult was an ideological oxymoron, and because the modesty of the Leader was part of his self-promotion.
I recalled Richard Pipes in 2004, reviewing Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by the English writer Simon Sebag Montefiore:
Stalin hated it if anyone disagreed with him, yet he admired the courage of those who did: ''Having created an environment of bootlicking idolatry,'' Montefiore writes, ''Stalin was irritated by it.''
If there's one thing I can't stand, it's a yes-man! Get out!
Khrushchev dealt Stalin's cult a blow, though it was not terminal. Most students I knew during a postgraduate year at Moscow University five years after his speech joked about his regime freely ("How do you catch a lion? You catch a hare and beat it till it confesses to being a lion"), yet there were recalcitrants, especially among ultra-nationalists. It would be pleasant to believe that all this belongs to a long-gone era, though whether it is Bo Xilai's milking of Maoist nostalgia in Chonqing or the ambiguities of the Putin regime on Stalin, in softened forms the cults live on. Postscripts about their tenacity would have helped round off these books. There were Mao and Stalin cults in the West, not least in universities, where Maoist hocus-pocus held particular appeal ...
Also from the TLS for June 29 - Wm. Roger Louis (UTexas-Austin), doyen of US historians of the British Empire, on Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Very British Coup by Christopher de Bellaigue:
The caricature of him in the British and American press as a bald, huge-nosed, tearful, bedridden maniac has prevented balanced assessment. In Patriot of Persia Christopher De Bellaigue uses Iranian sources for the most part to reveal a man of “truculent honesty” who “personified constitutionalism”. It is conceivable, though perhaps improbable, that without Western interference, Mossadegh might have reduced the Shah to a constitutional monarch and thus prevented the Iranian Revolution of 1979.
Along with Gandhi in a loincloth, Mossadegh in his pyjamas represented a generation of anti-colonial nationalists who transformed the world.Mossadegh was born in 1882, the year Britain occupied Egypt, and died eighty-five years later shortly before the Arab–Israeli war of 1967. His principal political legacy is in Iran. The dominant influence in his early life was his mother, Najm al-Saltaneh, a Qajar princess with a salty tongue (“I’d prefer to be sexually abused”, she once said to another member of the family, “than to be fucked [as] you have been by the papers”) ...
There is little new in Patriot of Persia about Kim Roosevelt and his CIA team in bringing about the fall of Mossadegh in August 1953. Much of it reads as melodrama, with Mossadegh as the hero, the British as villains, and the Americans as bumbling interventionists, to good and readable dramatic effect. But De Bellaigue’s book is unsurpassed as a rounded portrait of Mossadegh, “a visionary and a fusspot” with a flair for weeping and fainting to make his arguments dramatic and persuasive. Mossadegh, even in times of crisis, could give long and boring speeches and was capable of sulks on the magnitude of Edward Heath’s. In fairness to Mossadegh, he suffered from a chronic nervous illness that caused him to faint at times of tension. But his critics believed his weeping and fainting to be intentionally dramatic ...
De Bellaigue explains that the origins of the plan to topple Mossadegh began with the guidance of Nancy Lambton, the foremost British scholar of Iran, and Robin Zaehner, who became the operations officer in the British embassy charged with planning the overthrow. Lambton believed that lawyers, doctors, professors and businessmen as well as activists in street mobs could be rallied into an anti-Mossadegh movement. Zaehner was fluent in Persian and easily won allies in the Majles by distributing biscuit tins full of cash. Above all, Zaehner sustained the British connection with the three flamboyant and wealthy Rashidian brothers. The Rashidians were the operational arm of MI6 in Iran.
And stars of the early kinescope reality series, Couping Up With the Rashidians ...
Zaehner paid them £10,000 a month to influence thugs and others in the bazaar and to provide anti-Mossadegh articles and lampoons in the press. Zaehner, however, was temperamentally not the right man for the job. He drank heavily, he enhanced occasional mystical insight with opium, and he became politically indiscreet. He left Iran eventually to become Professor of Eastern Religions at All Souls College, Oxford. He later acquired a certain notoriety by burning down his rooms in the college and writing a book rebuking American hippies for believing they could understand religious mysticism by taking LSD rather than by studying the ancient texts – but he was nonetheless a scholar of distinction.
Zaehner’s successor was C. M. Woodhouse, a veteran of the Greek civil war, and later, among other things, head of Chatham House and a Member of Parliament. De Bellaigue does not relate this part of the story but it is critical to the book’s subtitle, A very British coup. Woodhouse, by his own testimony, consciously exaggerated the danger of communism to the Americans. When Mossadegh expelled the British and closed down the British embassy in October 1952, Woodhouse turned over control of the Rashidians to the CIA. The question then turned on whether the Rashidians would be willing to act under CIA command. According to the CIA’s own internal report written after the event, “the Rashidians did display such a willingness”.
Mossadegh’s own response to the crisis is ultimately puzzling. He reacted lethargically, even though he had advance warning of the plot. Perhaps he simply suffered from nervous exhaustion. He failed effectively to rally his own security forces and in any event did not rise to the occasion of mob violence. Mossadegh had ambivalent views about political violence. Indeed, he possessed a lasting streak of pacifism. Taut and emotional, he lapsed into a fatalistic view that he was doomed.
At his trial, his compelling personality reasserted itself. He eloquently demonstrated his commitment to democratic or constitutional practices and the rule of law. He made clear again that he wanted a strong democratic government to check the Shah and the army, reiterating that the Shah should reign and not rule. He left the impression of an old-fashioned hero telling the truth. He was sentenced to death. The Shah, wary of making a martyr of a figure of such national strength and principle, commuted the sentence. Mossadegh served three years in prison and then lived under house arrest for the rest of his life. The Shah went on to build a police state with American backing and with close links between the Iranian intelligence service, the Savak, and the CIA. One of the ironies, perhaps amounting to the ultimate Iranian conspiracy theory, is that Mossadegh’s enemies attempted to portray him as a British agent.
Mossadegh’s integrity, patriotism, and self-sacrifice live on in public memory. And not only in Iran. Earlier this year, US presidential candidate Ron Paul of Texas restated the popular belief that the people of Iran embrace a “theocratic dictatorship” because of “the CIA backed-coup”, which led in turn to the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
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