One of the points I keep trying to hammer home is that people can’t think clearly about fascism because they simply use it as a label for “evil” and then suspend critical thinking. Meanwhile socialism for some reason doesn’t have that connotation, even though more people were slaughtered in the name of socialism than were slaughtered in the name of fascism — by far. Anyway, here’s a good example of the disconnect:
There is a truly bizarre story on Reuters saying that the French car manufacturer Citroën has apologised for running an advertisement featuring a scowling Chairman Mao.
“As a Chinese, I felt greatly insulted when seeing this ad,” a posting on web portal Tianya (www.tianya.com) said. “It is not only insulting Chairman Mao, but the whole Chinese nation.” […] “Chairman Mao is the symbol of China, and what Citroen did lacks basic respect to China,” another posting said.
Astounding. The man who was probably the most prolific mass murderer in history, who murdered between 44.5 & 72 million mostly Chinese people and brought tyranny to almost one fifth of the world’s population, is regarded by some people in 2008 as “the symbol of China”? That is truly surreal.
This commenter gets to the rub:
Kill six millions Jews in Germany, your name becomes a synonym with evil. Kill between 44 and 72 million Chinese, you get a café named after you. It’s a funny old world, eh?
Now, just for the record, I have pretty strong views about the signature evil of the Holocaust. It is not my aim to downgrade its evil in anyway. But I would like to see the evils of Stalin, Mao and other socialists (other than Hitler, of course) get their due as well.