By Jack Cashill

June 2, 2006
Courtesy of worldnetdaily.com

© Jack Cashill

When I completed "Hoodwinked," my book on intellectual fraud, in spring 2005, I thought I had the cultural waterfront pretty well covered.

That was until I read "Mao: The Unknown Story," the definitive new biography by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. Now I am embarrassed to admit that one of the 20th century's most lethal enablers – in a class with Walter Duranty, Rachel Carson, Alfred Kinsey and others – has a veritable shrine in his honor less than a mile from my house, right here at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, or UMKC.

The man's name is Edgar Snow. Upon realizing my oversight, I publicly requested in the regional business magazine I edit that UMKC, at the very least, slap a major asterisk on its precious Edgar Snow Exhibit. That is not about to happen. Kansas City has invested too much cultural and social equity in its wayward native son to back off.

In the way of background, Snow was born in Kansas City in 1905, graduated from a local high school, spent some time at Missouri University's famed J-school, (faked a diploma for his book jackets), and wandered off to China as a freelance reporter. In 1936, Snow made his way to Mao's beleaguered band of Chinese Communists, which was then holed up in a distant province at the seeming mercy of both Chang Kai-Shek's nationalist forces and the invading Japanese army.

Mao was looking for some Western reporter to whom he could tell his story, and the eager Snow fit the bill. "Ed Snow was an activist," the UMKC Edgar Snow Exhibit boasts, "ready to encourage worthy causes rather than be a purely passive spectator." Once exposed to Mao's presumed "fight for a life of justice, equality, freedom and human dignity," young Snow proved anything but passive.

Snow wrote the above paean to Mao in his 1938 book, "Red Star Rising," a book that saved Mao's bacon, a point on which both friend and foe agree. The UMKC exhibit refers to the Snow book as "a great classic" and "a scoop of all time," one that "burst as a surprise upon not only the Chinese people but the whole world."

On and off for decades thereafter, Snow channeled the remote Mao to the rest of the world. Snow played a particularly useful role in the years before Mao assumed control of the mainland. Indeed, the UMKC exhibit claims with some justification that Snow "acted as eyes and ears for President Roosevelt."

Without intending to, Snow reconnected with Kansas City in 1965. Then living in Switzerland, he journeyed to a "world government" conference in New Hampshire. There he happened to meet Dr. E. Grey Dimond, the "counterculture medical educator" who would go on to found the UMKC School of Medicine. The two bonded.

After Snow's death in 1972, Dimond's wife, Mary Clark Dimond, launched The Edgar Snow Memorial Fund in his honor. From the beginning, this organization was much more social than the average academic adventure. The Memorial Fund has maintained the Snow Exhibit in affiliation with UMKC and sponsored a whole rash of visiting professorships, scholarships, lecturers, "and even travel parties to China." The travel parties have proved particularly popular. "Symposium celebrates the heart of Snow," reads the artless headline of the university newspaper about a recent chancellor-led junket to Bejing.

Unfortunately for Snow's memory and UMKC's social life, authors Chang and Halliday have proved to be the ultimate buzz killers. It's not that they deny Snow his significance. His book "profoundly influenced radical youth in China," they admit, "and played a big role in swaying Western opinion in favor of Mao." What they deny are his credibility and his common sense. After 10 years of extraordinary in-country research and writing, the authors know whereof they speak.

If the UMKC exhibit portrays Snow as the "man who first told the true story of those times," Chang and Halliday paint him as a "useful idiot," the slur Lenin assigned to Westerners so willfully blind they wouldn't recognize the truth if they tripped over it. In the Lenin "big lie" tradition, claim the authors, Mao fed Snow a goulash of useful facts and "colossal falsification," which the hungry reporter "swallowed in toto."

What Mao falsified was his "years of torture and murder." According to Chang and Halliday, "appalling torture was commonplace" chez Mao. Apparently, he and his henchmen used more than 100 astonishingly sadistic varieties of torture to intimidate peasants, to eliminate internal opposition in frequent Stalinist purges and to prevent his own soldiers from fleeing en masse.

The always-creative Mao also concocted battles and feats of heroism for his always-credulous biographer. And, to be sure, he concealed from Snow his contempt for the common people, especially those who were forced to carry Mao during a "Long March" that must have seemed much longer to them than to their indolent boss.

More problematic in the long run, Mao fully deceived Snow about his relationship with the Soviets, the Japanese, the Nationalists and the Americans. Based on Snow's say-so, the world came to believe that the selfless Communists tried to create a united front against Japan, but that the corrupt Nationalists sabotaged it, being more keen on killing their Chinese brethren than on beating the Japanese.

"All this is untrue," say Chang and Halliday. Indeed, it was the opposite of true, but so persuasive was Snow's reporting that America eventually lost the will to defend the Nationalists. In time, we yielded the whole of mainland China to three more decades of Mao's homicidal madness and three more decades after that of Tiananmen Square style mayhem.

Nor is this a case of "He said, she said." The following typical review of "Mao: The Unknown Story" from the London Times gives some sense of both Mao's infamy and the authors' insight into it.