Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2003/09/04
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At 02:27 AM 9/4/03 EDT, Afterswift@aol.com wrote: >I didn't see the rock business, but I'll do some research on the scholarly >side. The point is that Mao, without the complicity of Stalin couldn't have >taken over China. ====================== Simple balderdash. If anything, it was the inept inability of the US to bring Chiang to heel which caused Mao to win. I DO understand both Chiang's limitations -- he was, in the end, a petty and short-sighted demagogue beset by having to deal with a dozen warlords, and his grand mistake was in regarding Mao as just another warlord -- and the limitations of the era and the nation, but, in the end, it was the US' refusal to back Chiang which caused the eclipse, temporary though it may be, of the KMT government on the mainland. George C Marshall was sent to China as a plenipotentiary in 1946 to resolve all of the issues between Chiang and Mao and the warlords. When he left, his report included the phrase that, "the proudest boast I have ever made is that with a single stroke of my pen, I disarmed 60 of Chiang's divisions". And THIS from the military genius who won the Second World War? Chiang DID disarm 60 divisions. The warlords did not do anythingof the sort, nor did the CCP forces. But Marshall was PROUD of stabbing Chiang in the back! Wow! (No, I am not suggesting that George Catlett Marshall was a ComSymp, just that he was a mainstream Democrat, blind in the left eye and unwilling to understand what was lost in China, as he was equally unwilling, from his phobia over British Imperial interests, to understand the virtues of bringing Turkey into World War II on the Allied side in 1943, with the loss of thousands of US sailors on the Murmansk Run.) Mao won the Chinese Civil War once it was a clear contest of a reduced KMT versus the warlords versus the CCP, and he did so with minimal assistance from the USSR. It has been suggested, repeatedly, that he did so to ensure that he would not be beholden to Stalin but, in any event, Mao never bent his knee to the Kremlin. (And, it has been argued, that Chiang, as a Moscow-trained revolutionary, might well have done so had he won. Just who was the ComIntern rooting for in 1947?) The Leica connection? Mao's rather odd widow, the creature who gave us that epic phrase, "the Gang of Four", applied to myself and Eric Welch and Tina and Ted some years back on the LUG, required one of the Chinese State Factories to make a replica M4, now a most desireable collector's choice acquisition, as the Excellence of Proletarian Labor ensured that they were made in an even smaller quantity than that semi-mythical 2.8/180 Telyt-V several of you own and use. Now, to my knowledge, neither Ben Cartwright, General MacArthur, Chiang, nor "Uncle Joe" Stilwell ever took a single picture with a Leica, but I suspect that Ted will remind me of their chance meeting in 1923 at "The House of Eternal Happiness" in Shanghai in 1922, two blocks off the Bundt, where George Bernard Shaw and Julia Child showed them the UR-Leica and explained its mysteries, Ted, of course, having been the bus-boy that evening, just part of his rather mysterious career as an undercover agent of rare abilities. Marc msmall@infionline.net FAX: +540/343-7315 Cha robh bąs fir gun ghrąs fir! - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html