> Chairman Mao: You have about 600, 000 Chinese in the United States. We probably don't even have 60 Americans here. I would like to study the problem. I don't know the reason. I wonder if he studied it and what he found.
I mean, just read on!
The Mao-Kissinger Meeting of 1973
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Re: The Mao-Kissinger Meeting of 1973
#42I'm not entirely sure I get what this tells us. A degree of cynicism in politics is inevitable, for the players. And, Kissinger was undoubtedly playing. As was Mao, with other people. Interesting Edgar Snow was brought up, I read his long March piece as a child, it's pretty accessible. ("Red Star over China" 1937) Zhou EnLai was a survivor and a moderating force in the bad times. The national museum in Tienanmen squa…
> Kissinger was a war criminal so I tend to regard this kind of verbatim report as reflecting two criminally minded geniuses shooting the breeze together.
Of course he was / they were. But guilt v. innocence is too crude a distinction to say anything meaningful about history. There's a lot going on that that distinction can't account for. In the end, they're all guilty, and we're all guilty, and only a childish craving to see oneself as innocent and project all badness onto others imagines otherwise.
p.s. This is not a criticism. I enjoyed your comment.
Re: The Mao-Kissinger Meeting of 1973
#43Was this before mao killed millions of Chinese or after?
After.
Re: The Mao-Kissinger Meeting of 1973
#44On Dunkirk: > Chairman Mao: They shouldn’t have attacked Moscow or Kiev. They should have taken Leningrad as a first step. Another error in policy was they didn’t cross the sea after Dunkirk. > Dr. Kissinger: After Dunkirk. > Chairman Mao: They were entirely unprepared. > Dr. Kissinger: And Hitler was a romantic. He had a strange liking for England. > Chairman Mao: Oh? Then why didn’t they go there? Because the Briti…
Angus Calder has a quote I can't recall about the "fight them on the beaches" speech Churchill gave, somebody in the house of commons said something to the effect "well we will be flinging beer bottles at them, it's all we've bloody got" and indeed the home guard was being taught how to make Molotov cocktails by ex Spanish civil war volunteers, and parading with pikes. A three man suicide squad technique was deviced…
The British Navy was intact though, and the Germans did not have air superiority. Had they had air superiority they'd have been able to keep the British Navy at bay and then invaded. It was a close-run thing.
Re: The Mao-Kissinger Meeting of 1973
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also that Henry Kissinger is still alive and turned 100 few weeks ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Kissinger
Fun fact: Kissinger has lived for so long that Commodore BASIC, SQL, Apple DOS, and the TCP/IP protocol were all created after he retired from government service. Not after he was born , but after he retired .
People like Kissinger never retire, he still shape our world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Bilderberg_Conference
Re: The Mao-Kissinger Meeting of 1973
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you daft? It's two of the greatest/most-importants minds of the 20th century meeting in the post ww2 era. From the western side - Kissinger is arguably right up there with Machiavelli, his influence is immutable. and Mao sort of made modern china.
You left out the Evil multiplier. These are also two of the most vile things to live in the last 500 years. Their great minds are what allowed them to get away with the murder hundreds of millions.
That doesn't make these memos not interesting. Quite the contrary!
Re: The Mao-Kissinger Meeting of 1973
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you daft? It's two of the greatest/most-importants minds of the 20th century meeting in the post ww2 era. From the western side - Kissinger is arguably right up there with Machiavelli, his influence is immutable. and Mao sort of made modern china.
Hey, please omit swipes from your HN posts. Your comment would be fine without that first bit. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I don't think u/dontupvoteme meant it the way you took it. "Are you daft?" didn't come across as a swipe but as a bit of a British-like exclamation on their point. Could be a language thing.
Re: The Mao-Kissinger Meeting of 1973
#48Looks like some game of chess: China stopped supporting North Vietnam, but that didn't stop North Vietnam from invading South Vietnam, after the pullout. However at that point no one in the US cared about any domino theory, because the US was now friends with China against the Soviet Union. I wonder what the chess pieces were all thinking...
The Sino-Soviet split came to mind when listening to Xi swear to be Putin's BFF and blood brother forever. Is Putin really stupid enough to fall for that? He will be polishing Xi's boots with his tongue soon enough.
Re: The Mao-Kissinger Meeting of 1973
#49This reminded me of the great story where Kissinger, on that trip, asks Zhou Enlai "What do you think of the French Revolution" and Zhou replies "It's too soon to tell." I love that, and it is what I say when people ask "how are you" too early in the morning. But I've also been trained by a passion for too-good-to-be-true quotes and that one definitely sounds too good to be true. Guess what - it is. But for an intere…
Zhou might have meant something important by that. If you think that La Terreur set the pattern for many other terrors since, then the fact that the struggle against La Terreur hadn't (probably hasn't) finished quite yet might make that retort quite frank and meaningful.
Re: The Mao-Kissinger Meeting of 1973
#50Looks like some game of chess: China stopped supporting North Vietnam, but that didn't stop North Vietnam from invading South Vietnam, after the pullout. However at that point no one in the US cared about any domino theory, because the US was now friends with China against the Soviet Union. I wonder what the chess pieces were all thinking...
The Chinese split from north Vietnam is just a consequence of the sino-Soviet split that began under kruschev. However, the Vietnamese did help with Soviet tech to preserve and display Mao’s body, at least.
both China and the Soviet Union were supporting North Vietnam at the same time - up until 1968 (when they had this war over an island). The Sino Soviet split happened much earlier, in 1961.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_in_the_Vietnam_War
The great friendship between China and the USA started after that border conflict in 1968, as China was looking for a counterweight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Soviet_border_conflict
I mean Mao was playing Nixon and Kissinger against Brezhnev.
The funny part is where Kissinger is taking all of the credit for the US China rapprochement.