Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2003/09/04

[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]

Subject: Re: [Leica] re: gun balderdash & photos - Stalin and the Long March, (also Ancient Astronomy)
From: Marc James Small <msmall@infionline.net>
Date: Thu, 04 Sep 2003 21:29:36 -0400

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

Replies: Reply from "Greg J. Lorenzo" <gregj.lorenzo@shaw.ca> (Re: [Leica] re: gun balderdash & photos - Stalin and the Long March, (also Ancient Astronomy))
Reply from Marc James Small <msmall@infionline.net> (Re: [Leica] re: gun balderdash & photos - Stalin and the Long March, (also Ancient Astronomy))