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PARTISAN REVIEW
scale, the Jews are being replaced by the Chinese as ideological
bogeymen and scapegoats. The devices developed for anti-Semitic
purposes were now used against the Chinese. For example, a new use
was made of the main weapon employed in Stalin's campaign against
the "cosmopolites": the "exposure of pseudonyms," whereby the
official propagandists discovered, behind the facade of Russian
pseudonyms, the real, Jewish names of the "cosmopolites."
In
books
and articles about Cambodia, it was especially emphasized that the
former premier, Pol Pot, had concealed his real name, Salot Sar, and
his origins. (His mother was Chinese.)
In
late 1979 the magazine
N
ovyi
M
ir
published the famous
Marshal Chuikov's memoirs about four trips he made to China on
orders from Stalin and the meetings he had there with communist and
Kuomintang leaders. Chuikov's account is a memoir in name only.
Actually, it is a warning of inevitable war with a dangerous enemy; and
its tone is hardly triumphant. "China is invincible," Chiang Kai-Shek
said to him early in 1941. "For China, war is only an illness; and
illnesses run their course.... " When Chuikov objected that "some of
them are fatal," the response was: "Nol We don 't believe that they
cause death. Death is not an illness: it comes as something separate."
The reasons for Chiang Kai-Shek 's enigmatic optimism are to be
sought, not in the philosophy of Confucius, and not in the poetry of
Tu Fu, but in some remarks by his chief political rival, Mao Tse-Tung.
In
Moscow, during the anti-Stalinist Twentieth Party Congress in
1956, the Israeli Communist leader, Samuil Mikunis reports in his
memoirs that Mao's favorite topic of conversation was World War III,
which he regarded as inevitable. Mao, he tells us , was convinced that
one had to be ready for it at any moment; and he thought only in terms
of that war, as if it had already begun.
"Nehru and I, " he said, " have been having a little argument as to
how many people will be killed in an atomic war. Nehru says a billion
and a half, but I say only a billion and a quarter." At this point
Palmiro Tagliatti asked him : "And what will happen to Italy as a
result of such a war?" Mao looked at him intently, then replied coolly:
"Who told you Italy has to exist? There'll be three hundred million
Chinese left, and that's enough to keep the human race going."*
·Samuil Mikunis, "Insighl"
(Time and We,
1979,
No. 48, p.
165).
Similar remarks by
Mao-with some slighl varialions-have been recorded by olher memoirislS. In an anicle
lilled "Peking's Hidden ConceplS,"
(lnamya,
1979,
no.
12,
pp.
222- 233)
the Soviel
journalisl Ernsl H enry ha broughl logelher a slanted seleclion of lhem, including lhe
famous one recorded by Edgar Snow.
