tim's experiment

Last week the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman again chided Japan for failing to “come to terms with its history”. I think he was upset over the launching of a new helicopter carrying ship, though this can hardly be relevant to present foreign policy disputes because it is a large boat and must have been ordered years ago. Anyway this is a theme to which the Chinese Foreign Ministry regularly returns, usually apropos of some synthetic outrage like a history textbook or a shrine visit. No doubt Japan still has a lot of history to come to terms with. Well we are all warned against throwing stones while living in a glass house, and this is a fine example.

The 20th century was remarkable for huge calamities in which millions of people died: wars, famines, upheavals, massacres, genocide… By the 1950s this led to the coining of a new word “megadeaths”, for the convenience of people who wished to discuss the end of civilisation in the next war without typing “million deaths” all the time. Most of the casualties could be blamed on three remarkable men — or if you prefer remarkable criminals – namely Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Now we all know that Hitler accounted for six megadeaths by deliberately turning killing into an industry. But that is nothing like his total, which depends on how much we put down to his account of the total deaths in World War 2, which ran to 55 megadeaths. Some of these must presumably be allocated to Hirohito. Some also must be put down to Stalin, though he needs no help, having caused a famine (20 megadeaths) and numerous examples of political persecution and ethnic cleansing. Mao is a bit easier to handle. We can spare him a share of the Chinese Civil War (3 megadeaths) because as a head of state he is in a class of his own: the famine following the Great Leap Forward is now reckoned to have produced between 45 and 50 megadeaths in a mere four years. To that we can add another 7 megadeaths from the Cultural Revolution.

The interesting thing about this is not that these three men were spectacularly bad – no doubt others would have done as much evil given the opportunity – but the way in which they are now regarded in the countries they bathed in innocent blood. Hitler is generally reviled. Denying his crimes is a criminal offence in some European countries. Uncle Joe is now regarded even in Russia as an embarrassment. Mao on the other hand still beams down in portraiture on his capital city. People still queue to walk past his remains. One wonders what they say, under their breath. The consequences of his rule have emerged gradually and painfully. Many documents remain concealed. Nobody has been prepared to come to the obvious conclusion that he was a mass murderer on a grand scale.

And this brings me to a curious concept circulating currently, the “Tacitus trap”. This is not a commonplace of Classical studies. Apparently it was discovered by a China scholar in search of a tactful way of saying that many of his countrymen do not share the Chinese Communist Party’s high opinion of itself. Tacitus observed of one of the emperors whose reigns he chronicled that eventually he was so ill-thought-of that even when he did good things they were ignored or misinterpreted. The implication is that the Chinese Government is in danger of being stuck in a “Tacitus trap” despite its economic successes because of unsolved political and social problems. I think this assumes that people have very poor memories. The Chinese government may be in a trap. It is not a Tacitus Trap, it is a Hannibal Lector Trap. When you have been a serial killer for a long time people find it difficult to believe that you have found religion, turned over a new leaf and become a harmless upstanding member of society.

There is an old saying that “Treason never prospers. For this there is one reason. If it prospers, none dare call it treason.” While mass murder is unacknowledged, asking other people to study their history is ill-advised.