Interim White House Communications director, Anita Dunn,gave a high school commencement address in June of this year in which she praised Hitler, using him as an example to illustrate a point:
“You don’t have to accept the defintion of how to do things and you don’t have to follow other people’s choices and paths.
Okay? It is about your choices and your paths. You fight your own war. You lay out your own paths. You figure out what’s right for you. You don’t let any external definition define how good you are internally.”
OK. She didn’t use Hitler as her example. That would have been absurd. Hitler’s government systematically and ruthlessly murdered millions of innocents.
She used Mao Zedong. Mao’s government systematically and ruthlessly murdered more than twice as many innocents as Nazi Germany. (Death by Government, R. J . Rummel)
Maybe the 50 million Chinese dead were just accidental by-products of Mao’s personal ethical journey? Maybe Dunn meant that the kids should follow their own Shining Path?
But wait! She also referenced Mother Theresa! Telling the kids to “go find your own Calcutta.” Here’s Christopher Hitchens on the sainted lady.
I’ll ignore the Mother Theresa allusion; her name has become, however wrongly, synonymous with passionate service. The Mao Zedong allusion cannot be excused.
Here’s the actual quote.
“The third lesson and tip actually comes from two of my favorite political philosophers: Mao Tse-tung and Mother Theresa — not often coupled with each other, but the two people I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point which is ‘you’re going to make choices; you’re going to challenge; you’re going to say why not; you’re going to figure out how to do things that have never been done before.”
From http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/10/16/beck.dunn/index.html
In the CNN article, she says that her reference to Mao as a favorite philosopher was supposed to be ironic. I don’t believe her.
WOW. Here’s the video link.
http://pajamasmedia.com/rogerkimball/2009/10/16/a-maoist-in-the-white-house/
Outrageous.
Irony? There’s no irony there. Unless she doesn’t know what irony is. It’s ironic that the White House Director of Communications wouldn’t know what irony is, but using Mao as an example of enlightened, independent morality? That’s not ironic, that’s offensive.
One last comment: I find it entirely unsurprising that Dunn would think of Mao as a political philosopher. Dunn almost certainly encountered Mao as a “philosopher” in college. For the hard, Marxist left, Mao sits right there alongside Lenin and Trotsky. The fact that communism was responsible for more genocide and murder in the 20th century is, for a large number of ideologues, irrelevant. Dialectical materialism, the “philosophy” of communism is separable from the practice of evils of its totalitarian incarnations. It’s an absurd position of course; dialectical materialism demands the bloody sacrifice of wracked human bodies to effect the kind of material change it takes to strip away false consciousness. Communism is totalitarian and oppressive in theory just as it is in practice.
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