Ann Coulter and the History of China

Ann Coulter's latest article is a bit of a complaint about a bad review of her work. But she uses the opportunity to spring into saying further nutty things from the McCarthy era.

"Democrats lose entire continents to totalitarian monsters, lose wars to bloody tyrants, lose countries to Islamic fascists, and then insist that everyone recite the liberal catechism: "No one lost China," "Vietnam was an unwinnable war," "Khomeini's rise to power was inevitable." (Conversely, Ronald Reagan didn't "win" the Cold War; it just ended.)

At the time, the State Department even issued an 800-page "White Paper" purporting to prove the communist takeover of China was inevitable. Despite these heroic efforts, a Gallup poll found that a majority of Americans did not buy the "inevitability" excuse."

OK, lets start with the end first. Are we really to believe, Ms. Coulter, that we should accept the opinion of the majority of Americans over those who have studied the situation in depth and who have the best information? Yes we are. Because in Ms. Coulter's world the State Department was full of traiterous liberals.

One of those traitorous liberals, Dean Acheson, described the China situation thusly. "Our military observers on the spot have reported that the Nationalist armies did not lose a single battle during the crucial year of 1948 through lack of arms or ammunition. The fact was that the decay which our observers had detected in Chungking early in the war had fatally sapped the powers of resistance of the Kuomintang. Its leaders had proved incapable of meeting the crisis confronting them, its troops bad lost the will to fight, and its Government bad lost popular support. The Communists, on the other hand, through a ruthless discipline and fanatical zeal, attempted to sell themselves as guardians and liberators of the people. The Nationalist armies did not have to be defeated; they disintegrated. History has proved again and again that a regime without faith in itself and an army without morale cannot survive the test of battle."

It is one of the conudrums of history that McCarthyites of the time and Ms Coulter today seem absolutely certain that a few Liberals in the State Department lost us a country of over a billion people, but they seem incapable of suggesting what they would have different.

And of course the great crime of those liberals in the State Department; analyzing the situation and predicting what would happen. They saw the Nationalist Chinese as having lost the support of the people, of having been totally unmotivated, leaderless. They saw the Maoists as being agressive and disciplined. So who did they think was going to win? But in the ideologically driven world of Ms. Coulter all information is to be judged not on its merits but on its adherence to Conservative Dogma.

I have more to say on this subject, but unfortunately have to get on the road--have a nice day.