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So long and good riddance - "Madame Chiang Kai-shek"

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dArKeR Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Oct-27-03 07:42 AM
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So long and good riddance - "Madame Chiang Kai-shek"
Edited on Mon Oct-27-03 07:47 AM by dArKeR
"Of the dead say nothing but good," Plutarch advises. The problem is that in the case of Soong Mayling (宋美齡), also fawningly known as "Madame Chiang Kai-shek," there isn't any good to be said. Many obiturists have remarked that she was the most famous Chinese woman of the 20th century. What hasn't been said is that she was also perhaps the most evil woman to wield any kind of power during that bleak 100 years and that her influence on almost anything she touched was corrupting and malign.

Soong learned to speak like a Western democrat during her years of schooling in the US, but her psychology was utterly feudal. Her hypocrisy and mendacity were astonishing, perhaps best represented by her convincing Henry Luce, the powerful boss of Life and Time magazines, that she and her husband Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), himself a protege of Shanghai's Green Gang and earning millions in the opium trade -- for which he used the Opium Suppression Agency's boats -- represented this religious crank's best hope for "bringing the Chinese to Jesus."

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/edit/archives/2003/10/27/2003073589

I guess I'm a coward. I didn't actually say what I felt about this women, I guess because she just died and I guess I wanted to show some kind of respect. But since this reporter has told the truth he gives me cowardly courage:

I depise every bone and every thought you ever had Madame Chiang Kai-shek. I am sure you are rotting in Hell!
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bluestateguy Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Oct-27-03 07:49 AM
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1. One need not have sympathy for someone who was 105
I don't know about applauding someone's death--I rarely do that--but one need not pity someone who lived a life of longevity and privilege.
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papau Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Oct-27-03 08:09 AM
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2. Before all US media was media whored, Dragan Lady via Luce/Novak
Edited on Mon Oct-27-03 08:10 AM by papau
was untouchable.

She caused more misery to more people, yet in the 50's through the 80's she was the foreign policy power in the GOP.

I was always convinced that the reason Ike started the Vietnam war via having Secretary of State Dulles refuse to honor the US commitment to abide by the result of elections in Vietnam in 1954 (where Ho won in the North, and was projected to win by a landslide in the South at which point Dulles stopped any election from happening in the South) was the Dragon Lady's influence in the GOP.

And US Media covered for her - only in the comics was she even mentioned regularly - and as now those drawing the comics had balls -and showed her as evil!
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