Chairman Mo in Beijing

Global socialist and environmentalist Maurice ‘Mo’ Strong has been hiding out in eco-disaster Beijing for the past few years (in the wake of the Iraq/U.N. oil-for-food fraud) as consultant and visiting professor, sharing his grandiose statist vision with China’s government and students. Writing in Maclean’s Magazine this week Chairman Mo expounds on China. Of a number of commentaries parsing Mo’s essay two of my favourites were one by Peter Foster and another by blogger ‘John the Mad’.

Peter Foster does his usual sterling job of reality checking and interpretation concluding with an observation that Strong and his global vision are high maintenance:

... it is difficult to see how any reasonable person, presented with the bizarre facts of his business history and political ideology, could not be disturbed by everything that Mr. Strong stands for and has promoted, especially as the public cost has run into the tens, perhaps even hundreds, of billions of dollars.

Maurice Strong is perhaps the world's most expensive man. He is also the very last person from whom China should be seeking advice if it wants to live in true harmony with the rest of the world.

And ‘John the Mad’ captures the overall flavour of Mo’s essay with this:

On reflection ... I came to the conclusion that Comrade Strong's piece was really ghost written by a gaggle of Chinese communist party communications flacks undertaking damage control for the public relations fiasco leading up to the Peking Olympics.

...[really, however] I accept that Maurice Strong may well have written it. His agitprop is entirely consistent with the plethora of crap written throughout the 20th century by those whom Vladimir Lenin called "useful idiots of the West." His defense of evil is an ignoble, but unfortunately all too common, tradition with those on the left.

Both are great reads and serve as reminders that the Wikipedia entry (puff-piece) for Mo Strong is in serious need of revision to cover the more, ahem, ‘colorful’ aspects of his history.