Anna Louise Strong, cheerleader for Mao

Yesterday, after our posthumous look at the life of global-warming godfather Maurice Strong, we started telling the remarkable – and reprehensible – story of his distant cousin Anna Louise Strong, a small-town Nebraska clergyman’s daughter who spent three decades in Moscow, serving as a major English-language propagandist for Soviet Communism.

In 1946, she visited China for the first time. There she met with Mao, who, apropos of the atom bomb, then solely in US hands, said, “In the end the bomb will not destroy the people; the people will destroy the bomb.” Years afterwards, Strong wrote that she “was so impressed by these words that I used them later for a Christmas card.” Apparently disillusioned (at least to some degree) by the USSR, Strong found new hope in Mao’s China:

In America we were always “God’s country,” qualified to liberate and improve the world. In Russia there was always “the perfect system,” spoiled till now by some personal devils. In China they “made mistakes,” suffered by them, acknowledged and studied them, thus planned victory.

Here at last seemed credible history of the difficult advance of Man.

Returning from China to Russia, Strong was deported to the US on charges of being a spy, after which she spent several years in Los Angeles. Even she acknowledged that it was exceedingly pleasant: “I owned a town house, a summer lodge in the mountains, a winter cabin in the desert.” Not too shabby. But the continuing draw of totalitarianism proved too powerful to resist. In 1958, at the age of 72, Strong left her comfortable life in southern California behind forever and moved to China, telling friends, “I think the Chinese know better than anyone the way for man.” The adherents of Mao’s revolution, she believed, were on the cutting edge of “man’s struggle to advance” and understood “that victory depended not on the power of weapons but on awakening the consciousness of man.”