Very little of this will be new to long-time readers, but Paul Kengor at Prager U narrates this video to remind us, yet again, that Mao Zedong was a complete and utter bastard.
“Mao became a Marxist not out of idealism; his only ideal was Mao. The plight of the Chinese people meant nothing to him, not as a young man and not as a dictator. For Mao, other people existed to be used. Their lives didn’t matter at all.”
I’ll skip over the history of his rise to power and skip right to where the atrocities start.
“Half a billion people, a fifth of the world’s population, were thrust into one vast ideological laboratory in rural areas. Families were herded into collective farms. They no longer would work for themselves, they would work for the government.”
“This was as true for women as it was for men. In a perverse way, Mao believed in the equality of the sexes. If men could do backbreaking labor in the fields and factories, why couldn’t women?”
“There was no real equality in China for anyone, male or female, and no chance of improving one’s condition.”
“If you were assigned to a village, you had to stay in that village. If you were assigned to a city, you had to stay in that city. Whatever job the party gave you, that was your job. You couldn’t say ‘I would rather be a teacher than a farmer.’ Well, you could say it, but if you did you’d be shot.”
“There was also no equality between the proletariat and the elite. Mao lived in total luxury and hedonism. He had a dozen custom-built homes scattered throughout the country. Peasant girls were brought to him for his sexual satisfaction. Mao refused to bathe or brush his teeth and had chronic venial disease.”
“He ate whatever his heart desired, meat, vegetables and pastries, Meanwhile, peasants starved in mud huts.”
“Why couldn’t the peasants feed themselves like they had for centuries? [Mao] was exporting food all through this period. He believed China had to be a great military power, so he traded food for industrial hardware and armaments. The Soviets in Eastern Europe got the grain, Mao got the guns.”
“The peasants got nothing, and then they got less from 1958 to 1962. During the Great Leap Forward, Mao pushed the peasants even harder. Their suffering is impossible to describe. First they ate the dogs, then the rats, then the bark from the trees, then in some cases human flesh. According to a contemporary account, ‘the life we had to endure in those days was worse than the life of primitive societies. We lived like animals.'”
“Tens of millions died before Mao finally backed off.”
“In the mid 1960s, he instigated the so-called Cultural Revolution encouraging Chinese college students to denounce anyone not sufficiently revolutionary. This included their own parents and grandparents. And then, when he felt the college students had gone far enough, he turned on them. Thousands were sent to labor camps, and of course many were tortured and executed. It wasn’t a Mao Purge if that didn’t happen.”
“After being directly responsible for the murder of between 50 and 70 million of his own people after impoverishing the most populous country in the world, after killing anyone who opposed him, Mao died in his bed in September 1976.”
Indeed, Mao killed more people than any other leader in history, Hitler and Stalin included. And Kengor didn’t even touch on Mao’s bloody subjugation of Tibet, or his insane attempt to exterminate sparrows.
A bit more on Mao’s genocide, along with that of other communist nations, plus a bit of bibliography on the subject, can be found here.
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6 Responses to “Reminder: Mao Was A Complete Bastard”
“If you were assigned to a village, you had to stay in that Village. If you were assigned to a city, you had to stay in that city. Whatever job THE PARTY gave you, that was your job. You couldn’t say ‘I would rather be a teacher than a farmer.’ Well, you could say it, but if you did you’d be shot.”
Replace “the party” with “feudal lord” and the entire scheme becomes transparently obvious. Maoism exemplifies pre-capitalist feudalism, where social mobility was nearly impossible. You could advance your “station in life” through military service or by taking Church Orders but for the overwhelming majority of civil society, village life was circumscribed the entirety of one’s existence.
This period is notable mostly for the lack of imagination in military affairs and its technological backwardness, which produced only two significant achievements: the horse collar and free-standing fireplace.
Horse collars allow the peasantry to tap into the feudal Lord’s supply of war horses and convert some portion of them to plough horses, thus increasing agricultural productivity. This agricultural increase greatly contributed to the increased value of farm labor and boosted the peasant’s standing in the social hierarchy, narrowing the distance between nobility and serfs and making social mobility easier.
N.B., Paul Kangor teaches economics at Grove City College, whose alumni (in particular, those who earned their Econ degrees there, *wink* *wink*) among the most intellectually accomplished savants to crack open a textbook, evah!
The Great Chinese Famine during the Great Leap Forward was primarily caused by diversion of rural peasant labor to the construction and operation of backyard furnaces for smelting iron. These small blast type furnaces did not produce usable iron, and their operation distracted China’s agricultural pool from growing and harvesting. Food exports were not a major factor in the famine.
Backyard furnaces were fueled with charcoal, resulting in massive deforestation which haunted China into the 1980’s. Additionally, valuable farm implements such as plows, hoes, and rakes were converted into worthless puddles of slag iron. Industrial tooling was also sacrificed to these furnaces.
Mao was directly, personally, responsible for the backyard furnace cult. He wanted to double China’s steel output, but wound up destroying a century’s worth of steel implements and tools for no gain whatsoever.
Least we forget that CCP literally wipe out sparrow because Mao deem them pests that eats crops as part of the Four Pest Campaign. This of course massively increase the population of locust . It’s Lysenkoism, CCP style.
You either don’t know what Lysenkoism is or have an unusually broad definition of it.
Lysenkoism is a version of Lamarck’s claim that children inherit traits that the parents gain during their lives. That is, if your father pumped iron, you’ll inherit more muscle than if he did not.
I don’t think it has quite entered the lexicon as meaning the subjugation of science to politics; it’s just a go-to example.
“If you were assigned to a village, you had to stay in that Village. If you were assigned to a city, you had to stay in that city. Whatever job THE PARTY gave you, that was your job. You couldn’t say ‘I would rather be a teacher than a farmer.’ Well, you could say it, but if you did you’d be shot.”
Replace “the party” with “feudal lord” and the entire scheme becomes transparently obvious. Maoism exemplifies pre-capitalist feudalism, where social mobility was nearly impossible. You could advance your “station in life” through military service or by taking Church Orders but for the overwhelming majority of civil society, village life was circumscribed the entirety of one’s existence.
This period is notable mostly for the lack of imagination in military affairs and its technological backwardness, which produced only two significant achievements: the horse collar and free-standing fireplace.
Horse collars allow the peasantry to tap into the feudal Lord’s supply of war horses and convert some portion of them to plough horses, thus increasing agricultural productivity. This agricultural increase greatly contributed to the increased value of farm labor and boosted the peasant’s standing in the social hierarchy, narrowing the distance between nobility and serfs and making social mobility easier.
N.B., Paul Kangor teaches economics at Grove City College, whose alumni (in particular, those who earned their Econ degrees there, *wink* *wink*) among the most intellectually accomplished savants to crack open a textbook, evah!
The Great Chinese Famine during the Great Leap Forward was primarily caused by diversion of rural peasant labor to the construction and operation of backyard furnaces for smelting iron. These small blast type furnaces did not produce usable iron, and their operation distracted China’s agricultural pool from growing and harvesting. Food exports were not a major factor in the famine.
Backyard furnaces were fueled with charcoal, resulting in massive deforestation which haunted China into the 1980’s. Additionally, valuable farm implements such as plows, hoes, and rakes were converted into worthless puddles of slag iron. Industrial tooling was also sacrificed to these furnaces.
Mao was directly, personally, responsible for the backyard furnace cult. He wanted to double China’s steel output, but wound up destroying a century’s worth of steel implements and tools for no gain whatsoever.
Least we forget that CCP literally wipe out sparrow because Mao deem them pests that eats crops as part of the Four Pest Campaign. This of course massively increase the population of locust . It’s Lysenkoism, CCP style.
@BigFire
You either don’t know what Lysenkoism is or have an unusually broad definition of it.
Lysenkoism is a version of Lamarck’s claim that children inherit traits that the parents gain during their lives. That is, if your father pumped iron, you’ll inherit more muscle than if he did not.
I don’t think it has quite entered the lexicon as meaning the subjugation of science to politics; it’s just a go-to example.
Back in the 60s, the John Birch Society used to refer to him as “Mousy Dung”.
Don’t forget the child molesting.