A Holiday Message from the Chairman

"We are prepared to sacrifice 300 million Chinese for the victory of the world revolution. Don't make a fuss about a world war. At most people die...Half the population wiped out--this happened quite a few times in Chinese history."

- Mao: The Unknown Story, p. 439.

These are the words of Mao Tse-Tung, chairman and dictator of the People's Republic of China from 1949 to 1976. This frightening statement was made during his announcement of the infamous "Great Leap Forward" to the Communist Party congress in 1958 . What followed was the worst famine in human history which left 38 million Chinese dead.

As Mao puts it here, he was willing to offer the lives of 300 million of his own people--nearly half the population at that time--for the sake of global, military domination. China lacked the finances and technology needed to develop nuclear weapons, so Mao had to forcibly take and sell vast amounts of the peasantry's food to Soviet Russia to pay for his bomb. And so it was, for three years that Mao through tyranny and coercion starved his own people to fuel a superpower dream. His dream fizzled quickly, leaving China and Russia at odds and his country a wasteland, from which it has yet to completely recover.

The Great Leap is the crowning atrocity of Mao's rule, with as many mistakes, massacres, murders, deception and terror to fill a 800-page biography that nearly killed me to read. Mao has a very impressive resume of awfulness. Here are a few things from his 27-year reign: He aimed to win a civil war against the Nationalists over fighting the nemesis Japan in WWII, leaving his people open to Japanese occupation and brutality; he terrorized his own people into becoming unquestioning, murderous zealots during the foundation of his cult personality; and then there was the Cultural Revolution, where Mao laid waste to hundreds of thousands of cultural treasures like temples and art across the country--beautiful history lost forever.

It's almost unbelievable that such a man could walk this earth, yet what is astonishing to me is that hardly anyone, probably not you, and definitely not Chinese today, think this man was bad at all. I wasn't aware myself until I went to Beijing in 2007 and saw a twenty foot tall picture of the guy's ugly mug. I mean, it's amazing that the worst dictator in history, far worse than Hitler or Stalin and possibly the chairman of KISQ, the worst man simply ever is someone few people properly hate.

I say "few" because in China, Mao is revered, revered I tell you. He is on every banknote and in most cities there's a statue of him, holding out his hand, blessing the people. In Beijing there's his mausoleum (I thought mao-soleum just now and laughed) where you can join hordes of people that silently walk past his corpse encased in formaldehyde. I went there and it was creepier than you can imagine. And then there's of course the people, as in the vacuous "People's" Republic of China, who have repeatedly told me they think of Mao as the perfect person but can't explain why. The government is mostly to blame, which bans anything that criticizes Mao or communism; I'm sure my book is at the top of the list.

To me, the tragedy isn't that 70 million people, mostly destitute and innocent, were killed as a result of one man's pursuit of global conquest. That's certainly horrible, though. Think of the Holocaust times twelve and the atomic bombs dropped on Japan times a lot more than that. The tragedy, then, is that the world, particularly the survivors who were terrorized for decades, will never be recognized. And this generation and ones to come, both in China and around the world will never see Mao for what he is, and that's evil incarnate.

During the propagation of Mao's cult personality, Mao authored a little red book with short quotations about Chinese history and politics and whatever. It's inane garbage, but one quotation suits him well. It reads "every fart has some kind of smell, and we cannot say that all farts smell sweet."

It just goes to show that deception and tyranny have their weight, but eloquence is the true criterion for dictating mass murder.

Or something.


-K