The statement by Anita Dunn, Obama’s Communications Director, describing Mao Tse-tung (aka Mao Zedong) as one of her two favorite philosophers, is, of course, appalling. Sixty years ago China, which had been slowly progressing towards a free republic under Chaing Kai-shek, was placed into the hands of one the most ghastly thugs in history.
Chairman Mao seemed bereft of any human love at all. He boasted about how he would have tortured his own father for the revolution. Chairman Mao’s wives and children suffered terribly, even when Mao had the ability to relieve their suffering.
The mass murders committed by Mao Tse-tung surpassed any human in history. The Holocaust is estimated to have caused the murder of six million Jews and six million Christians. Estimates of Stalin’s victims hover around 20 million. Mao exterminated more than Hitler and Stalin combined. Professor Rummel, the world’s leading expert in such grisly studies, accepts the figure of around 38 million people killed by Mao. That is a number beyond our power to truly grasp.
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But the evil of Mao sinks lower. Stalin and Hitler secreted victims of the Gulag and the concentration camps. Specially trained and hardened operatives, men instructed and inured to inhumanity — the Nazi Gestapo, the Soviet Chekists, and others — did this dirtiest of dirty work. The camps were concealed, to a large extent, and victims were transported to them in cattle cars, away from the public eye. Mao compelled ordinary Chinese to become SS or MKVD operatives. Villagers were made to arrest the innocent, to denounce them in surreal accusations, to torture them in public, and to kill them or to maim them. Those who failed in their assigned roles as Soviet blue caps or Nazi camp guards were themselves, with their families, the next enemies of the state. Mao made the Chinese people as a whole descend to the special status of helpers in Hell.
Chairman Mao did not limit his aggression to the Chinese. The Kuomintang, or “Party of the People,” headed by Chiang Kai-shek, reached an accord with Tibet. When did the current war of genocide against Tibet, so despised by chic leftists, begin? It started in 1949, after Chiang and the remnants of his forces retreated to the island of Formosa (Taiwan), establishing the Republic of China there. Mao helped the worst regime on earth, the rulers of North Korea, gain and hold power. He battled with peaceful nations like India. Mao loved violence, torment, enslavement, and intimidation. Those were the food and drink of his life.
Did Mao bring China into the 21st Century? No serious student of history can believe that lie. The “Great Leap Forward,” in which Mao absurdly demanded that farmers set up countless backyard steel mills, was a colossal failure. China today is a growing economic power, but that has been in spite of Mao, not because of Mao.
The Chinese people are among the most diligent and intelligent in the world. The per capita income of Singapore, a predominantly Chinese island nation, is about $51,000 per year – a bit higher than America. The per capita income of Hong Kong, the old British colony now economically free but otherwise under the control of China, is about $48,000. The per capita income of Taiwan, the nation created by Chaing when he left the Chinese mainland in 1949, is about $30,000. What about Mao’s China, the product of his great revolution? China, today, has a per capita income of about $6,000 — five times lower than the “other” China on Taiwan, and much lower than other predominately Chinese nations which had been British colonies. The People’s Republic (as China is formally called) is the only Chinese nation with people substantially less productive than in other nations of the world.
The legacy of Mao is uniformly awful. The murder of tens of millions no more brought prosperity or progress to China than it did to Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia. Mao was even more a monster and even less a genuine human than either or those savage tyrants. He impoverished China rather than enriched it. He crushed democracy and freedom rather than nourished them. He failed in every way except in what mattered to him: Mao, today, is a respected memory in the land he tortured and plundered so long. In some ways, that is his worst crime of all.
Photo: AP Images
