There have been plenty of blood-thirsty tyrants in history. Some have been more successful than others, while some more murderous. But no one in history has been both as murderous and successful as Mao Tse Tung.
Every socialist professor brings up the atrocities committed by the Nazis. Every peace activist compares whoever they hate at the moment to Hitler. And while Hitler was truly a monster, the deaths at the hands of mid-19th Century Germany cannot compare to the 80 million-plus deaths caused by Chairman Mao.
Yet, we rarely hear of these. If we do hear about the horrible actions of Communist China, it usually involves Tibet or some other country they have overrun in the name of communism but most Americans are blissfully unaware of the atrocities within China.
It is political correctness that keeps the silence. To say a communist leader is the worst monster in history would go directly against the form of government these left wingers adore. Some part of them wishes that the US was communistic. And it is here in BAST where the silence will be broken and some of the most horrible atrocities ever committed in history will be revealed.
The West’s communist supporters of the Sixties lauded Mao and China, saying it was a great boon for workers’ and women’s rights. This mythology reached star struck leftists who wrote that Mao was the greatest Marxist in history. Useful Idiots like Edgar Snow wrote a work of fiction entitled “Red Star over China”. Originally printed in 1936, Snow wrote about the great “hardships” Mao went through to bring freedom his people.
Things have not changed much. Even today these same intellectual types, who must surely realize the errors of their ways, remain silent.
Stalin’s terrible deeds do not come close to Mao’s actions. Modern China is slowly disavowing their past history, as they have done a dozen times before. Young children are not taught of the great legacy and the past dissolves before the country’s eyes.
Chinese college students were told that Mao was “two-thirds good and one-third bad”. This is part of the revised version of Mao in the current Chinese government, when they actually did admit to some of the millions of atrocities committed in the name of Mao. Through mass murder, rape, torture and forced starvation, Mao created a society that bowed to his every personal whim, be it a string of young village girls, or the grease-laden foods he so loved.
Mao’s parents were prosperous peasants in the Hunan province of China. He was born on December 26, 1893. He did work in the fields a little when he was young, but he also received schooling, enough to begin his interest in learning. He never spent much time at manual labor.
China of the 1920s was a desperate place. Starvation was widespread, as was social unrest. Mao became involved in radical student groups and began putting together his revolutionary ideas in 1927.
In 1934, he was involved in guerrilla warfare against the government. The government closed in, but Mao and his forces escaped for their “Long March” to the Shensi province. Mao retold the story of how difficult the Long March was. Not only did he not suffer at all, he was carried the entire way on a litter, along with all his luggage, books and belongings. His carriers sweat blood as they felt his large girth upon their backs through endless mountains and forests.
After a brief recess for World War II, the Chinese civil war resumed and Mao proclaimed victory with the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949.
From the very beginning, Mao ruled with a cold, viscous hand. He held public executions and he ordered ears chopped off and ankle tendons slit. The watching of public executions was compulsory to put fear in the peasants’ hearts. Other devices were to bury people alive, lead them around by wires which were pierced through noses and ears. His soldiers also destroyed whole towns where they suspected counterrevolutionaries lived and held bandit raids to take food for themselves. They also forced members of families to testify against other family members, who were quickly led off and killed, or taken to work camps where they would die shortly afterwards.
1950 began the nationwide land reform, which only took three years to complete. Land reform removed the distinction between landowner and peasant. Land ownership was only allowed by the government. Under the new reforms, everything fit neatly into sayings. There was the Four Olds campaign to eradicate old ideas, habits, customs and culture. The Three Antis movement eliminated corruption, waste and bureaucratism. The Five Antis campaign was for elimination of bourgeoisie, bribery, tax fraud, cheating and stealing state property. These sounded good on the surface, but a little digging will reveal the truth.
What this was in reality was a purge of those who did not support the regime. This would happen every few years as the great plans failed, one after another, as all Mao’s monolithic ideas led to disaster. Those who did not support the new plans were taken to work camps where they lived for a few years while laboring, endlessly slaving until they could not move and quickly passed away. Or, they were tortured for hours upon end. Young peasant girls were raped and humiliated by the Chinese soldiers or used as play things by Chinese officials.
Along with these reforms, the Five Year Plan was revealed in 1953. It was meant to speed up the socialization of China in a planned economy by maximizing returned from agriculture through industrialization. 90 percent of the farmers took part by 1956. By this point, nearly all industry was owned by the government, so implementation went quickly.
Throughout all the reforms, Mao held no regard for the peasants. He could not care if they lived or died. They were the brute working force and that was all.
It was at this time as well, when Mao sent his starving troops into the Korean War. He encouraged Kim II Sung to invade South Korea, a step he deemed as necessary to build the greatest war machine in the world when eventually tied to the Soviet Union.
While the rest of the world feared the used of the atom bomb by one of the West’s enemies, Mao nearly looked forward to it. “The atom bomb is nothing to be afraid of,” Mao said to Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s prime minister. “China has many people. They cannot be bombed out of existence. If someone else can drop an atomic bomb, I can too. The deaths of ten or twenty million people is nothing to be afraid of.” Nehru was shocked.
The Hundred Flowers Movement was said to be an attempt to liberalize China in 1956. It came from the traditional Chinese saying: “Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend”. It was touted to allow people open criticism of the government. But, few saw behind the shroud to what it really was about. What it did was reveal who Mao saw as traitors of Communism.
And then on the heels of liberalization, came the Great Leap Forward. In 1958, it was formed to combat the backwardness of China’s economy, industry and technology. Communes were created, about 26,000 of them, each composed of 5,000 households.
In order to appear more successful than it was, numbers were enhanced, exaggerated showing incredible success and even the leaders had to admit they were not accurate. The steel produced was low quality and the goals fell way short of what was expected.
Resistance to the communes was strong, so the sizes were reduced.
The effects of the Great Leap Forward to the people were devastating. The combination of natural disasters and neglect of agriculture (because so many were working in the steel factories) led to three years of bad harvests and severe food shortages. Nothing that happened before could compare to this devastation. Not only did the program fail; it produced mass starvation which in a few extreme cases, lead to cannibalism. During this especially dark time, 30 million Chinese lost their lives.
In one particular act of sheer madness, Mao ordered all the sparrows in China killed because they ate the grain and we responsible for the starvations. Before long, Mao was asking Russia to send them sparrows. This was the greatest manmade famine, far outdoing Stalin’s collectivization of the Ukraine.
Mao told his staff “50 million might have to die…you can’t blame me when people die.”
But, because China wanted to win favor from other communist countries, they exported food, spending a fortune. Mao sent so much food to East German that those underneath him complained and asked what the Chinese peasants would eat. “Let them eat bark”, was Mao’s response.
Even through the losses suffered by the Great Society, China still had a lot of money. This was because much of the country’s wealth was acquired in the drug trade. The government itself farmed and smuggled opium. Farmers grew poppies, growing regular crops around them to hide them from suspecting eyes.
Mao felt his power slipping away and to stop any further erosion, he created The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. It was a radical step closing schools, slowing production and cutting off China from the outside world. On a mammoth scale, it altered the culture and the economics of communist China. It lasted for only two years, yet was not declared over until 1977.
The power struggle between Mao, his wife Jiang Qing and Lin Baio (second in command) was mostly the cause of the Cultural Revolution. Frustrated with her husband’s continued infidelities, Qing tried to undermine Mao at every turn while Baio wanted power of his own.
And Mao suffered from paranoia. He never stayed in one place for two long, preferring instead to take long train rides across China to the many compounds that awaited him. The trains would take hours and tied up regular traffic for days afterwards.
Throughout his entire time in power, Mao had countless numbers of young women. He suffered from venereal diseases regularly and was an abuser of barbiturates. He had terrible problems sleeping and felt that if one sleeping pill worked, five or 10 would work better. He never brushed his teeth and they remained yellow and rotting until the day he died.
In the spring of 1966, a time of unrest throughout the world, a group of Beijing high school girls protested against the college entrance examinations. The Central Committee gave in by promising to reform the system and postponed enrollment for six months. Freed from their studies, students demonstrated in Beijing in August. This started other demonstrations, mostly by young people who were inspired by Mao. They wore red arm bands and held copies of Mao’s “little red book” while marching through the streets. They were known as the Red Guards and continued to pour into Beijing throughout 1967.
Mao feared that Chinese society was too rigid and to prevent this, he invested in the military and the youth. Earlier that year, some of the highest leaders were dismissed. Revolutionary committees stormed through the country, taking power from local governments. Mayhem and mob control were the orders of the day. The Red Guards attacked anything remotely connected to the West, capitalism, intellectualism or the Soviet Union. Books were burned, gardens destroyed, churches, temples and mosques destroyed and thousands publicly humiliated; paraded through the streets wearing placards around their necks in humiliation.
Writers, musicians and poets were tortured and killed. Museums destroyed, ancient artifacts turned to dust by raging mobs. Mao forbid the reading of books and took many rare volumes himself. When unwitting Western visitors came to his palace, they complimented him on such a scholarly library. Had they only opened their eyes.
The Red Guards were so destructive and chaotic, that the universities did not open again until 1970. Mao was fascinated with the violent force he created.
The Cultural Revolution set China back more than could ever be imagined. It cost the education of nearly a whole generation of Chinese young people, plus the loss in industry and agriculture was massive. Shortly after this time, Mao quietly stepped down as Chairman, replaced by Zhou Enlai.
In 1976, Mao passed away. The Chinese government continued its onslaught (as it does to this day) on human rights. In 1989, the Tiannaman Square massacre killed thousands. And the atrocities covered here do not even bring up the violations caused in neighboring countries. I will talk about these in a future issue.
Throughout all the starvation and devastation, the Party leaders lived the lives of those who are the richest in the world. They had the best of everything, even though this went directly in the fact of their supposed ideology. They were idolized by the intellectual left of the West, the same type of people Mao put to death in China. And yet, even after he left the post of Chairman, he remained an important figurehead to the people of China for many years. Now, the Chinese are pulling away, trying to present themselves as the gentler, modernized China.
Mao Tse Tung will always serve as one of the most horrific mass murderers and one of the greatest Cult of Personalities in history.
- Martha Hughes
