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.