SallyRand

"Retard", eh?

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/09/op...rsky_ed3_.html

"A bleak anniversary : Mao the mass murderer
Jonathan Mirsky
Published January 9, 2004

LONDON? While China celebrates the 110th anniversary of Mao Zedong's birth, six well-known Chinese intellectuals have called for his body to be removed from the mausoleum that dominates Tiananmen Square.

For Yu Jie and Liu Xiaobo, who live in Beijing ? the other four live in American exile ? this must be one of the bravest statements since the Communist Party seized power in 1949. In the most recent issue of the Hong Kong magazine Kaifang, or Open, they urge that sending Mao's body back to his home village in Hunan province "would elevate the status of Beijing into that of a civilized capital, and make it fit to stage a 'civilized Olympics' in 2008. We certainly do not want to see the farce of the Olympic flag flying over a city in which a corpse is worshipped."

But China's leadership has yet to come to terms with what Mao did to the country. In 1981, in a judgment overseen by Deng Xiaoping, the Communist Party admitted that Mao bore the chief responsibility for China's greatest modern catastrophe, the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976, but emphasized that his "mistakes" were those of "a great revolutionary" whose contributions were far greater than his errors.

This explains why a huge portrait of Mao continues to hang over the Tiananmen walls and why, in late December, an avalanche of praise for Mao filled the Chinese media. The China Daily, an official English-language newspaper, asserted that Mao's military, philosophical and literary teachings still influence China, while according to the party's People's Daily, "His outstanding achievements, glorious ideas and great charisma influence generation after generation, far beyond his own day."

It is impossible to imagine official homage in Germany for Hitler or in Russia for Stalin. And yet Mao was a destroyer of the same class as Hitler and Stalin. He exhibited his taste for killing from the early 1930's, when, historians now estimate, he had thousands of his political adversaries slaughtered. Ten years later, still before the Communist victory, more were executed at his guerrilla headquarters at Yan'an.

Hundreds of thousands of landlords were exterminated in the early 1950's. From 1959 to 1961 probably 30 million people died of hunger ? the party admits 16 million ? when Mao's economic fantasies were causing peasants to starve and he purged those who warned him of the scale of the disaster.

Many more perished during the Cultural Revolution, when Mao established a special unit, supervised by Prime Minister Zhou Enlai, to report to him in detail the sufferings of hundreds of imprisoned leaders who had incurred the chairman's displeasure.

One of the chairman's secretaries, Li Rui, wrote recently, "Mao was a person who did not fear death, and he did not care how many were killed." The writers of the Kaifang article tell us what this meant for China: "Mao instilled in people's minds a philosophy of cruel struggle and revolutionary superstition. Hatred took the place of love and tolerance; the barbarism of 'It is right to rebel!' became the substitute for rationality and love of peace. It elevated and sanctified the view that relations between human beings are best characterized as those between wolves."

It is common in academic circles, not only in China but in the West, to consider Mao as a thinker, guerrilla leader, poet, calligrapher and literary theorist. Mao specialists tend to divide his career into two periods: before 1957, when Mao "the visionary" fought his way with tenacity and brilliance to party leadership and set about transforming China from a fragmented, backward society into a unified nation; and after 1957, in which Mao became power-crazed and dragged China into violence and economic stagnation.

The signatories of the Kaifang broadside, however, see Mao whole: "Under Mao, the ideological obsession with 'attacking feudalism, capitalism and revisionism' severed links with traditional Chinese culture, with modern Chinese culture and with Western civilization, deliberately placing the country beyond the mainstream of human civilization."

This seems reasonable. Yet few of Mao's closest comrades, or their successors today, ever admitted publicly, even after his death, that from his earliest years of authority whatever Mao proposed, encouraged or commanded was underpinned by the threat of death. This was also the secret of Stalin's power, and of Hitler's. The Kaifang writers note that "Mao Zedong's writings poisoned the soul and the language of the Chinese race; and his violent, hate-filled, loutish language remains a problem to this day."

In 1973 Mao suggested, apropos of Hitler, that the more people a leader kills, the more people will desire to make revolution. Mao would have approved the killing of unarmed protesters in spring 1989 not only in Tiananmen but in dozens of cities throughout China, and would have hailed the party's "hate-filled" insistence to this day that the 1989 demonstrators were criminals who deserved what they got.

At a recent American seminar on Mao a professor from Beijing who specializes in Mao studies asked me if I was suggesting that the millions of Chinese who admire and love Mao are revering a mass killer. I replied that such veneration was China's tragedy."

http://www.heritage.org/research/com...is-mass-murder

"The Legacy of Mao Zedong is Mass Murder
By Lee Edwards, Ph.D.
February 2, 2010

Can you name the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century? No, it wasn?t Hitler or Stalin. It was Mao Zedong.

According to the authoritative ?Black Book of Communism,? an estimated 65 million Chinese died as a result of Mao?s repeated, merciless attempts to create a new ?socialist? China. Anyone who got in his way was done away with -- by execution, imprisonment or forced famine.

For Mao, the No. 1 enemy was the intellectual. The so-called Great Helmsman reveled in his blood-letting, boasting, ?What?s so unusual about Emperor Shih Huang of the China Dynasty? He had buried alive 460 scholars only, but we have buried alive 46,000 scholars.? Mao was referring to a major ?accomplishment? of the Great Cultural Revolution, which from 1966-1976 transformed China into a great House of Fear.

The most inhumane example of Mao?s contempt for human life came when he ordered the collectivization of China?s agriculture under the ironic slogan, the ?Great Leap Forward.? A deadly combination of lies about grain production, disastrous farming methods (profitable tea plantations, for example, were turned into rice fields), and misdistribution of food produced the worse famine in human history.

Deaths from hunger reached more than 50 percent in some Chinese villages. The total number of dead from 1959 to 1961 was between 30 million and 40 million; the population of California.

Only five years later, when he sensed that revolutionary fervor in China was waning, Mao proclaimed the Cultural Revolution. Gangs of Red Guards -- young men and women between 14 and 21 -- roamed the cities targeting revisionists and other enemies of the state, especially teachers.

Professors were dressed in grotesque clothes and dunce caps, their faces smeared with ink. They were then forced to get down on all fours and bark like dogs. Some were beaten to death, some even eaten -- all for the promulgation of Maoism. A reluctant Mao finally called in the Red Army to put down the marauding Red Guards when they began attacking Communist Party members, but not before 1 million Chinese died.

All the while, Mao kept expanding the laogai, a system of 1,000 forced labor camps throughout China. Harry Wu, who spent 19 years in labor camps, has estimated that from the 1950s through the 1980s, 50 million Chinese passed through the Chinese version of the Soviet gulag. Twenty million died as a result of the primitive living conditions and 14-hour work days.

Such calculated cruelty exemplified his Al Capone philosophy: ?Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.?

And yet Mao Zedong remains the most honored figure in the Chinese Communist Party. At one end of historic Tiananmen Square is Mao?s mausoleum, visited daily by large, respectful crowds. At the other end of the square is a giant portrait of Mao above the entrance to the Forbidden City, the favorite site of visitors, Chinese and foreign.

In the spirit of Mao, China?s present rulers continue to oppress intellectuals and other dissidents such as human-rights activist Liu Xiaobo. He was sentenced last month to 11 years in prison for ?inciting subversion of state power.? His offense: signing Charter 08, which calls on the government to respect basic civil and human rights within a democratic framework. .

China presents itself as a vast market for U.S. companies and investors. But some U.S. companies are taking a second look at doing business in a country which considers Mao Zedong its patron saint. Google has said it is reconsidering its operations in China after discovering a sophisticated cyber attack on its e-mail which the government must have initiated or approved.

Google has revealed what many in the Internet world have known for some time -- China routinely hacks into U.S. and Western Web sites for national security and other valuable information. Mao would have enthusiastically applauded this intellectual rape.

I wonder: would President Obama be so ready to kowtow to China if in the middle of Beijing there was a mausoleum of Hitler and, hanging from the gate to the Forbidden City, a giant swastika?"

You may now go fuck yourself and no one cares what the fuck you think.