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Mao Zedong was a poopy head

mao

Looks like the Chinese are getting stroppy again about people mocking Mao. I think that’s our cue to mock Mao, don’t you?

We know tens of millions died in Mao’s famines. Have you ever wondered if it was the passive incompetence of Communism, or whether he was an actively genocidal nutball? To examine the question, I mucho recommendo the book Hungry Ghosts. My copy is in a box somewhere, so I’ll pull this together from memory as best I can. And I’ll try to be brief.

Mao adored science. He was sure science would lift China to world dominance. Unfortunately, he had NO fucking idea what science was. He’d imprisoned most of the real scientists, anyhow, so he just took his best guess:

Communism + enthusiasm = science!

Mao believed nature actually worked on communist principles; that rice plants should be grown as close together as possible, since plants would cooperate, not compete. The propaganda rags of the day claimed elementary schoolchildren were making dramatic genetic breakthroughs in their school gardens during recess; that crops grown with communist methods were so thick, kids were photographed walking across the tops of the wheat stalks (it later came out they were standing on a bench); that it was unnecessary to build new roads when everyone in China would soon have his own personal airplane. Students declared the decimal point bourgeois and demanded the right to place it anywhere they liked. Oh, it was going to be Emerald City, man.

In short, the whole country went bugfuck crazy under Mao’s direction.

But, you know, when your boss is a nutcase who gets annoying people killed, you do your best not to be an annoying person. Provincial governors began to vie with each other who could promise the most balls-out insane wheat production numbers. Using Mao’s methods, you can produce twice as much wheat? Well, we can produce ten times as much! Oh, Yeah? Well, we can produce thirty times what we did last year! And so on. Anyone who didn’t play the game was out.

Beating the West at wheat growing (not really China’s crop) and steel production were Mao’s two biggest obsessions. But “steel production” isn’t what you think: you know, digging up iron ore and smelting it and shit. Oh, no. Peasants were made to build these makeshift furnaces in each village in which they melted down their own tools and utensils and hinges into useless lumps of mongrel metal. I am so not shitting you. AND, when they ran out of firewood, they burned their own furniture and doors to keep the fires going. AND, their best and strongest workers were drafted to run the furnaces (the ones that weren’t already working on wild-ass crazy projects like building earthen dams that would crumble to bits in no time) so that the fields were neglected.

And then, quite coincidentally, China had a bad growing season. Periodic regional famine is historically common in China, but this one — few tools, few workers, desperately wrong-headed stupid farming methods — was set to be a hum-dinger.

But when harvest time came around, Mao gathered his deputies and said, “okay — pony up!” (I paraphrase). And they’re like, “what?” And he goes, “you guys promised me a hundred times the grain we produced last year, so let’s have it!” And they said, “oh! Um. Sure, boss.”

But of course, they couldn’t scrape together half what they’d produced the year before, let alone a hundred times. So they came back to Mao with the only possible explanation: those bastard peasants are hiding it from us!

And, of course, the poor bastards were hiding some. The soldiers had come around again and again rounding up what little food they had, so of course they hid what they could or starved outright. If the peasants were caught hoarding food, they were taken to camps, or beaten to death on the spot. If they didn’t hoard food, they starved or ate dirt and died of stomach cramps. Ttwenty or thirty or even fifty million of them. All the while Mao was giving away food to friendly communist countries and letting much of the rest rot in warehouses. Because they had a hundred times the grain they needed, don’tcha know.

So! Was Mao a drooling bumpkin retard or a homicidal nutcake psycho? Do you know, I still have no idea.

Comments


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: April 17, 2009, 8:07 pm

One thing makes me lean toward the “evil” explanation and away from the “stupid”: communists (and socialists) fucking *hate* farmers. They aren’t for the little guy, they’re for urban factory workers. Because urban factory workers are desperately dependent on others: for their wages, for food distribution, for transportation. It’s easy to make factory workers look to government (or unions, or whatever) for survival.

Farmers? Not so much. Farmers are capable of being entirely self-sufficient and telling outsiders to go fuck themselves.

Look at what Russia did to the kulaks.

So, even though Mao was of middle-class farming stock, it is not inconceivable that he wanted to wipe out a few dozen million peasants.


Comment from dfbaskwill
Time: April 17, 2009, 9:03 pm

Chairman Mao’s favorite food is also mine. Kung Po chicken is the world’s best meal. When I finally had it in China, it was a dream come true! I paid 50 per cent of my student loans for kung po from Philly’s Chinatown. They still know me 25 years later. Coincidentally, I will be there Saturday night, extra spicy for me.


Comment from RedHatRob
Time: April 17, 2009, 9:11 pm

Paul Johnson has a chapter on the idiocy of the Great Leap Forward in his tour-de-force Modern Times.

It’s titled, Experimenting with Half Mankind.

Mao was evil.

See also Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine

Took the idiots in the west (not all of them useful) 40+ years to piece together what happened. Hint: It was worse than anybody has heretofore imagined.


Comment from Scubafreak
Time: April 17, 2009, 9:14 pm

Oh, come on! What ISN’T to mock about China’s #1 kiddie fiddler?

Muhhammed wasn’t the only person who had a thing for 8 year old girls……


Comment from Scubafreak
Time: April 17, 2009, 9:25 pm

I DO have to admint, however, that Mao was usefull to us once Nixon presented him with the data on the K129. That little bit of hidden history caused more changes in U.S.-China and U.S.-Russia relations than anything else in history….


Comment from armybrat
Time: April 17, 2009, 9:32 pm

Pleeeeeeeeaaaassseeeee! The crazy fucker’s love of straitjacket gray garments without any hint of tailoring let you know that he’s just bugfuck crazy. Everybody knows that black with princess seams is what the discerning communist is wearing this season. And never white before memorial day.


Comment from Dave in Texas
Time: April 17, 2009, 9:46 pm

Mao fucking hated Stalin (and vice versa). His first visit to Moscow, after asking twice before and Joe sayin no, he was treated like an assistant undersecretary of doo doo. He convinced his generals prior to attacking the US in Korea that the Sovs would provide air cover, but Stalin dragged his feet, playing the two powers off of each other until the US finally managed to turn them back.

Giving Mao advice was like asking for a bullet in the brain. Not a good idea.


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Time: April 17, 2009, 11:14 pm

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Comment from porknbean
Time: April 18, 2009, 1:26 am

*thinking of the bug fucks in congress and their hater in chief*


Comment from porknbean
Time: April 18, 2009, 1:28 am

What is a good book on Stalin?


Comment from Rich Rostrom
Time: April 18, 2009, 1:52 am

“Was Mao a drooling bumpkin retard or a homicidal nutcake psycho?”

No. He was a clever-dick intellectual who was extremely full of himself. Marxism was the perfect ideology for such ginks. It justified them seizing absolute power, after which no one could ever tell them when they’re wrong. It also encouraged them them to think up wild & crazy schemes to impose on the country.


Comment from blake
Time: April 18, 2009, 1:55 am

The numbers that Mao killed (directly and in-) seem to constantly go up. Last numbers I’ve seen top 100M. I wonder if we’ll ever know.


Comment from Dawn
Time: April 18, 2009, 5:06 am

I have a dear friend who escaped from China forty years ago. His mother smuggled him to Hong Kong. The family was persecuted for being Christian. They are the most humble people I know.
His mom lost her leg during a Japanese bombing.


Comment from Uncle Badger
Time: April 18, 2009, 7:03 am

And the media still use ‘Right wing’ as the ultimate insult.


Comment from Scott Jacobs
Time: April 18, 2009, 12:36 pm

Was Mao a drooling bumpkin retard or a homicidal nutcake psycho?

Hold on now! You’re being ever so limiting…

He could easily have been both!


Comment from Gibby Haynes
Time: April 18, 2009, 2:35 pm

Socialism is like x-rays: Okay in small quantities for short periods of time, but anything more than that and you risk injury, suffering and death.


Comment from Enas Yorl
Time: April 18, 2009, 4:12 pm

I too vote for psychoretard option. I don’t claim to be a scholar on the subject of Chinese history but I recall that more than a few Chinese emperors seem to fit this general profile as well. I dunno, but maybe the Chinese were used to this kind of nonsense.

Somewhat on topic – it looks like Jackie Chan is evolving the opinion that the Chinese people need to be kept on a real short leash. Weird eh?


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: April 18, 2009, 7:50 pm

Oh, dear. Someone just found sweasel.com using the Google search “how can I watch porn without my parents knowing.”

Sorry, sonny. Can’t help you there, young man.


Comment from MCPO Airdale
Time: April 18, 2009, 8:30 pm

The Chinese scare me much more than the Soviets ever did. Their government is patient and bent on economic and military superiority.


Comment from jc
Time: April 18, 2009, 9:33 pm

Rich, wadda you mean “was”?


Comment from jw
Time: April 19, 2009, 11:13 am

Gibby Haynes? May I respectfully disagree with you? A little socialism leads to more socialism, and more socialism leads to MORE socialism. Incrementalism my friend. Witness the Social Security ponzi scheme, wellfare, and all of the other social services in the U.S. Charity and helping others with a hand up is one thing, demanding it without your consent is quite another.


Comment from Gibby Haynes
Time: April 19, 2009, 2:12 pm

Yeah jw, I suppose it’s a slippery slope. One minute you’re thinking about nationalising the health system, the next you’re industrially murdering an ethnic group.

What was the weather like darn sarf today B and Weas? Up here it was mild, sunny, cloudless and quite frankly beautiful. Great for gardening.


Comment from Uncle Badger
Time: April 19, 2009, 3:41 pm

It started cloudy but by lunchtime the sun came out… and so did the mustelids.

Trouble is, it’s gaining on us. The more time I put in our there, the more I see that needs doing. Trays and tray and trays of seedlings that all need pricking out.

And you can stop that laughing at the back!


Comment from porknbean
Time: April 19, 2009, 7:22 pm

And the media still use ‘Right wing’ as the ultimate insult.

Funny that. All of the ‘isms’ are on the left.


Comment from Mrs. Peel
Time: April 19, 2009, 11:45 pm

Looks like pnb had a beanectomy…there’s only one left. 😉

I have a feeling that Uncle B would weep at the sight of my flowerbeds, which are mostly full of weeds. It’s on the to-do list, I swear!


Comment from Gibby Haynes
Time: April 20, 2009, 1:02 pm

Beanectomy eh? They do that a lot in Africa, don’t they? Savages.

Hey Weas or B, do you have a link to where you got your compost bin? I think my wooden-frame-and-chicken-wire one that I built myself is fundamentally flawed or something. It’s been over 9 months and some of the clippings are still green. I’m nearly desperate enough to have a big splash on it like Julia suggested.


Comment from porknbean
Time: April 20, 2009, 1:24 pm

Looks like pnb had a beanectomy…there’s only one left.

There can only be one.


Comment from Allen
Time: April 20, 2009, 3:11 pm

I immediately thought of this guy

I thought the “barefoot doctors” leap forward was pretty stunning.

“Are you a doctor?”

“You are now a peasent, that peasent is now a doctor.”


Comment from Uncle Badger
Time: April 20, 2009, 4:45 pm

Gibby, we got ours via the local council’s cheapie offer scheme. If you buy one of these damned Johanna things from the usual sources they are over £100 and they are absolutely not worth it. From the council, ours was about £20!

Most councils seem to do special deals as a part of the ‘cut down your refuse’ scam. Honestly, I’d take advantage of one if your local council does it – they work out a heck of a lot cheaper and the one we have really is No Big Deal. I’d have been just as happy with most of the other brands I’ve seen.

Having used them before, the one thing I would say is make sure you get one with a door. My first one didn’t have and getting the compost out was murder.


Comment from uighjg
Time: January 13, 2015, 7:11 am

Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-Tung) is a cryptoJew.

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