BOOK REVIEW: 'Mao: The Unknown Story'

The word politics is derived from 'poly' meaning many, and 'ticks' meaning small blood sucking objects.

Mao Tse Tung breaks that mould. Mao's blood lust was never small. If you're interested at all in the history of mass murder and in the politics of large world-destroying blood sucking bastards, then you have to read Jung Chang's and John Halliday's book 'Mao: The Unknown Story.' It will make you sick.

I've read several accounts before of Mao and his crimes, and I realised he was a complete bastard. 'Mao: The Unknown Story' reveals that he was without doubt history's biggest bastard -- a mass murder utterly without virtue or any redeeming personal qualities whatsoever. To read his story as Halliday and Chang lay it out certainly made me feel ill with revulsion.

Mao was perfectly prepared to try and wipe out his country's history and to destroy his country's culture, and perfectly happy to murder millions in the attempt. Sacrifice was endemic to him, combined with the relentless pursuit of power -- he sacrificed millions of Chinese in pursuit of power and the protection of his power -- sacrificing them sometimes as an afterthought, and sometimes to assuage his blood lust. He began the technique right from his earliest days, when he sacrificed whole armies and whole cities purely in order to position himself better in the struggle for control of the Chinese Communist Party. When his life and his career was finished, his country lay in ruins, seventy million people were dead, and those left alive were terrified, and they were starving.

The communist ideology provided the justification for the sacrifices Mao demanded; for Mao it meshed perfectly with his desire for power. The Chinese were disarmed by that ideology, and they died of it in their millions. Seventy million! Seventy million people who died of starvation, of torture, as the result of Mao's blatant power lust.

IT'S SOMETIMES THOUGHT THAT to master the profession of blood-sucking dictator, one needs to maintain a gimlet-eyed focus on reality. Mao puts paid to that idea. For him reality was something to evade, with the Chinese people paying the price for his evasion: his insistence in the pursuit of super power status for his feudally impoverished county, for example -- in utter disregard of what might be necessary to become one -- resulted only in further impoverishing China (and leaving it that way for decades) and starving more than forty million human beings -- starved for no other reason than Mao's refusal to accept that "super power status" or even any kind of prosperity was beyond a country in which freedom was so viciously expunged.

His grip on the country was complete, and remained so for a quarter-century by the simple expedient of terror within, and deception without. If he did have a talent, it was for understanding how terror could be used to pacify opposition, and how willingly western leaders would be to participate in his deception.

He really had no interest at all either in the ideology of communism or the welfare of anyone other than himself -- he never showed any interest in the peasants and "the people" in whose name the "People's Liberation Army" supposedly carried out their terror. He was interested in communism only because it gave him the perfect platform on which to seize and maintain power, and to partake of his favourite pleasure: sloth. His chosen ideology was and remains the perfect ideology for the professional thug: as long as the notion exists that individuals are sacrificial fodder for the collective, then there will always be thugs prepared to pick up that sacrifice -- the wider the acceptance of that evil notion, the power the thugs will have; and the less squeamish they are, the more heads they're be able to bust.

THIS BLOOD SUCKER WAS the perfect embodiment of evil --yet it's said that evil is impotent. How to reconcile that paradox when we see him all powerful for so long? Chang and Halliday make plain that Mao himself only survived through the complicity of others -- through good men either doing nothing, or lesser men allowing themselves to deliver a country into his evil.

Without a world full of useful idiots, Mao would have been just another lowlife power luster. Without power being handed to him on a plate by an utterly outwitted American post-war foreign policy team entirely unaware of the scum with whom they were dealing, maintained for him by a Soviet Union eager to expand their own dictatorial power, and paid for by a country which he quite literally cannibalised, he would have been nothing. Without others to deliver him what he could not, he had no power himself by which to carry out his destruction, and to protect his power. At manipulating these useful idiots he did prove himself a master. At using them to destroy a country simply to hang on to power, he proved himself history's finest.

IT'S SAID TOO THAT as long as statism exists, then war will exist. Mao's career offers further evidence. "Wars," said Ayn Rand, "are the second greatest evil that human societies can perpetrate. The first is dictatorship, the enslavement of their own citizens." This, she points out, is the real cause of wars.

If men want to oppose war, it is statism they must oppose. So long as they hold the tribal notion that the individual is sacrificial fodder for the collective, that some men have the right to rule others by force, and that some alleged "good" can justify it -- there can be no peace within a nation and no peace among nations.

Mao's career once again provides the evidence. He proved himself perfectly prepared to plunge the world into war simply to gain some (often illusory) political advantage for himself - threatening Taiwan and invading Korea and India simply in order to gain technology from Russia -- technology China was in no position to use. He sponsored conflicts in Indochina, for no reason other than to acquire further influence and more technology he couldn't use, that left millions dead across Vietnam and Laos and the killing fields of Cambodia , and scars that still exist to this day across every country involved.

And once the Russians finally rejected Mao as a lunatic, too dangerous even for them, in order to continue the technological parasitism his survival demanded he then proposed to that grinning moron Nixon (supposedly the then defender of the free world) that the free world join China in a nuclear umbrella against the Soviets -- a proposal that would have left the west at the mercy of whatever border conflict the lunatic Mao wanted to manufacture for his own ends -- a proposal only offered so Mao could steal the west's military technology -- a proposal all too eagerly lapped up by by the braindead Kissinger and Nixon. As Chang and Halliday show, these two had rings run around them by Mao and Chou En Lai. They went to China in pursuit of peace, and left with the danger increased.

The proposal that the west risk joining hands with Mao in a mutually assured nuclear holocaust was ended only by Nixon's Watergate resignation. Thank small mercies for Deep Throat!

IT'S WORTH REFLECTING AGAIN on Ayn Rand's point on peace -- a point that was never even contemplated by the grinning moron and his mate, and the many other morons whose willingness to grant evil bastards absolution allows their evil to flourish. The nuclear danger only makes the point all the more important.

If nuclear weapons are a dreadful threat and mankind cannot afford war any longer, then mankind cannot afford statism any longer. Let no man of good will take it upon his conscience to advocate the rule of force -- outside or inside his own country. Let all those who are actually concerned with peace -- those who do love man and do care about his survival -- realise that if war is ever to be outlawed, it is the use of force that has to be outlawed.

Is that lesson so difficult to understand*?

Mao's evil was allowed to flourish by morally disarmed morons who were either ideologically prepared not to understand, or pathologically unwilling to contemplate the point; prepared and able to deliver to Mao what he wanted, and to give him and his destruction either the ideological benefit of the doubt (he might be a murdering fucking bastard, but at least he's our murdering fucking bastard) or -- worse -- to worship at his shrine, as many braindead Maoist morons did and still do. His methods of ideological intrigue can still be seen at work around the world in all those Maoists who still infest the world's parliaments and political platforms with their poison.

It's time that Mao and Maoism and the murder and poverty brought about by communism and communists was treated with the same popular revulsion as the likes of the Nazis and the KKK. Don't give any of these bastards the benefit of any doubt.

This book helps to make clear they don't deserve it.
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*To make the lesson more topical for you: Let those in NZ who are actively concerned with peace reflect that Tame Iti received his own indoctrination in Maoism early on, including a visit to Peking in 1973, a year before Nixon and right at the start of his activist career. As all the evidence makes clear he is still following what he learned there.