Saturday, October 17, 2009

THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD, AKA CHAIRMAN MAO'S STIMULUS PACKAGE


CAPTION: "SMASH THE OLD WORLD-ESTABLISH A NEW WORLD"



What with White House Communications Director Anita Dunn communicating that she is a great admirer of the “philosopher” Mao “Moe” Zedong for his ability to “get ‘er done”, perhaps it’s time for another history lesson.

It’s rather unfortunate that these little history check-ups are necessary, but as the old saying goes, “Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.” Very few products spewed forth by our modern public education system have much knowledge of history, American or otherwise, other than perhaps knowing who the first lesbian to climb Denali was. That’s because, after 16 years of now Education Secretary Arne Duncan and his pals like Barack Obama and Bill Ayers “fixing” the Chicago school systems, the kids are still too busy dodging bullets and falling debris from crumbling school buildings to make it to class. The few American youth who have ever heard of Chairman Mao probably did so either from an old Beetles song, or from an NEA-approved teacher swooning over his brilliant "philosophy".

So let’s take a look back at Mao waxing philosophic. Mao Zedung was the first “Chairman” of the Communist Party in China, born in 1893 and died in 1976, and he single-handedly ruled the most populous country on earth with an iron fist for over 3 decades. Those thought to be even a potential threat to his power didn’t live long.

Of course Mao was converted to Marxism while studying in universities, a trend that continues to this day in American colleges. Taking all he had learned, Mao attempted a Communist uprising in 1927. When that failed, Mao retreated to the mountains, joined forces with other insurgents, and instituted guerrilla warfare.

In a dispute over command of the guerrilla army there, Mao began honing his “leadership” techniques. His opponents and the men loyal to them were tortured and murdered. The tortures included having red-hot steel rifle cleaning rods shoved up the victim’s anus. Estimates of Mao’s first “philosophical body count” range from “tens of thousands” to over 150,000.

Other notable events of the time included the Long March to save the remnants of the guerrilla Red Army from destruction and a little thing called World War II, which not many American students have heard of either. During the war, both the Chinese Nationalists and the Communists spent about as much time fighting each other as the Japanese, vying for control of post-war China.

In 1949 Mao and his forces won all the marbles and established the People’s Republic of China. The Chairman sent in and micro-managed the Red Army to fight against the United States and the United Nations in the Korean War in 1950. At home, his “philosophy” was to secure his own personal dictatorial power by murdering as many as 5 million political opponents (or suspected political opponents, or innocent people who could be used as an example) and sentencing another 1,500,000 or so to gulags or concentration camps cheerfully renamed “Reform Through Labor” camps. Rather like the Nazis’ Arbeit macht frei logo on the gates of their concentration camps…”Work makes you free”.

Mao then implemented numerous “reforms” (redistribution of wealth was first on the list) and a typical Commie “5-Year Plan” that resulted in a few million more dead Chinese people. In 1958, Moe decided to do ‘er up right and jumped into his second 5-Year Plan known as the New Deal. No, wait, my mistake, that was something else. It was known as the Great Leap Forward.

Mao announced, “I will invest in the core infrastructure -- roads, bridges, locks, dams, water systems and essential air service -- that rural communities need." Whoops. Messed up again. That was an Obama promise during the campaign.

Anyway, having killed off just about every professional or educated person in the country, Mao relied on idiot bureaucrats and party hacks with absolutely no knowledge of what they were doing to implement his Great Leap. Many of the roads, bridges, locks, dams and water systems turned out to be completely dysfunctional since they were designed by government flunkies rather than trained engineers. To produce huge quantities of steel and meet completely unrealistic government quotas to grow China’s industrial might, villagers melted all their pots and pans down in backyard kilns to produce useless lumps of crude pig iron. Burning wood in home-made furnaces was inefficient to begin with, the requirement denuded local forests, and valuable manpower was taken away from agriculture.

The wise Chairman had philosophized about that, too. A major part of the Leap was to greatly increase the food supply through more government “innovations”. Naturally, these innovations turned out to be wasteful, inefficient, idiotic government “improvements” that no farmer in his right mind ever would have attempted. Food production plunged, but local Party officials continued to turn in grossly inflated harvest “success” figures to appease the central government and make themselves look good.

All this led, in turn, to the Great Chinese Famine. Even where crops were successful, men to harvest them had been diverted to the other great infrastructure projects so that in some cases the desperately needed food rotted in the fields. To make things worse, another brilliant step of the Great Leap had been a huge nation-wide effort to kill off all the sparrows, so they wouldn’t eat grain seeds. Well, it turned out, with no birds to keep them in check, locust populations swelled to incredible proportions and they devoured every crop field in their path.

In the end, Mao’s brilliant philosophizing and the Great Leap Forward, aka the Red Chinese Stimulus Package, led to another 30,000,000 corpses. No one knows for sure how many people died thanks to Chairman Mao. A low end estimate is put at 35,000,000, not including the famines, to 70,000,000 dead with them included. Either way, the numbers make Hitler look like a piker.

So, we can see why Obama Administration officials admire the big Commie lug so much.

1 comment:

Ben said...

Ironic that the Chinese system is now becoming more capitalistic while ours is sliding toward communism.