Mao Was Bad

Every now and then, either on the internet or on the side of some concrete on the way home from the airport (if you live in Austin, you might know this concrete, since there are only really two ways home from the airport for something like 95% of us, which always cracks me up given this is the eleventh-most populous city in the country), I see a reference to “Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.” It always rattles me.

Marx, to my knowledge, didn’t kill anybody. You could make a case that he killed millions down the line with his ideas, but that’d open you up to the debate over whether the ideas were the problem or whether those just happened to be the ideas aspiring dictators used to justify their mass killings. Were the killings bound to happen, and was Marx innocently swept up as the rationale? Is that kid from college who used to love Ayn Rand and then got really into his faith and then got really into far-right media and broadcast the whole experience with seamless transition on his Facebook wall a product of those ideas, or was he going to be anger-posting absolutism regardless of the ideology of the month? Lenin, though, killed a lot of people. Sometimes I forget how many people Lenin killed, because Stalin killed so many more, but Lenin’s regime was responsible for thousands of killings, if not tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands. And Mao…whoa. Mao.

The thing about all the people Mao killed is that not all of the killings were motivated by alleged political dissidence. Sure, millions of them were. Millions of the deaths were carried out violently, under Mao’s orders or with Mao’s encouragement. But millions upon millions more only happened because Mao’s regime made some really dumb mistakes. In the Great Chinese Famine alone, well over ten million people, possibly more than fifty million people, starved to death for reasons even the CCP ascribed in part to policy. That’d be like Greg Abbott saying, “I’ve got a great idea,” and within four years that great idea killing somewhere between a third of Texas’s population and the entire population of Texas, plus Florida, plus maybe Alabama or South Carolina, and then—the wildest part—the Texas GOP saying, “That’s on us.”

I guess the point here is I get why some people think highly of Marx’s ideas. I get, at some level, why certain folks still cling to Lenin, and I suppose I can see the logical leap some might take to justify his killings as war killings (I don’t join that leap—I’m not a fan of secret police, personally). But Mao…I just don’t get it. Not only did he brutally murder a ton of people, but he also killed a bunch through stupid policy. The guy, by most accounts, killed more people than any other human being in history, and he did it by means of both cruelty and bad decisions. It’s supposedly his thoughts that these people like, but they’re then trusting the mind of a guy who said, “I can get everyone enough to eat,” and then left nearly a tenth of his country to starve? If a guy says he’s going to get lunch for the table and then a person at the table dies, I’m not trusting that guy to optimize political systems.

There’s probably a lesson in all this. There’s probably something to take away. And what is that? Basically, you can be the deadliest idiot in the world as long as 1) your political movement eventually liberalizes just enough for the standard of living in your country to rise and 2) Andy Warhol paints your portrait. You hit that first one and folks will go to great lengths to write off the tens of millions you killed. You hit that second one and you’ll be all over dorm room walls. You hit both, you get a whole political ideology (well, a third of a political ideology) named after you and spraypainted on the side of an underpass I, an independent contractor getting paid four times your country’s average hourly wage to drive private citizens to and from the airport, see out my window.