Born in 1893, trained in the Marxist-Leninist tradition, Mao Zedong participated in the founding of the Chinese Communist Party until becoming in 1949, thanks to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China that he proclaimed in Tiananmen Square and which ended four millennia of imperial dynasties, in the guiding dictator: the “Great Helmsman”. Site from which he ordered – after his massive “long march” to northwest China – a series of murderous purges to guarantee the elimination of anyone who was a danger to his regime, from peasant landowners to nationalists sympathizing with the Kuomintang. by Chiang Kai-Shek.
The first, carried out between 1950 and 1953 shortly before starting its first five-year structural plan, reached a death toll close to one million people. The second, the “Sufán Movement” – carried out between 1955 and 1957 -, had the objective of continuing to “cleanse” the party and its administration of the “counterrevolutionary” elements, for which 18 million people were investigated, perishing according to data from Jean -Louis Margolin 770 thousand. And this was just the beginning: in the last 20 years it has been possible to confirm, reveal and denounce what remained a secret for decades: Mao Zedong has been the greatest genocidaire in human history, with his regime having reached necrofigures that range between 65 million, according to Margolin’s own calculations, and 70 million dead according to the diligent researchers Jung Chan and Jon Halliday, the authors of “The Unknown History”, twenty million of whom died from hunger and the rest from other types of horrors.
However, the bulk of the deaths occurred after 1958, when Mao proposed an “innovative” political program of social engineering called the “Great Leap Forward” (1958-1962), whose objective was to achieve agricultural collectivization and Chinese industrialization from the establishment of autonomous communes in which private property was abolished. Program that failed miserably, after having caused the largest famine and humanitarian catastrophe in history – as confirmed by Frank Dikötter in “Mao’s Great Famine” – derived from the confiscation of food to exchange it with the USSR. due to manufacturing materials and weapons, displacement to the countryside, forced labor, violence and starvation, causing between 20 and 45 million new deaths, in addition to the cruel massacre of a million and a half sparrows that he ordered within his “Four Plagues campaign.” (along with rats, flies and mosquitoes). A sparrow – he said – ate 4 and a half kilos of grains annually. Killing him would save the grain of 60 thousand people: they were therefore “enemies of the revolution, they eat our crops, kill them.”
Yes, in the words of Alexander Pantsov: the “greatest economic failure in the history of the world, the greatest famine on record”, and which was followed by a new failed initiative with tragic social and economic consequences: the “Cultural Revolution” ( 1966-1976), which declared the eradication of the “four olds”: thought, education, custom and culture, as well as the elimination of all academics, intellectuals and “revisionists” who questioned Maoist initiatives. “For the birth of a civil war throughout the country!” was his slogan. As a result, more than two tens of millions were persecuted and sent to “re-education” camps where they were tortured, stoned, drowned, beheaded, buried alive, lynched, exploded with dynamite and, in many cases, cannibalized by the “faithful.” followers” of “Comrade Mao”.
The main foundation of Maoist ideologization was the “Red Book”, by which society was indoctrinated from early childhood, ensuring that children, when they became young people, became “Red Guards”: strict watchers of the actions of their peers. those they accused in case of detecting any “infidelity” or “betrayal” to the Great Helmsman. And for Mao there was a priority objective: to disappear from the face of the Earth any threat that could exist against his communist regime, for which he not only used the Red Army, his greatest force was the peasants, students and workers. who obeyed his implacable and atrocious will.
Who was Mao? A subject with little charisma and poor oratory power, an obsessive against the “enemies of his revolution”, a refractory to Western culture that banned classical music and chess, but above all a being characterized by envy, selfishness, paranoia and vileness, ruthless and bloodthirsty, with great power of social manipulation that capitalized on every situation for its benefit. Yes, a narcissistic psychopath who said he “loved his people” and wanted to take them “forward”, but who in fact did not hesitate, like Stalin, to destroy and massacre them, enjoying the agonies and executions of anyone who did not profess to him. their blind and fanatical adherence. (To be continue)
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