We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
Samizdata quote of the day – the horror of Mao’s dictatorship edition “If I were prosecuting Mao, I’d further cover my bases by pointing out that he gave explicit orders to literally enslave hundreds of millions, then invoke the felony murder rule. However you slice it, Mao was a monster – and it’s high time for China to tear down his remaining posters and replace them with monuments to his victims.”
– Bryan Caplan, EconLog.
His article refers to a new study of the terrible famine, wrought by collectivisation of the Chinese economy. Communists tend to be very, very bad at farming. Property rights, incentives, etc – they just don’t get it.
Until such time as China takes a full, objective reckoning of the monster that Mao was, I don’t see much that is benign about that nation, even though this isn’t meant to be a sweeping statement about all Chinese people, of course.
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
This is all so amazingly reminiscent – to take just one example – of the forced collectivisation of Ukraine in the 1930’s, and the resulting disastrous outcomes.
It’s almost like the ideology itself has some basic flaw.
Ditto Colonel Mengistu’s Ethiopian famine.
Collectivisation of agriculture has been an utterly reliable gold medal winner for socialist economics in the Great Death Olympics, whenever it has been tried.
But the death is not a bug, it’s a feature. This is how to kill your enemies in staggering numbers.
Imagine if the energy now directed at opposing “deniers” were instead directed at condemning these monsters? Imagine if “condemning” were properly focused?
Overnight, monuments would be down and BBC/PBS documentaries would be streaming 24/7.
Err, am I missing something? The link to Bryan Caplan gives dates in Feb 2011, and the link to the book gives a publication datf of 2010. So not really a “new study” at all.
Not saying that your final paragraph is wrong, though.
Paul, Caplan reposted this on his Substack this week. So I thought it worth using too!
Why would the CCP want to get rid of Mao’s image? If anything it’s a constant reminder to the normal Chinese that if they get out of line they’re next and that the state won’t hesitate to just let the masses starve to death if Beijing deems it necessary so sit down and shut up.
But they don’t kill off farm output as a goal. It’s a side effect of their main goal – control. That they also wipe out lots of propertied (and thus empowered) individuals is just an additional benefit. Those farmers were never really good commies. So, it’s a win/win in communist eyes.
(Tim Worstall recently blurbed on the same impulses from Stalin here. I think it applies to the Chinese also.)
“Mao: The Unknown Story” by Jung Chang shows Mao as the Marxist monster he was – the murderer of tens of millions of people.
The historical works of Frank Dikotter such as “Mao’s Great Famine” and “The Tragedy of Liberation” confirm it.
And “Blacklisted by History” by the late M. Stanton Evens shows that Senator McCarthy and others in the 1940s and 1950s were telling the truth – traitors in the American government brought the Marxist regime of Mao to power, by deliberately undermining the Republic of China.
But then it was always known that Mao was a mass murdering monster – I remember, as a young boy, being disgusted with President Nixon and Prime Minister Heath for crawling to the mass murderer Mao.
If a young boy in Northamptonshire knew (and I did know) how could Nixon and Heath not know?
Of course, they DID know – they just did not care.
It is like the Western establishment today – who pretend that the 2020 American Presidential Election was not rigged, or pretend to not know that the Covid “vaccines” have killed many people – “I can state categorically to the House that the Covid vaccines are safe” – as a certain person said a few days ago.
They do know – they just do not care.
My father, Harry Marks, knew about the murder of millions in the Soviet Union in the 1930s – that is why he left the Communist Party, he had no special sources of information – it was not hard to find out.
The powerful people why claim that they “did not know” about the murder of millions in the Soviet Union or Red China are lying – they did know, they just did not care.
And they would the same to us – here in Western countries.
Not just the Marxists – but the Henri Saint-Simon style technocrats of such groups as the World Economic Forum and the World Health Organisation (with its Marxist doctor-of-philosophy head).
In “The New Atlantis” Francis Bacon (the patron of Thomas Hobbes and the enemy of Chief Justice Coke) laid out the blueprint for technocratic totalitarianism in the name of “the science” – and that was 400 years ago.
This war is not new.
“only 400 years? hold my beer” say the Chinese “Legalist” philosophers thousands of years ago – the people who advised the “first Emperor” to enslave the population to the unlimited government.
The enemies of the “Legalist” Chinese philosophers were the Taoist Chinese philosophers.
Just as in the West this war goes back thousands of years (Plato and his supporters – and their opponents) so the war in China goes back thousands of years.
This war is everywhere that humans live and is as old as humanity.
And it is not a “knowledge problem” – the evil know what they do and they know it is evil.
Evil, the pleasure of inflicting harm, is powerful and seductive – and exists in every human being.
Most certainly including me – very much so.
“Mao: The Unknown Story” by Jung Chang shows Mao as the Marxist monster he was – the murderer of tens of millions of people.
@Paul Marks, what makes me enraged is how few people in the West are taught about any of this. A massive loss of life, deliberately wrought, as a result of collectivism of the ugliest kind, and it’s down a fucking great memory hole.
The fundamental lesson that we seem determined not to learn or teach our children is not so much that Mao (and Stalin etc) were utterly ruthless and indifferent to human suffering, but rather, looking over history and much of the world today the unarguable reality is that life, deprived of agency and irretrievably bound to a vicious totalitarian nightmare, is actually the default position for most of humanity. The small sparks of enlightenment, personal freedom, governments and would be tyrants restrained by the rule of law, respect for property rights, freedom of speech and association and the right to self defense, all those things that are under constant attack today, these are the only tissues of protection between we fortunate few and the endless, untold misery of the rest.
Whether explicitly or intuitively, I believe that was what got my father’s generation (and his fathers) to put on a uniform, pick up a gun and sally forth in defense of these ideas.
I know my father went to his rest deeply disenchanted with what my (Boomer) generation had allowed to be done to those values. I hate to think what my grandfather would make of the world today.
Jonathan Pearce – agreed Sir.
And it is not taught because the “Progressives” intend to do it again – this time in the West.
Selective education is all the rage. Many Americans are shocked at how the British Navy has been instrumental in almost ending slavery in the modern world. And lots of Whites are shocked at how many non-White nations practiced it. I do wonder if African tribes know that their ancestors were slave-traders? That book, and film, ‘Ashanti’ was (is?), I believe, true.