Today’s modern left would be a source of pride for the Chairman. Though there’s much barking about Putin’s Russia these days, it seems unlikely that the erstwhile communist USSR was ever the author of the new totalitarian leftists in America.
Mao Zedong, or Chairman Mao, was in many ways, the author of what has become modern day China. With the establishment of the Peoples Republic of China in 1949, the communist nation was formed under his authoritarian command.
Mao was for all intents and purposes, a Marxist. His ideas were not of the individual but of the collective. As the young communist nation struggled to establish itself, Mao could not leave it to grow organically. Mao determined that radical programs must be implemented to flip the nation from agrarian to industrial. The ‘Great Leap Forward’ and the ‘Cultural Revolution’ are such radical programs.
As the embodiment of freshman level Marxism, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez reflects the ignorance of the new young elite. The self-same AOC of the Green New Dumb…sorry, I meant to say, the Green New Deal (GND). Her, with an educational diet of leftism and economic theory baked up in the teachers lounge. Theories that have little to do with reality.
Don’t let the Bronx bartender schtick fool you, her degree from Boston U. cost $300k. Despite this elite education, it seems that Ms. AOC didn’t learn that, you know, things cost stuff. That is to say, money. Things cost money.
Starting in 1958, Mao’s Great Leap Forward was his attempt to industrialize, in five years, the newly formed communist nation. This was back in the 50’s when becoming a communist was all the rage. In part, Mao’s Communist Party of China (CPC) yanked citizens from the largely agrarian nation and forced labor on projects like infrastructure. Along the way, eliminating certain types of farming that the Party deemed unacceptable.
When AOC’s GND hit the streets, much was made of the cow farts. It’s funny but its lack of seriousness is a harbinger of things to come. Within the GND, there is but a few lines dedicated to agriculture and ostensibly lip service to farmers on what is ‘technologically’ feasible for ‘sustainable farming’ and so on. Meaningless word salad, really.
The issue here isn’t really the farmer. It isn’t even the lip service given to farming. It’s the spectacular lack of vision on the part of Ocasio-Cortez. Tersely tweeted by Patrick Moore, Greenpeace founder, “@AOC Pompous little twit. You don’t have a plan to grow food for 8 billion people without fossil fuels, or get food into the cities. Horses? If fossil fuels were banned every tree in the world would be cut down for fuel for cooking and heating. You would bring about mass death.”
That’s gonna leave a mark.
Though AOC seems to believe that food appears in grocery stores on the backs of unicorns, the rest of the world understands that 18-wheelers on the highway are hauling something.
The GND’s proposed industrial changes to infrastructure and transportation preclude the delivery of all that ‘sustainable’ farming stuff. Even according to the left leaning National Farmers Union, “The Green New Deal is a bold proposal to transform our society, but as it stands, the resolution appeals to an urban voter base and does not recognize the essential contribution of rural America…”
When Chairman Mao used this self-same infrastructure logic, with an urban focus, the result was the Great Leap’s producing 30 to 50 million deaths. Largely due to starvation. Not to make light of death by mass starvation, but given the possible negative global impact of the Green New Deal, Ocasio-Cortez just told Chairman Mao, ‘hold my beer’.
At some point, Mao wasn’t all that jazzed with the results of his Great Leap Forward. Whether or not he was a great tactician, Mao figured a sort-of cultural change was necessary. He launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) in 1966. Otherwise commonly known as the ‘Cultural Revolution’.
Mao thought his party’s leaders were getting a wee bourgeois. To capitalist. In this Cultural Revolution, the Chairman co-opted students, closed down schools and marshaled them to do his proletarian bidding. Groups like the youth Red Guard formed and, among other things, preyed on the population to include the elderly and terminally ill. Charming.
The rise of socialist tendencies on the left is nothing new. For that matter, radical student activism is not new. These go hand-in-hand.
Antifa, the ironic anonym for ‘anti-fascists’, has been on the rise following the Trump election. Not new per se but certainly on the rise. Though Antifa bills itself as largely a counter to white supremacy, as does most of the US, what underlies Antifa is a decidedly anti-captitalist message and skews largely to young students. Mark Bray, organizer of Occupy Wall Street and writer of ‘Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook’, noted in his book, “Many anti-fascists will argue that you can’t really be an anti-fascist without being an anti-capitalist, because they argue that capitalism breeds the conditions for fascism,”
Like the Maoist students, Antifa clearly employs violent tactics. The students of Mao’s Red Guard took to the elite with Mao compelling them, “(to) Completely denounce the capitalist representatives in the academic, educational, journalist, artist, and publication circles. Take the power of leadership back from these cultural realms.”
Remove ‘academia’ from Mao’s directive and replace it with corporate CEO’s and you have the battle cry of the left. The battle cry is the same. The players have changed. More heads are bashed. And the left in America has succeeded with overtaking academia, journalism and art.
It’s very well worth noting Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has both said, “(that) To me, capitalism is irredeemable,” as well as, “Capitalism has not always existed in the world, and it will not always exist in the world.”
Which has a loud echo of Chairman Mao from 1957, “The socialist system will eventually replace the capitalist system; this is an objective law independent of man’s will. However much the reactionaries try to hold back the wheel of history, eventually revolution will take place and will inevitably triumph.”
At the early outset of Mao’s China, population growth was encouraged. In Mao’s mind, manpower was power. From 1949 through 1959, the Chinese population grew from 500 million to over 900 million. A lot of mouths to feed. By 1960, many of them starving to death from overpopulation and disastrous decisions from the Great Leap Forward.
Within today’s Climate Change religion, the newest fervor posits children should no longer be brought to this planet. The reliably rambling AOC suggested during a recent livestream, “There’s scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult. And it does lead young people to the legitimate question: Is it okay to still have children? We had time when I was born, but — tick-tock — nothing got done. As the youngest member of Congress, I wish we didn’t have 12 years. It’s our lungs that are going to get choked with wildfire smoke.”
Control of the population is not new to the progressive hordes. Long is the debate over leftist piety of abortion. ‘We’re all gonna die anyway so why bring a kid in the the world?’ they say. Ocasio-Cortez is simply advancing the most recent leftist eugenics craze.
Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, was quite a fan of eugenics. She fancied the elimination of those she deemed as inferior, as eugenics suggests. This included those with developmental issues as well as minorities. Like most leftists, she considered herself superior to others and capable of determining who lives and who dies.
Hillary Clinton was a proud recipient of the Planned Parenthood ‘Margaret Sanger Award’.
Mao never officially enforced a policy to limit population growth. In 1979, the then post-Mao communist China leaders did. The policy was the so-called ‘One Child’ policy. It was a radical approach of enforcing only one child for any couple.
Birth by central planning.
In the modern day, when Iceland heralds eliminating Down’s Syndrome by means of abortion, the elitist left only wishes to see themselves in the mirror. The great unwashed, those of us who can’t surrender 300 large for an elite education; if only the left could just make us all go away, life would be better in the glow of all their centrally planned awesomeness.
Yet China is soon to encounter unintended consequences not unlike the United States; the aging citizenry under the weight of a populace no longer replacing itself. Neither China nor the United States will soon be able to afford the cost of the elderly.
And our American leftists want even more of this.
Consider the path we’re going down. Consider the rise of the totalitarian left. Consider the violence wrought by empty ideology and vacant platitudes. Consider how easy it is to fall prey to emotional appeals in absence of facts. Consider that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told us that facts and semantics were unimportant if you’re morally right. She is but the avatar for a much deeper well of leftist totalitarianism.
Are we going to continue the slide in to a socialist miasma and the chaos wrought by idiotic central planners. Or do we still adhere to a personal liberty that values personal decisions and a free economic system found in capitalism?
If we do so little to counteract the idiot socialist left, we’ll be taking directives from central planners. At that point, little of our personal will would matter.
Great article! I disagree, however, with the contention that Mao is the architect of modern China. Mao was a communist purist, and China has, over the past – call it forty years – migrated toward something other than pure communism, keeping state control over the means of production, but using profit as an incentive system.
There is no profit under true communism.
State control plus a profit incentive is not communism. It is fascism.
Today’s China owes as much to Mussolini as to Mao.
I do agree that what is now modern China would not have been something Mao would have envisioned. The market based reforms were more a creature of Deng Xiaoping’s tenure but I suppose you don’t get to Deng without Mao. My statement in the article could be more accurately stated as the father of modern China, if perhaps not the author. Deng Xiaoping and his ilk were more pragmatic but still intended to hold power so I see it has something of an evolution of Maoism.