Posted on 05/18/2016 4:29:45 PM PDT by dynachrome
Michael Crook, a Briton whose Communist father moved to China before the Second World War, was one of a handful of foreigners living in the country when Mao launched an all-out class war. snip Far from worrying that he too could come under suspicion because of his Western background, he was among the first of his classmates to sign up for the Red Guard the fanatical student group that became the revolutions most devoted enforcers. snipThat Mr Crook is unapologetic about the Mao era is perhaps unsurprising given his family history.
His father, David, fought for the Communists in the Spanish civil war, and became a spy tasked by Stalin with infiltrating Trotskyist groups in China.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
And for the record I'm speaking about China *the nation*,not the Chinese people.Hong Kong and Taiwan are two excellent examples of what Chinese people can do when given some political and economic freedom.
A wise society will banish people like this, forcing them to find a place to build their own society from nothing instead of cheating by staying put in a real one.
Mao was a green toothed, child-molesting monster. Your account has plenty of parallels to it. In “The Gulag Archipelago”, there were men given 20 year terms to the gulag, and still worshiped Stalin.
Hard to understand, but true.
Mao was bad. And you are right the continued worship of despotic leaders is scary. When I was in Wuhan I would occasionally eat at a restaurant with a bust of Mao in the corner. The locals burned joss sticks to it like a Buddhist god.
It was both really sad and really surreal. But at that time in rural China the peasants would still ask; “How is the emperor?” if they found you were from Beijing. They thought Mao was just another Emperor.
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