Facts I Learned From Maoism: A Global History (Part Two)

As I read Maoism: A Global History, I came to the conclusion that Maoism is a cognitohazard. Like, a straight-up, SCP-Foundation-style cognitohazard. If you think about Maoism too hard, you turn evil.

All the Maoist leaders are evil. I understand this; it’s an evil ideology. It is true that, early in the history of the People’s Republic of China, innumerable idealistic young Communists went around China teaching people to boil water and not to bind their daughters’ feet. But most of them were then purged and perhaps tortured or killed in one anti-rightist campaign or another, so I feel this is compatible with my diagnosis of Maoism-Induced Evil Syndrome.

What baffles me is why, all around the world, over a century of history, with ideologies ranging from boring liberal democracy to outright fascism, everyone who fought the Maoists is also evil. My notes on Maoism: A Global History contain phrases like “standard anti-Maoist torture/rape/war crimes/concentration camps.” From Chiang Kai-shek (the Number Three But We Try Harder of early twentieth century Chinese atrocities) to the mining companies brutally repressing the Adivasis today, a demon whispers in the ear of every anti-Maoist campaigner:

You’re in the clear as long as you vaguely think that Maoism is probably bad. Taking any specific actions about your belief that Maoism is bad is high-risk for turning evil. Once you’re assigned to the China bureau, it’s too late.

I have organized this set of facts by country, roughly in order of how disturbing they are.¹ So you can keep reading until you are as disturbed as you would like to be today.

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Exactly one political leader in all of history was immune to Maoism-Induced Evil Syndrome, and it was Ho Chih Minh.

To be clear, Ho Chih Minh was a bad person. But after chapter upon chapter of Abimael Guzman and General Suharto and Kim il-Sung and MK-Ultra, not to mention Mao Zedong himself, I am grading political leaders on a very generous curve.

For example, it’s true that, when he did land reform following the Chinese model, 10,000 to 30,000 people died and many more were tortured. But then he stopped! He even apologized! You don’t catch General Suharto or Kim il-Sung apologizing.

Ho Chih Minh knew that many Maoist policies were terrible. But Vietnam’s relationship with the PRC was crucial to its national security, so he faced a delicate balancing act. During the Great Leap Forward, North Vietnamese elites had letters home from their children studying in China, saying that there wasn't enough to eat and asking for various consumer goods. So elites knew the Great Leap Forward wasn't as good as advertised and suspected famine. Ho Chih Minh and other Vietnamese elites also privately called the Cultural Revolution insane. Too dependent on Chinese aid to openly criticize Chinese policies, Vietnamese elites were mostly conspicuously silent. For example, Zhou Enlai once made a forty-minute presentation about the Cultural Revolution to North Vietnamese elites and got exactly one question.

The Americans believed in domino theory: if Vietnam became Communist, the dominoes would fall and Maoism would spread throughout Asian. To the Americans’ credit, the Chinese Communist Party also believed in domino theory. But Ho Chih Minh had no intentions of being a domino. He saw the Chinese as Vietnam’s historical colonizers—useful allies, but not people he would allow to dictate his foreign policy.

I can’t believe that, given how many incredibly objectionable Communist governments there were throughout the world, America somehow wound up fighting a hot war with the one Communist government that was inarguably less bad than war.

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In Africa, Chinese aid workers were typically more popular than American or Soviet aid workers. Soviet and Western development experts and aid workers tended to live in luxury hotels and have servants. Chinese aid workers lived among the people in the same conditions they did. They did manual labor alongside Africans, ate the same food as everyone else, and were notoriously kind and humble. Once again, we see that random aid workers are exempt from Maoism-Induced Evil Syndrome.

However, the Chinese aid workers’ lives were so politically regimented that they couldn't really socialize with native Africans. They went about in large groups so that no one could do unapproved activities. And they could sometimes be politically annoying to deal with:

The Chinese were at times antagonistic to other aid workers: they refused to allow a group of Americans building a road parallel with the Tan-Zam Railway to enter the land alongside the route, and besieged them for five hours, chanting slogans and brandishing steel-tipped rods all the while.

'I am tired of being asked what I think of the Soviet position when I am eating a sandwich,’ fulminated a Kenyan delegate, ‘and what I think of the Chinese position when I am drinking my tea. I would like to be able to eat in peace.’

On the other hand, if you were working on Chinese-run project, you could take a break whenever you wanted by sitting under a tree and pretending to read the Little Red Book.

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The first sentence learned in a local language by doctors the PRC sent to Africa was "Chairman Mao sent me." Opticians used the Little Red Book as an eyesight test.

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In Mali, China distributed one copy of the Little Red Book per capita.

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In many parts of Africa, the American embassy's film screenings were better attended than the Chinese embassy's film screenings, because the American embassy had alcohol and better movies.

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Doubtless to Chinese delight, the Soviets made a hash of their own aid package, unloading onto the dock of the capital Conakry [in Guinea] misaddressed piles of snowploughs.

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Various dictators wrote their own Little [Color] Books, including Julius Nyerere, first president of Tanzania; his vice president, Abeid Karume; and Muammar al-Gaddafi, dictator of Libya. Breaking with tradition, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana called his Mao-inspired book the Axioms of Kwame Nkrumah.

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The Zanzibari revolutionary Issa was a wild human being.

when in 1951 Babu arranged to meet him two months hence in London, it took Issa a whole two years to reach Britain. During that time he had married, impregnated then divorced (by letter) a South African prostitute, learned the jitterbug, developed a passable Frank Sinatra impression and almost enlisted in the US Army to fight in Korea.

Issa’s first four children were named Raissa (after a Bolshoi ballerina), Fidela (after Castro), Maotushi (after Mao) and – self-explanatorily – Stalin. Amid countless other infidelities, while his wife was teaching Swahili in China he conducted liaisons with two Englishwomen on the same plane between Uganda and Sudan. As a minister in President Karume’s Zanzibari dictatorship of the 1960s, he sent Tanzania’s youth down to starvation conditions in rural camps to cure their ‘declining respect’ (according to Issa, the idea came ‘from the Chinese’), while he regularly smoked marijuana and abandoned his wife (and mother of his four children) for a London party girl (with whom he had another four children, before abandoning her to a council house in Retford). In the meantime, his ministerial colleagues imprisoned the husbands of any woman with whom they wanted to sleep.

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After his arrival, [revolutionary Amadu from Niger] informed the director of the State Broadcasting Administration that the Koran permitted him to have four wives. He had already taken three in Africa but was reserving a spot for a Chinese consort and wanted to purchase one while in China. When the director explained that this would be impossible, an agitated Amadou protested that he was not asking for a handout; he was willing to pay for a woman.

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a childless Zambian so impressed with the performer’s [a Chinese stage magician's] display of supernatural powers (pulling fish, flowers, ducks, sweets out of thin air) that the African now requested the conjuror conjure him his heart’s desire: a son. An awkward scene ensued, with Chinese diplomats explaining that the show was all trickery and sleight of hand, and the Zambian refusing to believe it, or to leave.

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Zimbabawean guerilla names included Mao (reasonable); Zhou Enlai (reasonable); James Bond (sure); One O'Clock (on the logic that he would surprise his enemies while they were eating lunch); and Margaret Thatcher (what?).

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A South African flying to London from secret radio training in China in the early 1960s failed to destroy the sheet [secret visa] before his plane took off, and had no choice but to eat it while on board, to the bemusement of the passenger sitting next to him.

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One aspiring Latin American revolutionary ran a Maoist bookstore for six years selling propaganda he got for free from China. When Deng Xiaoping stopped funding Chinese revolutionaries overseas, the CCP shut down the shop by presenting the revolutionary with the bill for six years' of free books.

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When the King of Nepal outlawed political parties in 1960, he continued to allow Maoist texts to be published in the hopes of strengthening the Communists as a counterweight to his moderate enemies.

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The Nepali Maoists were two hours late to the first battle of the insurgency because they got lost.

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One Nepali Maoist guerilla fought up until giving birth, gave birth in a military camp, had a medical emergency and had to fly to India for surgery, and then walked back to Nepal the next day to rejoin the insurgency.

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The Nepali Maoist army spent five years in military camps after the war was officially over but before negotiations had been completed to shut down the army.

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Stalin prompted the Korean War in order to distract the U.S. from Europe. The CCP originally didn't want to send troops. However, Mao felt that he had to participate in the Korean War—in spite of his reluctance to do so—in order to preserve his credibility as the leader of the Asian revolution and as an anti-imperialist thinker. The USSR refused to provide much assistance to the Koreans and, after the war, billed the Chinese for the air support the USSR provided.

The Korean War permanently (so far) kept China from invading Taiwan. Kim il-Sung was never grateful to China for their sacrifice, considering it a just recompense for Korea's help during the Chinese Civil War. This set the general North Korean/Chinese relationship, which is that North Korea is weak and ungrateful and yet somehow manages to get China to give it lots of money and support anyway.

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At the end of the Korean War, Pyongyang had one surviving building (a bank).

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To this day, North Korea spends a fifth of its GDP on its army.

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North Korea's Mansudae Art Studio, which primarily creates images of the Kim family, has been commissioned to make numerous monuments and statues in Africa.

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During India's Communist insurgency in the 1960s, police began to consider any day in Kolkata peaceful as long as there were fewer than twelve bombings.

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The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs today denies any connection with India’s Maoist insurgency, past or present. Indeed, it constitutes such a red-line issue that if you search for it on the ministry’s website, a cartoon of a square green bureaucrat springs up on your screen holding a ‘NOTICE!’ that tells you: ‘Mistaken search, your search terms contain illegal words!’

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Charu Mazumdar, leader of the 1960s Indian Maoist insurgency, sent his first emissary to China on foot. The emissary was unclear on how to get to Beijing but figured that if he just walked to China he would eventually get there. It worked? Also he didn't speak a word of Chinese and almost got shot as a spy.

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even Mao – not renowned for his modesty – seems to have been uneasy at the cloying devotion of the Indian revolutionaries, telling them that their slogan ‘China’s Chairman is Our Chairman’ was immature.

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The Maoist insurgency in India continues even today. It is the longest-lasting continuous insurgency in the world.

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In Chhattisgarh in the 1980s, the People's War Group, a Maoist faction, began to organize the ethnic group the Adivasis. The Adivasis were paid less than a penny a day for their work collecting tendu leaves to wrap cheap cigarettes. Everyone was starving, women were regularly raped, and they were easily exploited because they couldn't count past twenty.

The Maoists organized the Adivasis by focusing on their primary complaints: violence and economic exploitation. For example, the Maoists murdered government officials and company representatives known for raping or stealing. Maoists also created a written language for the Adivasi language Gondi, taught new recruits to read, and provided medical care. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the Maoist insurgency functionally ran its own government in many parts of Chhattisgarh. Although the leadership is ideologically Maoist, the Adivasis themselves rarely seem to have any ideology more complicated than "it shouldn't be legal to rape or steal from us." Among Adivasi youth, joining the Maoist insurgency for a few years was a common form of teenage rebellion.

In the 2000s, corporations started wanting to mine in Chhattisgarh. The Adivasis were displaced. They were commonly arrested, raped, and violently forced off their land. They were never paid a fair market value. Sometimes company representatives would obtain the Adivasis' "consent" for mines by putting guns to their heads and threatening to kill them unless they signed.

The Maoists responded by doing terrorist attacks against the mines. The state responded by arming Salwa Judum (Purification Hunt), local villagers with vendettas against the Maoists. Salwa Judum assaulted, raped, mutilated, and murdered civilians, and also forced civilians into concentration camps.

The Maoists are better, but that’s not saying much. Corruption is endemic, with Maoist groups in one area making $500 million a year in bribes from mining companies. In some areas, Adivasis have to ask permission from ruling Maoists before leaving their villages. In others, women are forced to attend Communist festivals even when they don't want to. Everywhere, dissenters are punished with violence.

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Sukarno, a dictator of Indonesia, was very horny. Beijing published Sukarno's vanity book, a collection of paintings from his collection of erotic art, even though the CCP found erotic art uncomfortable. His Chinese doctors, a special diplomatic present from the PRC, left in disgust because Sukarno refused to cut back on work, have less sex, or take his meds. He survived a coup, the September 30th Movement coup, because he had too many wives and the coup leaders couldn't figure out which one he had spent the night with.

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Sjam was head of the espionage bureau of the Indonesian Communist Party, the PKI. Allegedly, he was a leader of the September 30th Movement coup. He successfully delayed his execution nine years by pulling a Scheherazade with his explanation of how the coup had happened.

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In India, from 1965 to 1966, the Suharto regime killed at least half a million Communists. 10,000 people were enslaved. The massacres were horrific. For example, here’s an excerpt from an interview with a perpetrator:

If we didn’t drink human blood, we’d go crazy… Some killed so many people they went crazy. One man climbed a palm tree each morning to do the call to prayer. He killed too many people. There’s only one way to avoid it: drink your victims’ blood or go crazy. But if you drink blood you can do anything! Both salty and sweet. Human blood. I know from experience. If you cut off a woman's breast, it looks like a coconut milk filter. Full of holes.

Suharto blamed the violence on Indonesia's Communist Party, the PKI, and on isolated civilians getting understandably carried away. The Suharto regime propagandized that the PKI was so hated that people just lost control and killed them. A Suharto regime member even claimed to NBC that PKI members had asked to be killed out of remorse for their actions.

Even today, massacre participants and their descendants are some of the richest and most powerful people in Indonesia. Victims are discriminated against; the perpetrators are heroes. The families of political prisoners are considered "unclean.” Sometimes victims who bring up the genocide are threatened with the genocide happening again.

Western governments played a significant role in the violence:

The US and UK in particular played a nefarious part: handing over to the Indonesian Army lists of alleged Communist sympathisers; funding paramilitary death squads; beaming propaganda broadcasts from Singapore into Indonesia to spread fear and loathing of Indonesian Communism. Anglophone media in Australia, the US and the UK either buried reports of the massacres or misrepresented the violence as acts of spontaneous self-defence against bloodthirsty Communists.

Western companies made rubber using Indonesian ex-Communist (or ex-"Communist") slaves. And the Western news covered all this in a characteristically racist fashion:

They were down to ‘witchcraft’, ‘mass hysteria’, ‘Asian violence’ or, as one New York Times editorial argued, a ‘strange Malay streak, that inner frenzied blood-lust which has given to other languages one of their few Malay words: amok’.

One Western documentarian compared the experience to "wander[ing] into Germany 40 years after the holocaust, only to find the Nazis still in power."

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Before he was dictator of Cambodia, Pol Pot was a high-school teacher. Apparently he was a gifted teacher known for always smiling and being very accommodating of others.

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Prince Norodom Sihanouk was king of Cambodia. In 1955, he abdicated to become a politician. Many people voted for him because they saw him as something like a god. At the same time, he was brutal in repressing dissent. He was known to send trucks around with the heads of decapitated dissidents per encourager les autres.

In 1970, a coup removed Sihanouk from power. At China's encouragement, Sihanouk told his people to join the Khmer Rouge. Loyal to their god-king and convinced that Pol Pot must be normal because the king approved, tens of thousands of Cambodians flocked to the Khmer Rouge.

'They will spit me out like a cherry pit the moment they have won,’ Sihanouk told the New York Times. And indeed, among themselves, the Khmer Rouge described Sihanouk as a ‘scab that will drop off by itself’.

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24 hours after the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia, they forced everyone out of the cities at gunpoint. Their goal was to "turn the Khmers into rice-producing machines that consume no fuel and not too much rice." Under the Khmer Rouge, the only right the Cambodian constitution guaranteed was the freedom to work. They abolished currency and differences in salary; China printed a currency for the Khmer Rouge as a form of foreign aid, but the Khmer Rouge never used it. No one was allowed to eat in their own houses; instead, everyone was required to eat in giant mess halls.

Tuol Sleng, the Khmer Rouge's prison headquarters, had 20,000 prisoners. Seven survived, mostly artists drafted to make art about Pol Pot.

The Khmer Rouge also executed all the experts, and replaced them with teenagers, because what you really need to run a country is willpower and the indomitable spirit of the people:

At Kampong Son, a crucial petrol refinery, most of the management and workforce were between eight and eighteen years old – they called Chinese advisers in their thirties and forties ‘grandfather’. This veneration of juvenility made the Chinese technicians nervous: one engineer refused a chance to visit Angkor Wat because the pilot detailed to him was only seventeen

It turns out, in the real world, it’s a terrible idea to transform your entire country into a shonen anime.

Because oppressing the entire Cambodian people wasn't enough, the Khmer Rouge also committed not one but two genocides: against the ethnic Chinese and the Vietnamese.

In 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and put the Khmer Rouge on trial in absentia for genocide and crimes against humanity. This is very possibly the most justified war on record.

[Phnom Penh, capital of Cambodia] was a city in which the clock of human activity seemed to have stopped. Its concrete infrastructure was just about still in place, but had been invaded by the natural world: banana, coconut and papaya trees sprouted out of the pavements, which were littered with ungathered fruit. Instead of workers, shoppers and flâneurs, pigs, chickens and geckoes traipsed through the grassy streets. In the empty houses, rats made their homes among abandoned tables, sofas, beds, televisions, telephones, clothes, records, musical instruments and photograph albums – the ruins of everyday life abandoned at gunpoint on 17 April 1975.

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Native Americans in Peru suffered from wild amounts of racism.

Local grandees – the gamonales – denounced ‘the Indian’ as ‘lazy, miserable and gluttonous’, ‘like savages’: ‘we Spaniards should have killed the Indians’, they declared. One notorious grandee swindled countless Indians out of their land, persuaded a woman to marry him by threatening to kill her if she refused, then mortally wounded the officiating priest when the latter complained that the administrative documents weren’t complete – all without judicial punishment.

'All the hard and dirty work was done by [the Indian],’ recalled a white memoir of the 1950s, ‘it suited his nature. To be Indian was to be trampled on, brutalised – an Indian could do anything: sleep at people’s feet…die of cold. An Indian wasn’t allowed to be hungry: he was used to hunger and therefore could go without food for a day or two, it didn’t matter because it suited his nature. He was less than human; he wasn’t human.’

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The Peruvian intelligence community missed the rise of the Shining Path because:

• There were seventy other Maoist groups at the same time, all also professing their desire to engage in armed revolution.

• The military dictatorship destroyed all intelligence information about subversive groups before handing power over to the new democratic government.

• Intelligence services were underresourced and corrupt. For example, the intelligence services didn’t have official cars because the son of the intelligence director kept racing in them and crashing them.

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Abimael Guzman, leader of the Shining Path, was nicknamed "Shampoo" because he washed your brains.

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Guzman's lieutenant had a two-hour pitch for Guzman's views called Matter and Movement, which started with the creation of the universe.

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Guzman's first wife may have committed suicide to save the Shining Path from her doubts about the righteousness of the revolution.

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A little less than half of the Shining Path's leadership, and 40% of its guerillas, were women—an unusual number for any insurgency. The Shining Path was notable for its gender egalitarianism. Both male and female guerillas could climb the ranks based not on gender but on merit (a term which here means "grotesque evil"). And both male and female guerillas could rape whomever they wanted. #feminism

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[Imprisoned Shining Path members] covered the walls with collectively painted technicolour murals of Guzmán. One group of inmates painted a quotation by Mao six metres off the ground. A visiting journalist asked them: ‘If you can paint that high, why don’t you escape?’ ‘We don’t want to escape,’ came the answer. ‘We want to show our captors that they are dwarves. It drives them mad trying to work out how we did it.'

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The Shining Path was founded in 1970 with 51 members. Guzman accumulated a considerable degree of power at his university: he founded the school for training rural teachers, chose the core curriculum for undergraduates, gave out the scholarships, and was in charge of hiring. Soon, his school wound up functionally a Maoist think tank. A quarter of the professors at his university had visited the PRC. The Little Red Book was a core text for both anthropology and philosophy. One professor went so far as to assign only the Little Red Book as a textbook in all courses.

Maoism was appealing to university students. First-generation university students were often uncomfortable with uncertainty: they wanted textbooks that were filled with the right answers, something Maoist propaganda was all too willing to provide. Maoism was rural and peasant-oriented, which seemed like it fit Peru's needs. And because there were few jobs for college graduates other than teaching in rural schools, it was easy to convince students that the entire system needed to be overthrown.

The Shining Path soon infiltrated much of Peru. Every village, after all, needs a teacher. Each teacher would convince other teachers, who in turn would convince students. Guzman's former students served as an intelligence network, giving him an extremely accurate view of the terrain on which he would fight.

In 1980, Guzman declared war.

Guzman taught that the revolution required a "quota" of people to be killed. When the "quota" was killed, the Communist revolution would occur. His tactics were as elegant as they were brutal: the Shining Path would commit such gruesomely violent atrocities that the government would feel obligated to respond with equally gruesomely violent atrocities, which would drive the people into the arms of the Shining Path.

The government acted exactly as Guzman had predicted. The explicit policy of the Ministry of Defense was that it was all right to kill 99 innocent people if the hundredth was a guerilla.

As they route-marched across the sierra, soldiers sang: ‘Shitty terrorists, we will come into your little houses, we will eat your little guts, we will drink your little blood, we will cut off your little heads, we will stab your little eyes, we will crush your little ankles.’

Government soldiers routinely tortured and raped civilians. Speaking Quechua was enough to have you declared a terrorist.

In its turn, the Shining Path believed that, since they were intellectuals with proletarian class consciousness, the peasants ought to obey them without question. They gleefully massacred peasants who dared to think that the Shining Path wasn't helping them. The Shining Path ordered villagers to torture dissidents, so that the Peruvian army would torture the villagers in punishment if the village was taken. Boys were forced to become soldiers; girls, prostitutes/childbearing slaves. Old and sick people were executed as "parasitic burdens." The Shining Path temporarily banned fiestas, then unbanned them when they realized that drunk people would identify informers so that the informers could be executed.

In the pursuit of self-sufficiency, Shining Path tried to close communities’ access to weekly markets. ‘Where would we get our salt and matches?’ one local asked matter-of-factly.

The objective was to destroy any alternatives to the party: thus they killed mayors and champions of slum welfare; they demolished rural development projects; they beheaded rival left-wing organisations. ‘The key is to raze,’ explained a party document. ‘And to raze means to leave nothing behind.’

After several years, the Peruvian army belatedly realized that the torture, rape, and massacre of civilians was a terrible approach to winning hearts and minds. They stopped committing war crimes. Their marching songs started to feature more saluting the people of Peru and less stabbing the eyes of the people of Peru. The army broke the centuries-long taboo against arming Indians and gave the peasants guns. In their turn, the peasants delivered the severed heads of Shining Path guerillas to army HQ.

Honestly, I’m normally against delivering people the severed heads of your enemies, but sometimes??? People mutilate the bodies of the dead??? To cope???

By 1990, the Peruvian army decided not only to mostly not commit war crimes but also to collect intelligence instead of simply assuming that Guzman was impossible to track down. They promptly found him and arrested him. The Shining Path collapsed, most of its central committee was arrested, and Guzman publicly announced that the Shining Path was to disband and stop violence. A militant Shining Path subgroup continues to this day, mostly to provide protection to drug mules.

Up until the publication of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s report in 2003, there had been estimates that 25,000–30,000 had been killed during the conflict. The report calculated that more than double that number – almost 70,000 – had died... the most shocking aspect of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s report was that it discovered 40,000 deaths in the sierras and jungles that the Peruvian governing classes had not even noticed.

1. To be clear, a lot of the countries with less disturbing facts are still pretty disturbing. They just aren’t disturbing in a very interesting way. My notes on them just say things like “cannibalism again?”