Mao ZeTrump’s Great Leap Backward

Op-EdTrump Term Two is resembling nothing so much as Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, which created a famine that killed 38 million people, and his Cultural Revolution, which killed 2 million more.In both cases, a small group of people with little to no knowledge about the policies they created and enforced thrust untold suffering upon millions of people. Consider what Mao did to Tibet, then compare it with what Mao ZeTrump is doing to all of us.For centuries, the Tibetan people had grazed yaks upon their million-square-mile plateau, because it was* too cold to grow crops there. *The herders traded wool, milk, butter and meat with farmers who grew barley at lower elevations. Thus, everyone ate.Then in May 1958, Mao decreed that Tibetans would plant crops on 14,000-foot-high plateau, while barley farmers would be herded into collectives at lower elevations, and trading between the elevations would stop, because trading is a form of capitalism.Naturally, the crops failed, and with yaks no longer able to roam freely, thousands died of hunger or were slaughtered. Nationwide, more than 30 million people died in the famine Mao created, roughly 5% of China’s pre-famine population of 645 million. In Tibet, the rate reached 26% — roughly 340,000 people out of 1.3 million — all due to partisan ignorance.Today we too have a tiny clique creating and enforcing policies they know nothing about. Consider Mao ZeTrump’s war upon vaccines, led by Bobby Kennedy Jr., a delusional nepo baby who is neither a doctor nor a scientist.Their latest idiocy is to recommend that children be given the MMR vaccine not in one shot, as has been done for decades, but dragged out over three appointments. Quoth Mao ZeTrump: “A vaccination looks like the size of the bottle of soda poured into a little child’s body.” Utter horseshit. A typical MMR shot is 1 cc.Vaccines have saved tens of millions of lives. But deaths? You want deaths?In the first year after Mao ZeTrump dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, hundreds of thousands of people died, most of them children younger than 6, according to the bourgeois running dogs at the Harvard School of Public Health.After the great famine came the Cultural Revolution, in which Mao sicced thousands of Red Guards upon his people, checking their papers at every other street corner, to root out and murder or imprison “class enemies.” No one dared intervene. Sort of like ICE’s warrantless arrests today, and the subsequent deaths in our immigration prisons.And now ICE can disable us with a mere touch, thanks to $20 million worth of high-voltage gloves, Mao ZeTrump’s Red Guards are pleased to call “de-escalation devices.”Moving along, what about education? Mao banned books — most books. Some people were executed for owning the wrong one.Under Mao ZeTrump, more than 6,800 book titles have been removed and banned from schools and public libraries, books by dangerous authors such as Kurt Vonnegut and Toni Morrison. Trump’s Red Squads haven’t killed anyone yet over books, but teachers have been threatened and fired. And it’s hard for me to see much difference between prohibiting people from reading and requiring them to read what the state demands.Mao ZeTrump claims his organized, intentional cruelty is the only way to protect society from people who are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Mao ZeDong called it “purification.”Mao purged thousands of officials for ideological reasons — no one knows the exact number. Mao ZeTrump fired or forced the resignations of 300,000 federal employees in his first year in office, a purge that continues. And he purges congressmen and senators through fear and primaries.For Mao’s “capitalist traitors” we have Mao ZeTrump’s “communists” (Democrats).Both Maos rule by slogan. One of Mao’s big hits was “Beat to a pulp any and all persons who go against Mao Zedong thought.” (Really.) Mao ZeTrump called six Democratic members of Congress “traitors” whose “seditious behavior” should be “punishable by death,” because they cited the Uniform Military Code of Justice, which states that members of our armed services need not obey an illegal order.Back in the civilian world, Mao unleashed his Red Guards upon people in mandatory “struggle sessions” of “self-criticism,” just as Mao ZeTrump sicced his MAGA troops on universities and law firms.Mao, like Mao ZeTrump, claimed his purges of officials and citizens were to “root out corruption,” though in both cases, the lion’s share of corruption came from the top.Mao, like Mao ZeTrump, was overtly racist, and not just against Tibetans: It was illegal in China for Han Chinese to marry Uighurs or Muslims in Xinjiang Province until 1979.Now, wait a minute, you may be thinking. Am I really likening Trump’s policies to Mao ZeDong’s?Yes. Words matter. They matter even more when they are enforced as policy by armed, masked men.After Mao died in 1979, his successors faced the tremendous, necessary task of rolling back what he had done. Of course, for millions of people it was too late.And for us? Hard to tell. Congress is only playing dead.Categories / Op-Ed, PoliticsSubscribe to our free newslettersOur weekly newsletter Closing Arguments offers the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world, while the monthly Under the Lights dishes the legal dirt from Hollywood, sports, Big Tech and the arts.Additional Reads