The Daily Reckoning PRESENTS: Mao never cared about ideology. He murderedhis keen communist followers as readily as capitalist roaders. He tookmoney from Moscow...but he also turned his back on the Russians wheneverhe could get away with it. He might just as well have been a Republican.Read on...THE LATE, GREAT HELMSMANby Bill BonnerEagles soar up the long vaultFish fly down the shallow riverbedUnder a sky of frost, ten thousand creatures vie to impose their willTouched by this vastness,I ask the boundless earth:Who after all will be your master?Mao Tse-tungThe more history you read, the less you learn from it. Not that it isn'tentertaining; to the contrary, history is nothing if not diverting. Thetrouble is, it is nothing more. In the end, all you take away is a gapingmouth and a mind pried so wide open it is ready to believe anything...andnothing. We say that after reading a grand biography of Mao Tse-Tung, written byJung Chang and Jon Halliday. The authors must have spent many yearstrawling through the official records, listening to oral histories, andreading the newspapers. What they have come up with is extraordinary. Andwhat is most extraordinary about it is that it shows how man - and here wespeak of the species, not the gender - can get away with almost anything.In the 20th century, man got away with more than usual. Murder, robbery,torture, starvation were not uncommon. And the people who committed thesecrimes often found themselves the subjects of popular adoration. Theirsilhouettes were recorded on paper currency. Likenesses of themselves werechiseled out of granite and hoisted onto public squares. Their quips andsayings were printed up in little books, distributed to the masses likeChristmas candies...and studied by callow scholars as if they were Gospellessons.In the 1960s, we spent some time in a center of higher learning in Paris.We recall that the most difficult choice a young European intellectualfaced was whether to sign up with the Trotskyites, the Leninists, or theMaoists. Each had his own special style and doctrine. Students stayed uplate into the night arguing the fine points of one or the other, none ofthem with a single clue about who these men really were or what theirbloody creeds really meant.Now, with the opening of archives and the closing of the lives of most ofthe principals, we get to find out more of what really went on...and whatthese great revolutionary heroes were really like. And what a ghastly showit is! Hegel meets Helter Skelter. Das Kapital meets Texas ChainsawMassacre.The Chinese are a smart people; just look at the names that make it toadvanced science programs at America's top universities. IQ aficionadostell us the Chinese and Japanese have an edge over the rest of us. Butread the story of Mao; it makes you wonder: how could so many smart peopledo something so moronic...it would be flattery to call them stupid?Who would have thought that one of the planets most ancient and refinedcivilizations would yield itself over to a lame-brained intellectual whoseprinciple preoccupations were creating havoc...and making sure his ownbowels moved? What went through the minds of his followers when theywatched him order his trusted subordinates trussed up, tortured andmurdered...? What did they think when their own general - faced with animplacable enemy who vowed to 'annihilate' all of them - set in motion apurge of his own forces that wiped out a third of his entire army...ordilly-dallied in hostile territory, against the orders of his superiors,and managed to lose 70,000 out of an original 80,000 of his long-sufferingfollowers? What could they have thought when the man who claimed to be achampion of the poor starved, robbed, and tortured them without mercy...soruthlessly that any peasants with the strength to escape ran off to theother side?If they didn't flee, they hung themselves or opened their veins. When Maofirst got his hands on a little chunk of China he immediately turned theplace into a prison. Armed guards patrolled the streets and borders -prevent people from escaping. People were encouraged to denounce eachother...torture was barbaric...executions were everyday occurrences.Families were not allowed to visit each other...as the authorities worriedthat they might be up to something. A family found to have welcomed avisitor was to be killed. Not surprisingly, people found this proto-Maoistworker's paradise rather depressing. Even top-ranking cadres began to taketheir own lives. "Suicides are the most shameful elements in therevolutionary ranks," came the slogan designed to halt the trend. What were the Chinese thinking, to let Mao get away with it? It was as ifthey didn't think at all. During his career, Mao-Tse-Tung was responsiblefor more deaths - murder, starvation, torture...the usual ways of dying,plus a few novelties added by Mao and his thugs - than any other man inhistory. Seventy million is the sum given by Chang and Halliday. Even theentire Mongel reign of Genghis Khan and his whole line - who conqueredthree civilizations...Muslim, Chinese, and Hindu...and threatened toconquer Christendom too...didn't match Mao in killing people. You'd think one or other of the hundreds of millions of Chinese who suffered at his handswould have done something about it. Surely, millions must have realizedwhat was up. It was obvious from the very get-go that Mao was a homicidal,incompetent tyrant. Why didn't one of them whose wife had been torturedabominably...or whose sons had been killed wantonly... or whose family hadbeen starved or bayoneted...do something to get even? In the early days,it would have been fairly easy to ambush Mao. Maybe that's the troublewith the modern world; people don't take the obligation of revengeseriously enough. Mao died of natural causes, many decades later.It is a relief to many that Mao was a communist and that bolshevism nolonger fires hearts and heavy artillery. But it is a counterfeit comfort.Mao never cared about ideology. He murdered his keen communist followersas readily as capitalist roaders. He took money from Moscow...but he alsoturned his back on the Russians whenever he could get away with it. Hemight just as well have been a Republican. He went with collectivism onlybecause it was stirred the pot...and the faster it swirled, the moreruthless bits of slime came to the surface. It was necessary, he wrote,"to bring a reign of terror in every country."Practically everything about Mao Tse-Tung was a lie or a swindle. In thatsense, he made a perfect leading man for a great public spectacle. And asit turned out, he was perfect for the role. He was all show...allhumbug...all mountebank. As a soldier, Mao was a disaster. He absented himself from the fight onevery possible occasion...usually holing up in the biggest, safest, mostluxurious house in the area...generally feasting and resting...while hisgang of killers did their work. Ordered by the Marxist hierarchy to jointhe battle, he would take his army in the opposite direction...or justwait out the fight and then come in afterwards. Why the party leadershipdidn't kill him is a mystery...an oversight that they later greatlyregretted.Very early in his career, he experienced the thrill of brutality. It gavehim "a kind of ecstasy never experienced before...it is wonderful...it iswonderful..." he said. To say that he was hard-hearted was a bit likesaying the Peking sewer is malodorous; it fails to capture the smellvividly enough. Mao would take part in torture sessions. He would condemnentire villages to starvation. He would waste his own soldiers inpointless battles and unnecessary suffering. Even on the famous 'LongMarch' he did little marching himself. His skinny soldiers had to carryhim on a litter! Military men are often blockheads, at least the best of them are, but Maowas in a class by himself. The Long March was so long partly because Maowasn't going anywhere. He marched his men uphill and down...hundreds ofmiles this way and that...with meager rations...and almost no medicalattention, even to the wounded...just to avoid going to a rendezvous thatmight weaken his political grip. He was supposed to link up with anotherarmy boss, one just as ruthless as he was.The communists' main enemy at the time - almost everyone hated them - wasChiang Kai-Chek. But Chiang had already decided to let the Reds get away.Still, Mao managed to stir up fights that decimated his little army. AtTucheng, for example, Mao put his own troops in about the worst possibleposition - with their backs to the Red River - and faced the best ofChiang's force. Naturally, the communists were nearly wiped out...whileMao watched from a nearby mountain. Of those red soldiers who weren'tkilled in the fighting itself, many soon died of cold and wounds...or werekilled by the local farmers who were getting even for way they communistshad treated them. Wherever he went, Mao handled the locals with such nakedbrutality...he caused revolts - against the revolutionaries!The whole Long March is nothing but a recitation of one Mao-causedcalamity after another. But the gods must have had a sour sense of humorin the 1930s...they let Mao, Adolf and Josef rise to power anyway.While Mao was a dud of a general, he was a bad joke of a politicalphilosopher. Early in his life, he might have been a follower of Ayn Rand."People like me only have a duty to ourselves, " he wrote. We have no dutyto other people." Later, he dipped his fork into Marxism like a Westernteenager sampling sushi. He was not too sure what was in it, and wasn'ttoo eager to find out. Instead, he took Emperor Qin Shihuangdi (221-206BC) who founded imperial China as his model. Qin's empire lasted nearlytwo thousand years. Not only did he build the Great Wall, he also killedConfucian scholars, burned classical books, and persecuted thousands -perhaps millions - of people. It was his single-minded pursuit of power that made Mao so successful. Hisrivals actually believed the Marxist claptrap. They took their orders fromthe party hierarchy and earnestly tried to implement many silly andimpossible programs. When Mao gained the support of Moscow, his Chinesecontemporaries felt their hands were tied; they knew he was trouble, butthey couldn't get rid of him.Mao operated under no such restriction. He eliminated enemies and friends- as it suited him. He listened to Moscow when he wanted to; when Moscowgave him directions he didn't like, he ignored them. He was not a 'goodcommunist.' He was hardly a communist at all. "Communism is not love," he said. "Communism is a hammer we use to crushthe enemy."But it is in his relations with the fair sex, that the worst of Mao isvisible. When it came to women, the Great Helmsman was more than abungler... or a brute....he was a cad.He married one woman...and then dismissed her. The next bore him twochildren. Scarcely 18 months later, he was conducting some atrociouscampaign of murder...and brought his army up near where she lived. Maocould have and should have immediately gotten his wife out of harm'sway...but he didn't. His enemies seized the poor woman and put her todeath, hoping to strike a blow at Mao's heart in that way. But the manseemed not even to notice. He had new paramour by then and had forgottenspouse number two. The new girlfriend, Gui-yuan, then became his third wife and had a babyduring the Long March. Again, Mao was nearby but did not come to see her.Thinking to save her baby from the appalling conditions prevailing, shegave it to a local farmer, along with a sum of money to pay for its care.It soon died. Then, Gui-yuan herself nearly died when she was struck by one of Chiang'sbombs. Doctors said she only had a few hours to live and her pain was sogreat that she even begged her comrades to put her out of her misery. Onceagain, Mao, who was in a nearby village, said he was too 'tired' to comesee her. More to come...Regards,Bill BonnerThe Daily Reckoning