Oh, wait … that's Shakira ... Shakira's Hips Don't Lie …

It's Rule 5 Saturday!

Boy, first Comcast disses me, and now I don't even make the Official Rule 5 Sunday post. Apparently, I just plain suck!

With the lovely and gracious Shakira at our side, today we look at one of the current Washington regime's favorite political philosophers, Chairman Mao.

“How to Get a Million Hits on Your Blog in Less Than a Year!”

Shakira (32-24-37) was born on February 2, 1977 in Columbia. The name Shakira means grateful or thankful in Arabic. She wrote her first poem at age 4, and wrote her first song at age 8 (after her older brother was killed in a motorcycle accident).

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After graduating high school, she made her third studio album, Pies Descalzos, selling over 5 million copies and bringing herself great fame in Latin America.

Shakira recorded 2 more albums, including an MTV Unplugged album, and gained global recognition. In 2001, she recorded her fourth album, Laundry Service, a cross-over album in English and has been a sensation ever since.

MAO: THE UNKNOWN STORY

Like a bolt of lightening, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece Gulag Archipelago, published in 1974, destroyed in an instant over fifty years of lies and deceit about the Soviet Union and its leaders. Stalin would never again be seen as kindly Uncle Joe, but as a ruthless killer of millions.

Some scholars suggest that it was Solzhenitsyn’s revelations that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union rather than Ronald Reagan’s strategy of “spending the ‘evil empire’ into oblivion.”

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Like the “Gulag,” we finally have this extraordinary work by Jung Chang and husband Jon Halliday that will forever end the web of lies that has insulated Chairman Mao from his true place in history as the worst murderer the world has known.

Mao: The Unknown Story (Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, New York: Knopf, 2005) is a step-by-step guide to how this evil man used terror as a tool to subjugate every Chinese citizen. Fear of a horrible, slow death, torture, and humiliation silenced every voice. Only what the Chairman said or thought mattered.

You must read this book.

It wasn’t fashionable to criticize Mao in the West, particularly in the US. In San Francisco’s Chinatown, only the local Kuomintang, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party, attacked Mao and they were marginalized as “reactionaries.”

During the hippie era of the 1960s, in many households, Mao’s Little Red Book was a popular Christmas stocking stuffer. Mao was thought of as a modern Confucius, a gentle peasant who had freed China from its corrupt warlords.

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Was it the media that promoted this false image about the worst tyrant who ever lived? It’s time to know the real Mao.

You must read this book.

Clearly the authors despise Mao, so it was essential that they support their 650-page treatise with an additional 200 pages of meticulously researched notes. Not just scholarly citations, but countless interviews with people who worked for, or otherwise knew Mao personally, and survived the violence of his regime. The notes also include many official documents that have not been seen in the West before.

Mao wanted to impress Stalin and modeled his state after that killer-thug. He then proceeded to “one-up” his Soviet teacher. Stalin would wait for the right moment to use violence and treachery against his enemies. Mao was brazen and did not need a timetable. He used torture and murder on a daily basis to control fellow communists.

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Chairman Mao made it known that his tactics were never on holiday. Often his punishment was meted out in front of huge crowds. This was certain to spread the news quickly. “Watch out! Everyone is a potential spy. And you could be next.”

The masses were easy to control. He simply starved them to death.

In the end, Mao had either killed or imprisoned, or sent to work camps so many of his former officials that he had run out of credible bureaucrats to run the day-to-day business of government.

He had no choice but to “rehabilitate” some that he had purged earlier, like the “Capitalist Roader,” Deng Xiao-ping. These men hated Mao, and the Chairman made a critical error in underestimating how they would undermine him as his health began to fail.

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Most interesting was the revelation that the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek (who later fled to Taiwan) was thwarted in his earlier negotiations with Mao because the Soviets were holding Chiang’s son “hostage.” By appeasing Stalin and Mao, Chiang hoped he would get his son back.

During his reign of terror, Mao forced the peasants to grow huge amounts of wheat and eggs and other foodstuffs to give to Stalin in return for technical information on how to build The Bomb. Mao starved his already poverty-stricken people and conducted public executions if quotas were not met. Business as usual for Chairman Mao.

Mao turned the country into one big concentration camp and he was the gatekeeper, allowing in selected outsiders, controlling what they saw so that when they returned home they would glorify what the Chairman had accomplished for his people.

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Mao had little difficulty locating western media whores who would promote the lies about Mao and life in Red China and spread them like a deadly virus. There should be a special place in Hell for these people.

If there is a deficiency in this book, Mao: The Unknown Story, it is that after hundreds of pages outlining Mao’s unspeakable cruelty, the reader becomes numb and desensitized. The fault is not the author’s, but with the endless crush of evidence present.

As an antidote to becoming desensitized, keep in mind that this is not about a madman like Pol Pot. Mao may, in fact, match the crazed Cambodian in savagery. But, there’s a major difference; Today, Pol Pot, often considered a protégé of Mao’s, is a statistic in the World List of Lunatics, while Mao retains his place as a great figure in world history. This remains true twenty years after the Chairman’s death. Well, until this Chang and Halliday masterpiece.

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You must read this book.

Here are some tidbits from Mao: The Unknown Story:

• A conservative estimate is that 70 million perished—in
peacetime—as a result of Mao’s misrule.
• During the famous, “Long March,” rather than trudging
along with the troops, Mao reclined in an elaborate “litter”
weighted down with his favorite books and other comforts, all
carried by peasants forced to perform like pack animals.
• Mao spent about US$4.1 billion to create a Chinese atomic
bomb. That money if spent on food would have saved the 38
million Chinese lives lost in the famine.

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In a recent TV ad promoting the 2008 Summer Olympic Games to be held in Beijing, China, the camera focused on what appears to be Tiananmen Square. In the center of the screen, lo and behold, is a giant portrait of the despicable Chairman Mao.

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Why do nations continue to show reverence for their tyrants?

Yes an economic miracle is taking place in today’s China. The by-product of such an explosion is always freedom. China is a long way from being a totally free society, but, if this book, Mao: The Unknown Story, leads to the Mao portraits finally being torn down, that will be a giant symbolic stride toward individual freedom in China.

And maybe in other countries as well.

Burton S. Blumert, Bagels, Barry Bonds, and Rotten Politicians (pdf).