the absolute madman

>>>/pol/

>>57757852
I see you're new.

This does not belong on /pol/, as Terry A. Davis is involved in the post, a tech legend.

will he one day go full allahu ackbar?

>>57757130
>Atheists never caused any wars
When will this meme end? Stalin and mao were militant atheists and they got a much bigger high score than any theist that ever lived. Mao got 78 million and Stalin got 20 million compared to n Hitler's (debatable) 15 million.

>>57758287
Oh I thought this was a religious thread.

>>57758497
Far from it. Now install Temple OS and praise the lord with Terry.

I want off this planet.

>>57758359
He did years ago, killed a CIA nigger with his car and scored one for the good guys

>>57758378
Mao is widely credited in the West with tens of millions of killings (49-78,000,000) but the sources are generally vague and contradictory. It is particularly difficult to pin down the deaths of the Cultural Revolution on him. Even assuming that the numbers are correct (and living witnesses saw very few people die during those years), Mao certainly started it, but after a few months he had lost control over the events, and there is no evidence whatsoever that he ordered or approved the many killings committed in the name of the Cultural Revolution: they were not carried out by the army or the police but by radicals. Crimes committed by the "red guards" cannot be automatically blamed on him. His wife Jiang Qing is widely despised in China and considered to have exerted an evil influence on those events (and was eventually arrested). In 1968 Mao called for "Big Unity" between the radical and conservative factions that were fighting all over China (not for more blood but for less blood). Before dying he appointed Hua Guofeng, a provincial governor, as his successor bypassing all the senior officials who were responsible for the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution indirectly caused starvation, but the number of people who died of that starvation is probably lower than Westerners thought (again, judging from living witnesses) and he can only be considered indirectly responsible for them. A failed policy does not constitute "genocide."

>>57760485
I read Burying Mao, The Unknown Story and many other books on China. I also happen to travel frequently to China (3 months total over 2014-15) and have Chinese friends both in the USA and China who grew up during the Cultural Revolution. I am obviously not a fan of the Chinese regime (my website is banned in China) but my view is that we still don't have a clear understanding of what happened under Mao. None of my Chinese friends and none of their parents know someone who was killed during the 1950s/60s: not a family member, not a friend, not a neighbor, not even a friend's friend's friend. Contrast with the Holocaust: virtually every older German and Pole knows of at least one Jewish family that disappeared during World War II. Nonetheless, all books on Mao published in the West routinely talk of millions killed under Mao. But there is really no study to justify those numbers. Whenever you read that he is responsible for 10, 20, 30... 70 million deaths, you should notice that they don't provide any evidence that would fly in a court of law. We literally don't have the names of those 70 million people who supposedly were killed under Mao (we do have the names of the people killed in Hitler's death camps, and the names of the people killed in Stalin's gulags). The avalanche of anti-Mao books started in the 1980s after Deng Xiaoping launched an ideological campaign against the legacy of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Ye Jian Ying's speech in 1979 and Liu Zeng's report of 1981 (both attacking the Great Leap Forward) were widely publicized by the Communist Party. Many books published in the West are simply quoting the figures published by Deng's clique back then without realizing that Deng's agenda was not to tell the truth but to defeat his opponents within the Communist Party. His enemies were the ones who had worked with Mao on the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, therefore Deng had to discredit both events.

>>57760517
We cannot trust any study published in China in the 1980s, at the peak of this ideological war, but most Western books are based precisely on those "revelations". The first major Western "studies" about Mao's massacres came out in the China Quarterly, and to this day those "studies" are routinely plagiarized in books and magazines. Well, we now know that this journal was covertly funded by the CIA (London Review of Books, Volume 23, no. 10, 24 May 2001). That magazine never funded any study aimed at defending Mao. It only funded studied to discredit him. Eyewitness accounts cited by Jasper Becker, Jung Chang, and others are just not enough to conclude that tens of millions of people were killed. At most, an impartial jury would reach the conclusion that Mao is responsible for a few thousand deaths (keeping aside the civil war during which atrocities were committed by both sides). I respect historians like Richard Baum, Frank Dikotter, Jung Chang, Judith Banister, Richard MacFarquhar, etc but for every book that alleges Mao is responsible for those deaths one could write a book alleging the opposite. It is just that in the West we don't have historians interested in defending Mao. It wouldn't be difficult to write a book showing that the Great Leap Forward actually improved China's economy and that life expectancy in the 1960s increased (a number that is hardly consistent with the claim that 70 million people died a premature death). I could list dozens of papers published over the years by economists, sociologists and technologists who had no political agenda but happen to reach conclusions that one could use to paint a brighter picture of Mao's era. (I have no interest in doing this because i don't like Mao, and wouldn't want to spend the rest of my life defending those papers).

>>57760532
In other words, we tend to be victims of China's own anti-Mao propaganda, taking for literally true what was originally a project to marginalize Mao's allies. That project succeeded, but it doesn't mean that Mao's allies were lying and that Mao's enemies were telling the truth. We don't really scrutinize anti-Mao books the same way we scrutinize books on other subjects. Banister, for example, assumes "under-reporting of deaths" and unilaterally decides how many people died. She is not saying "people reported x number of deaths" but "people did not report x number of deaths" and then goes on to conclude that millions died. Chang claims to have interviewed Mao's English teacher Zhang Hanzhi, not knowing that Zhang read the New York Times, and, having found out about that claim, she wrote to the newspaper that she never even met Chang. If this had been a book attacking George W Bush, Fox News would have spent days hammering it. But nobody does it when it's a book about Mao.

>>57760485
That radicals committed cruelties instead of Mao or the Red Guard doesn't really detract from the point that militant atheism caused such things; not to mention its inspiration for more and better documented atrocities further south.

The Holocaust also happened within a much smaller area and pool of people. If a madman kills two people in small town USA, everyone from that town's gonna know someone affected as well.