According to Diane Abbott, Labour’s international development spokesman, “Mao did more good than wrong.” Specifically, he left his country “on the verge of great economic success.”
This shows an enviable consistency of opinion, for back in 2008 Miss Abbott explained to a TV audience that “I suppose that… Mao did more good than wrong. We can’t say that about the Nazis.”
Well, I don’t know about the balance (or rather I do and will get to it later), but the Nazis had their moments too. For example, they were the first to establish a link between smoking and lung cancer, thanks to which cancer rates in West Germany remained lower than in the rest of Europe for decades.
This was achieved without staging any ghastly experiments on animals, to which Miss Abbott no doubt objects. Of course the Nazis had no shortage of eager human volunteers, but at least Hitler looked after animal welfare.
Moreover, Hitler, Hess and quite a few other leading Nazis occupied the high moral ground by being vegetarian. It has taken the idea some time to catch on, but now, even though most of us regrettably still insist on devouring the bodies of murdered animals, we know exactly where true virtue lies.
As to economic success, Hitler eliminated unemployment and energised German industry to a point where it continued to crank out weaponry even when most of it lay in ruins due to Allied bombing campaigns (which I, presumably along with Miss Abbott, deplore). Then again, Nazi industrialists had access to cheap labour generously provided by such work centres as Auschwitz.
So you see, Mao isn’t the only one who did good things as well as bad. Stalin could also boast – and the Russian press is still boasting for him – that he took over a Russia of the plough and left her with the hydrogen bomb. The greatest war industry the world had ever seen was created from scratch in less than 10 years in the 1930s – if that’s not a great economic achievement, I don’t know what is.
As to Mao, he murdered, by executions, privation and artificial famines, 70 million of his citizens, a fact more indisputable than the rather mythical ‘economic success’ on the verge of which he left the country. On which side of Miss Abbott’s ledger does this fact appear?
Naturally, as a communist in all but name, she can justify mass murder dialectically. Thesis: 70 million were murdered. Antithesis: They died in a good cause. Synthesis: Their deaths, lamentable as they must be, left China “on the verge of great economic success”. Marx himself couldn’t have done better, and as to Hegel, he was a rank amateur.
China’s ‘great economic success’ was all about creating a slave economy on millions of corpses. That someone like Abbott would be ignorant enough to know nothing about economics and amoral enough not to care about millions of victims is par for the course – she is, after all, a communist in all but name and, which is worse, Jeremy Corbyn’s ex-mistress.
Even mentioning this disgusting woman in polite conversation would be pointless and ill-advised – except for one minor detail. She is a member of Parliament. And of the shadow cabinet. And of the elite that governs us.
It pains me that Great Britain – Great Britain! – is governed by an elite including a creature who thinks that creating a slave economy that benefits a small group and leaves the rest starving justifies 70 million dead – and the rest starving.
From here there’s but a small moral step (if a greater physical one) to being governed by ISIS. At least those chaps don’t pretend to be respectable.