Or to put it another way, that Xi Jinping is a “son of Mao’s spirit.”
At the beginning of his new book, The Devil and Communist China: From Mao Down to Xi, Steven Mosher too broadly characterizes the nature of communism, saying that it is “the pernicious idea that man could create his own heaven on earth.”
This description leaves open what one might regard as a heaven on earth and what means of achieving it one would regard as consistent with this vision. But the idea that a government or a political party or a party-state can create a “heaven on earth” or utopia by means of totalitarian central planning is certainly pernicious, productive in practice only of hell on earth. And Mosher, prolific scholar of modern China and president of the Population Research Institute, gives plenty of details of what communism and the communism of China and Mao Zedong (1893-1976) have meant in practice.
Nowhere has the death toll from this tyrannical system been higher than in China. This was not a necessary consequence of the country’s large population. Rather, it followed directly from the proclivities of the evil genius who imposed Communism on the Chinese people. As we shall see, Mao Zedong spent his nights thinking of new ways to terrorize the Chinese people to get them to obey the dictates of his adopted faith, ways that invariably involved the stigmatization, torture, and execution of millions of people….
If Mao had not emerged victorious from the [Chinese Communist Party’s] vicious intra-party struggles of the 1930s and ’40s, some other lawless, narcissistic, power-hungry megalomaniac would have fought his way to the top…. Lenin’s dictum—“Whatever furthers the revolution is ethical”—attracts cold, heartless psychopaths like honey attracts flies.
As for Xi Jinping, China’s current dictator, he “takes Mao as his model in all things. It is why he and other top leaders continue to commit crimes against people and groups in China” resembling the crimes committed by “his long-dead master. He, like Mao, believes that ‘morality begins at the point of a gun.’ ”
Mosher tells Breitbart News that no one “has channeled Mao more successfully than the current leader of China, Xi Jinping. Xi may not be the son of Mao’s flesh, but he is the son of Mao’s spirit, a loathsome master of subterfuge and machination.”
Mosher seems to think that some form of religious perspective is the only viable moral bulwark against communism. At the beginning of his book, he invites the reader, before joining him in an exploration of “the dark abyss of evil that Mao wrought in China and in his own life,” to “resolve to enthrone Jesus in our hearts and live for Him on earth.” Pass.
Mosher also tells Westminster Institute that in writing the book he discovered that the best way “to see Mao through the lens of natural law…was by tackling Mao from the perspective of the Ten Commandments,” a law that “is written in the human heart irrespective of times, and places, and civilizations, and religions.”
This is another point at which we part company. I don’t think that the Ten Commandments are a definitive moral guide or that knowledge of valid moral principles is innate or “written in the human heart.” It’s not hard in most circumstances for human beings to attain some moral awareness even when very young. This awareness does not come preinstalled, though. We learn and develop.
I do agree with the bottom line about Mao, that he is “one of the most evil people in human history” and that later practitioners of Mao’s legacy inherit this assessment.
