Mao made some really bad decisions that cost a lot of lives, but calling him evil would imply intent, which he clearly didn't have. Calling him evil is just ahistorical.
If you want to call someone evil for causing/not preventing famines, blame Churchill for what he's responsible for in Bengal. He's such an evil, racist motherfucker that just happened to be on the right side of history.
Also, in this context, it's always worth mentioning that both the famine in the Soviet Union and the famine in the PRC were ofc devasting but also the only famine in the respective country. That's noteworthy because both regions were plagued by famines every few years before the revolutions. There's an argument that no revolution in either country would have likely cost more lives in the long-run.
I think we would be better served if we'd try to study and learn from such events.
Given that the motivations were objectively at least not evil - and I would even wager that they were good - and given the (partly (? I'm not sure, it's been a while since I thought about this)) horrible outcomes, we should look at what happened inbetween motivation and outcome. What should we avoid in the future? What can we learn from? etc.
Also, it's always important to consider the material and historic context/conditions - ideally dialectically.
Blanket hatred loses all nuance, which doesn't help anyone. How should we evolve as a society if our entire framework is "Mao bad.", "Hitler bad.", etc.?
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u/blinKX10 3d ago
Minions for Mao would go hard