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1) For a while now, I've been thinking about a particular story from Mao's China. He did a lot of criminal and monstrous things, killing millions of his own people, but this is the one I keep coming back to. Let's THREAD.
2) He was obsessed with how backwards was China was compared to the industrialized West. So he came up with a great idea: the peasants should all build furnaces in their backyards, and melt down their tools, pots and pans to make steel!
3) This was, of course, a complete disaster. It produced no usable steel, and the loss of the tools/implements/fuel contributed significantly to the Great Chinese Famine, which, as said, killed millions. Read about it here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_…
4) So, okay, Mao was an insane murderous tyrant. But he didn't (AFAIK) kill a single person himself. He didn't build a single furnace, melt a single plow. Who did?
5) The peasants, of course, had little choice: obey or die. But what about the men who showed up with guns? Or the men who commanded them, and those who commanded them, and up the chain?
6) A group of people around Mao -- some of whom must have known this was insane nonsense -- said, Yes, sir! Maybe they feared for their lives. Probably, they feared for their position in a highly stratified society. They were comfortable and safe and wanted to stay that way.
7) And those people ordered their subordinates -- who must have also known it was crazy, but were equally afraid for their position/safety -- and on and on down to the bottom strata where people had no choice so they obeyed and then they died.
8) People professed to believe something insane, and threatened to kill other people in pursuit of that insanity. We tend to think that this has something to do with an "authoritarian mindset" in other countries that make those people susceptible to this.
9) But I think we can say now, with the sweep of history, that behavior this is not Chinese. Or Russian. Or Muslim or African or German or Latin American. It is human. And it is far, far more likely than we ever want to admit.
