Though widely decried for its historical inaccuracies, the 1619 Project, conceived two years ago by Nikole Hannah-Jones, the New York Times, and the New York Times Magazine, offers interesting possibilities for the future.
The possibility of a 1949 Project, for instance.
After all, the People’s Republic of China is now near-universally recognized as the West’s most dangerous antagonist. Surely a 1949 Project, detailing for an untutored world the evil nature of the communist regime’s founders, their principles, and their revolutionary deeds, is long overdue.
Such a project should begin by acknowledging that Mao Zedong was never a believing communist or socialist. Mao came from peasant stock, but he had no sympathy for either the Chinese peasantry or the Chinese people as a whole. Mao, who despised Confucius for having counseled that a leader must care for his subjects, ordered Confucius’s home destroyed during the Cultural Revolution.
Mao launched that revolution in 1966 partly to eradicate 3,500 years of Chinese civilization. Like Shakespeare’s Iago, Mao was worse than a nihilist — he was a sadistic monster who embraced evil purely for evil’s sake. “Conscience is only there to restrain [in the interest of the self], not to oppose,” Mao wrote. “People like me only have a duty to ourselves. … Some say one has a responsibility for history. I don’t believe it. I am only concerned about developing myself.”
“Developing myself” meant for Mao acquiring unlimited power in order to destroy China and recreate it. “This formula applies [also] to mankind. … The destruction of the universe is the same.” After 1964, having acquired the atomic bomb with the aid of the Soviet Union, Mao’s ambition was boundless. He sought global control.
Mao was directly responsible for the deaths of perhaps more than 70 million of his own people. During the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961), he deliberately condemned 38 million people to death from starvation and overwork. These innocents were forced to surrender their harvests to the government, which exported them to finance industrial development and the production of armaments. That included the atomic bomb to allow Mao to recreate the universe.
While the peasantry subsisted on leaves and bark and people died by the millions, Mao argued that 500 calories a day were sufficient to support life. Regardless, Mao suggested, death is a beautiful thing that fertilizes the earth. In the cause of world revolution, “Working like this, with all these projects, half of China may well have to die.”
During the Cultural Revolution, Mao barbarized the entire country to achieve his real goal: purging the Communist Party of his enemies. Mao believed in nothing, including posthumous fame, except for his present power. In this sense, Mao was never a revolutionary at all. He was a satanic monomaniac with a will to annihilating power that exceeded anything Friedrich Nietzsche ever imagined.
Mao’s successors have been saner and more moderate rulers. The most enlightened of them was Deng Xiaoping, who sought with some success to take China into the modern global economic system. By comparison, Xi Jinping is a sort of quasi-Maoist: a nationalist and a Leninist determined to make China the world’s dominant superpower.
The contemporary American Left is keen on deconstructing the history of the United States, which is, in its mind, the most single most oppressive power on Earth. It should turn next to the deconstruction of Chinese history from the end of the Qing dynasty in 1911 to Xi’s accession to power.
Chilton Williamson, Jr. is the former editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture and a senior editor at National Review. His latest novel, The Last Westerner, is due out next year.
