“Not to have a correct political point of view is like having no soul.”
Wow, really? No soul? Isn’t that a little extreme?
Yes, but then, those are the words of Mao Zedong, the Chinese communist leader with the extreme distinction of having caused more deaths than any person in human history – 50 to 70 million, more than Stalin and Hitler combined.
Mao was a rabid believer in “political correctness.” In fact, he wrote the book.
Mao’s 1967 book – officially titled “Mao Zedong on People’s War” (though better known as Mao’s “Little Red Book”) – became the ultimate authority for political correctness during the 1960s. Carried around by millions of Chinese during the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” of 1968, the small, red-plastic-bound book consisted of quotes from Mao’s various writings, including such classics as “Significance of Agrarian Reforms in China,” “Strategic Problems of China’s Revolutionary War,” “On the Rectification of Incorrect Ideas in the Party,” “A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire” and “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People.”
So, while he was busy transforming China through massive “wealth redistribution” (using violence and terror to seize feudal landowners’ large estates and creating “people’s communes” in their place), leading guerrilla wars, promoting China’s “self-reliance,” writing poetry and philosophy, imposing insane policies that brought about unprecedented levels of death through war, starvation and even mass suicides – not to mention horribly torturing to death thousands of opponents and critics – the still-revered “Chairman Mao” was obsessed with making sure everybody embraced the “correct” views.
A few excerpts from the once-ubiquitous “Little Red Book” demonstrate just how fanatical Mao was about political correctness – which, whether on an American university campus or a communist dictatorship, amounts to the gradual, long-term conditioning (brainwashing) of the population:
- “Where do correct ideas come from? Do they drop from the skies? No. Are they innate in the mind? No. They come from social practice and from it alone. They come from three kinds of social practice: the struggle for production, the class struggle and scientific experiment.” (“Where Do Correct Ideas Come from?,” May 1963, 1st pocket ed., Page 1.)
- “… [T]he Communist Party has always advocated a firm and correct political orientation. … This orientation is inseparable from a style of hard struggle. Without a firm and correct political orientation, it is impossible to promote a style of hard struggle. Without the style of hard struggle, it is impossible to maintain a firm and correct political orientation.” (“Speech at the Yenan Rally in Celebration of International Labor Day,” May 1, 1939.)
- “A commander’s correct dispositions stem from his correct decisions, his correct decisions stem from his correct judgments, and his correct judgments stem from a thorough and necessary reconnaissance and from pondering on and piecing together the data of various kinds gathered through reconnaissance.” (“Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War,” December 1936, Selected Works, Vol. I, Page 188.)
- “A Communist should have largeness of mind and he should be staunch and active, looking upon the interests of the revolution as his very life and subordinating his personal interests to those of the revolution; always and everywhere he should adhere to principle and wage a tireless struggle against all incorrect ideas and actions … Only thus can he be considered a Communist.” (“Combat Liberalism,” Sept. 7, 1937, Selected Works, Vol. II, Page 33.)
- “In order to guarantee that our Party and country do not change their color, we must not only have a correct line and correct policies but must train and bring up millions of successors who will carry on the cause of proletarian revolution.” (“On Khrushchev’s Phony Communism and Its Historical Lessons for the World,” July 14, 1964, Pages 72-74.)
- “Be a pupil before you become a teacher; learn from the cadres at the lower levels before you issue orders…. What the cadres at the lower levels say may or may not be correct, after hearing it, we must analyze it. We must heed the correct views and act upon them…. Listen also to the mistaken views from below, it is wrong not to listen to them at all. Such views, however, are not to be acted upon but to be criticized.” (“Methods of Work of Party Committees,” March 13, 1949, Selected Works, Vol. IV, Pages 378-379.)
You get the idea. Like all sociopathic tyrants who have managed to extinguish their own conscience, Mao had a big task before him: how to suppress (if not extinguish) the conscience of hundreds of millions of people by manipulating and conditioning them into thinking the exact same way – which he deemed the “correct” way. His “Little Red Book” was the instruction manual China’s people were required to follow. But what made that nation’s uniquely bloody “cultural revolution” work was not the natural logic and virtue of Mao’s words – for they had none – but the people’s fear and dread of the consequences of failing to embrace them.
Contrast Mao’s book, reportedly the second most widely read book in history (or at least the most widely carried), with the Bible – the most widely read book in history. Both books point to a supposedly “correct” way of being, thinking, speaking and living. But unlike Marxism and other supremely foolish man-made philosophies and ideologies that must be superimposed on us from the outside and thereby violate our minds and souls, the Bible’s fundamental principles do not conflict with human nature. Indeed, human nature and the Bible share the same Author.
So, for example, the Ten Commandments say don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t commit adultery, don’t murder, don’t envy and so on. But our own conscience, a little bit of divine understanding tucked into each one of us by our Creator, tells us the same thing – that stealing, lying, adultery, murder and envy are wrong. Unlike Marxist political correctness – courtesy of either the tyrant Mao Zedong in China, or brain-dead, left-wing radicals in the U.S. – the Bible doesn’t create some new moral code that makes no sense; it invites us to embrace the one already within us, and that we know deep down to be right and just.
According to Mao, lying for the glorious revolution is fine, as is murder – he did a whole lot of both. Adultery is also fine with Mao, who led by example, according to accounts of his personal life. And of course, envy is the very root of Marxism (Churchill dubbed socialism “the gospel of envy”). So, just like previous delusional Marxist thinkers, Mao bequeathed to the world an alternate, inverted “scripture” from hell.
This is even more chilling when one considers that Barack Obama’s former White House communications director, Anita Dunn – who publicly attacked Fox News as illegitimate, called it a wing of the Republican Party and “opinion journalism masquerading as news” – claimed in a speech to students that Mao Zedong is one of her “favorite political philosophers.”
America is not China. We have a precious heritage of liberty and independence here that’s part of our national DNA. Yet the left has injected a very different “genetic code” into the population, the result of which is an ever-progressing mutation of our national identity.
Perhaps half of us still resonate with the founders’ and the Bible’s ideals, while the other half are either confused or brainwashed by the seductive words of silver-tongued sociopaths. And the future of the most magnificent nation on earth hangs precariously in the balance.
Related column: “‘Political correctness’ is totalitarian mind control” by David Kupelian
The preceding was excerpted from a much more comprehensive article – titled “Magic words: The left’s secret weapon for transforming traditional America” by David Kupelian – in the May issue of Whistleblower magazine, “THE ALINSKY CODE.”