General

After finishing The Unknown Mao, I understand that history’s second worst mass murderer, Joseph Stalin, died one week before I was born. Stalin’s protege, Mao Tse tung, went on to murder seventy million people during the time that I was living a “Leave It To Beaver” existence in Christian America.

During that time, I had absolutely no knowledge of the atrocities taking place. Mao murdered seventy million people. Seventy million. That’s like annihilating nearly 25% of of the US population.

Mao died just one month prior to my wedding day in 1976. At that time, I didn’t have a clue that Mao Tse Tung was the face of evil.

I now understand and weep.

Let’s analyze what the face of evil looks like–but more importantly, turn it around to discuss how we should live in this needy world.

I realize that talking about evil is not a pleasant subject. Shirley kept asking me why I was reading about Mao during the lazy, hazy days of summer. I said we can always learn good–even by looking at evil. One of our treasured Youth With A Mission principles is that believers should always move in the opposite spirit of Satan, his demons, and world. We should “overcome evil with good” (Romans 12:21).

One way we learn is to understand and expose sin–then ask God to empower us to do exactly the opposite. That’s my prayer for you.

First, her are some items about Mao Tse-tung that you might find interesting:

• He was born on December 26, 1893 in Shaoshan, Hunan Province, China into a middle class family. Wikipedia makes it sound like he was a “peasant” who made it big–but that is not true. His family had more than most–which led to his education and rise to power.
• Mao wrote and recited many poems during his lifetime. When Richard Nixon visited him for the second time in February 1976, Mao provided an evening of entertainment which included Mao’s favorite classical poems set to music–which mostly spoke of the tragic end of fallen leaders!
• Mao knew almost nothing about economics and oftentimes got numbers wrong–by either thousands or millions. No wonder the “Five Year” collectivist plans didn’t work so well.
• He loved luxury, and demanded numerous “villas” and palaces all over China. Most of them, he never lodged in.
• Mao rarely traveled out of China, but on a couple of visits to see Stalin in Moscow, he brought a wooden bed with him (he liked sleeping on boards), and had his hosts build a platform on top of the toilet because he preferred squatting.
• When millions were dying of starvation in 1966-67, Mao was dining on special foods provided by his vast entourage. Even his chef and servants stole scraps from his table because they, too, were mal-nourished.
• During his 27 years of ruling China, Mao never took one bath or shower. He preferred his personal servants clean him up with warm towels each day. He also swam in the pools he had constructed in his luxurious villas.
• Russia completely bank rolled the Chinese Revolution in which Mao emerged as the most ruthless–and hence effective leader (from a communist standpoint).
• Mao helped start the Korean War to get Stalin’s help in building his military/industrial complex. He secretly sent 300,000 Chinese soldiers to their deaths in Korea to “wear down” the Americans. He said that the Yankees couldn’t tell the difference between Chinese and Koreans because both had black hair.
• When he reached the pinnacle of power and declared China a communist state in 1949, Mao was the only millionaire in the nation. He had already spent twenty years looting and stealing from the landowners in the countryside.
• Mao spent his last days in a building called 202 in Zhongnanhai. He was taken there after a massive earthquake killed over 240,000 Chinese. His life was filled with hatred, frustration and self-pity. He complained to his aides that after his death there would be “upheaval,” “winds smelling of blood” and that “What’s going to happen to you, heaven only knows.”
• He died a bitter man, with only two “girlfriends” at his side just after midnight on September 9, 1976.

So what were the sinful traits–the face of evil–that one sees so openly in the life of Mao?

 1. Bitterness toward and alienation from his father

Mao’s father, Li-chang, considered Mao, his first son to survive infancy, to be arrogant, idle, and lazy. Mao talked back to his tutors and was dismissed from three schools. He hated his father, and his bitterness manifested itself all his life. He didn’t even attend his father’s funeral.

Mao displayed a rebellious streak from childhood–and it especially showed itself toward his earthly father. This estrangement set the trajectory of his life–and led to great dysfunction in his own family and all subsequent relationships.

2. Immorality

Mao was a grossly immoral man. He “used and abused” four wives over his lifetime, and none of his marriages ended well. Two of his wives had mental problems and went crazy, one was killed in a communist “purge” when she was 28. His last wife–actress Jiang Qing (the infamous Madame Mao), was the up front leader of the “Cultural Revolution” that took three million lives. She committed suicide in 1991.

Mao slept with hundreds of other Chinese women. He once said he couldn’t go “forty days without sex,” and any female would do. He traveled nearly fifty times to a certain city to party and hook up with “young girls.” His eightieth birthday was not spent with his wife Jiang Qing, but with five former girlfriends.

3. Unconcern for children

Mao Tse-tung fathered at least six children, yet unlike the parents of numerous generations of Chinese kids (and others around the world), he never cared for them. Half of his children were “lost” in the various purges and upheavals. His oldest son died in the Korean conflict and Mao was never close to his two daughters by Jiang Qing. Only once did he show interest in a child–after he had a nervous breakdown and was fighting for his life.

Of the millions who died under his reign of terror, a good portion were children who starved to death due to his draconian policies.  During the collective farm era, he even toyed with the idea of doing away with names and calling people by a “number.” That’s what human beings–especially young ones–were to Mao. They were faceless objects, not to nurture and care for, but to serve the interests of the state.

4. Lack of pity for people

One truth about Mao that hit me deeply was his total lack of empathy and compassion for people. In fact, his rise to the top of the communist party was due to his complete disregard for human life.

Mao had compassion for no one. When thousands of people were murdered and lands were confiscated from the “evil” landlords of the nation, Mao exulted in the chaos and said, “Wow, this is fantastic! Kill more. Kill more!” He oftentimes presided over the mass execution of “counter-insurgents,” even burying hundreds of people alive and doing so with a smile.

When thirty-eight million people were starving and died during the man-made famine of 1966-67, Mao ordered the grain rations of the peasants to be cut back so that he could send more military exports around the world. He quipped that the people could live on “tree bark and grass.” When they resorted to cannibalism to survive, he turned a blind eye to their suffering.

5. Self-centered focus and ambition

Mao lived by visions of grandeur–and demoted, purged and killed all rivals who got in his way. During the infamous Long March in 1933-34, he deliberately ordered a rival militia of 100,000 men to march through a miserable swampland knowing that most of them would die. They did. He emerged victorious. In Korea, he sent hundreds of thousands of Chang Kai-shek’s troops to their deaths to “clean out” the Red Chinese army.

During the Cultural Revolution, his cult of personality reached its peak with over six billion of his pictures littering the landscape (ten for every person in China). Mao Tse-tung coveted absolute power in China and ruthlessly did what was necessary to reach his goal. Beyond that, he dreamed of ruling the world--“uniting” it under the banner of communist conquest.

Fortunately, he died before that maniacal vision could be realized.

6. Lying and deception

At every turn in his life, Mao lied his way to advantage.  Early on he didn’t tell the truth about his training to get into the communist party (CCP). When he received orders or cables from Stalin, he would either tell a falsehood, not pass the message on to subordinates, or send back a fabricated answer. His entire empire was built on lies–which is why he needed continuous purges of officials around him and those who were his rivals. No one trusted him because every move he made was usually based on incomplete information or deception.

Mao built his wealth and power on stealing land and goods from others. He called it “land reform”–but that was a lie. It was simple theft. He lied to Stalin about his military successes to gain more access to resources and technology (including atomic bombs). 

7. Torture and murder

This was the hardest part to read in The Unknown Mao. I can’t begin to describe the hideous forms of torture and death that Mao and his thugs used to torment and control the Chinese people. For thirty years, Mao and his minions used brutal means to terrorize the people into submission.

I’ve often wondered why hundreds of millions of people followed Mao Tse-tung. Simple: Abject fear. People were shot in the public square–hacked to pieces with knives–buried alive–gruesomely brutalized to enforce conformity–starved to death without mercy–and on and on. As Mao famously said, “Power comes through the barrel of a gun”–and he used his to kill more people than any man in history.

Seventy million people died through Mao’s ruthless carnage. Millions of others were tortured and scarred for life. There is nothing romantic and inspirational about Chinese communism. It was simply a gruesome “kill culture” (Mao’s own words).

To sum up, when looking at Mao Tse-tung’s life, you are looking at the face of Satan.

This is because the prince of darkness–Lucifer, the enemy of God–is the author of evil. He inhabited Mao. He motivated Mao. If you want to understand Satan, look honestly at the motives and actions of Mao or any other human tyrant.

You can also look into your own heart, because we can be the same–even if we don’t murder people.

To learn some lessons, even from a person like Mao, we must resist the satanic characteristics and move in the “opposite spirit”–which is the character of Jesus. He loved and submitted to his Heavenly Father, was pure in every way, loves little children, is full of mercy and compassion, lived to glorify his Father and laid down his life for us, who always told the truth (He IS the Truth – John 14:6), and came to give us eternal life (not death).

Wow–what a difference!

Rejecting the awful example of Mao, let’s enthrone Jesus in our hearts and live for him on earth:

• Be reconciled to and love your Heavenly Father.
• Commit to a life of purity within the sanctity of marriage.
• Love children and always protect and champion them.
• Live a life of mercy and compassion for others
• Make your ambition to seek first God’s Kingdom.
• Put on the belt of truth and breastplate of righteous living (Ephesians 6:14).
• Live a life of love.

Resist the face of evil in this world.

Light it up with the beautiful face of Jesus Christ.

My summer reading included Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday (her husband). Jung Chang is considered one of the first brave writers to take the mask off of the history of Red China. 

Her epic 615 page book comes with 150 pages of footnotes and source material–showing the depth, breadth and accuracy of her research.

Wow, is it an eye-opener.

Two important principles stood out to me from her book about Chairman Mao. This week I will examine the first that we should apply to our own lives and nations.

It is: when it comes to history, oftentimes, things are not what they seem.

First a little background on the remarkable Jung Chang. She was born in Sechuan Province in China in 1952 and worked as a peasant, a “barefoot doctor,” a steelworker and an electrician before becoming an English language student and then assistant lecturer at Sichuan University.

Jung fled China for Britain in 1978, married Jon Halliday, and obtained a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of York in 1982–the first person from the People’s Republic of China to receive a doctorate from a British University.

In 1991, she wrote an inspiring book on her family heritage called Wild Swans which startled the world with its insider glimpse of Chinese life during the Communist years. The award-winning book sold more than 10 million copies in thirty languages.

That’s a mega best-seller. Why?

Because she was one of the first to tell the truth about what really happened in China during the 20th century.

After fourteen more years of research, including clandestine interviews with Chinese figures both inside and outside mainland China, Jung Chang and her husband followed up with Mao: The Unknown Story–which I’ve just finished reading.

Its revelations got me thinking that one of the biggest surprises for all of us in eternity–when we stand before God and learn the truth about human history–is that reality was significantly different from what we thought or were taught.

Thus, we need to constantly pursue God’s perspective on history and events so that we do not become lost in the lies of human life.

True, we will never see things with perfect accuracy here on earth. But we can get closer to  reality if we are prayerful, diligent seekers of the truth. And when we know the truth, that truth can both set us free and allow us to be emancipators of others through the grace and power of Jesus Christ (John 8:32).

Now a little glimpse into Mao: The Unknown Story. This week I will talk broadly about history and next week, delve a little more closely into the actual character of Mao Tse Tung (Zedong).

Next week’s article will be titled The Face of Evil.

That’s because we should really use Mao–rather than Hitler–as the poster child of evil tyrants. Hitler was certainly Lucifer personified in killing 6-8 million people before and during World World II.

But real history will record that Mao Tse Tung, the communist revolutionary who took over China in 1949 and led the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, was the greatest satanic tyrant to date–killing probably 70 million fellow Chinese citizens before he died in September 9, 1976.

That’s ten times more murders than Hitler.

And most of what we’ve been taught about Mao and the communist revolution, according to Jung Chang, is wrong.

Things are not what they seem.

Some examples:

• Popular consensus is that communists played on the hopes and fears of the peasantry to launch their take-over of Chinese civilization. We’ve all heard that communist revolutions take place when poor workers are mobilized to fight the landowners and wealthy–that it is the exploitation of the rich that leads to an uprising among the poor. But Mao himself came from an upper class background in Hunan province. He never cared for peasants or the disparity in income and power in feudal China. Jung lays to rest the myth that communist dictators like Mao are modern-day Robin Hoods. She pain-stakingly chronicles that Mao Tse Tung was nothing less than a power-hungry thug. Most of the 70 million murders were committed against the peasant-peoples.
• I have always assumed that the Chinese Communist Revolution was launched and funded in China–that is, it was an internal civil war first against the Manchu dynasty, and then the nationalists, led by Chiang kai-shek, against the communists (or CCP) led by Mao and others. That’s what I was taught in school. But that is not even close to the truth. Following the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, and gaining strength on the 20s and 30s, the whole of the Chinese Revolution was financed and led by Soviet Russia, especially under leadership of Stalin. Russian agents and double agents coordinated all of its developments from Shanghai, Stalin himself made all the key decisions from Moscow, and Mao would never have conquered China without millions of dollars of monthly Bolshevik support (a large sum of money eighty years ago). The final conquest was due solely to the Russian supply of equipment and arms. Stalin’s main purpose was to use a “united” (and Communist) China to defeat Japan. This was Russian empire-building via blood and money. It then became Chinese empire building–because Mao’s ultimate goal was to rule the world–by way of torture and bloodshed.
• I’d always heard that the famous “Long March” that brought Mao to the pinnacle of power in 1934-35 was an heroic escape from the bandit-lands of central China that endeared Chairman Mao to the Chinese people. I envisioned him leading bedraggled troops, akin to George Washington at Valley Forge, with great personal sacrifice and courage. Not a whiff of truth! Mao, who loved luxury, always lived in the nicest of dwellings even when others were freezing to death and bloodying their feet around him. In fact, during the vast majority of the 6000 kilometer march, as an 80,000-man army was reduced to 10,000 via famine, exhaustion, executions, and desertion, Mao and his top leaders were lavishly carried in sedan “litters” by the peasant soldiers–wining and dining while those around them perished. This was tyranny with “a smoke and a smile”.
• In every phase of Mao’s rise to power, from the early days in Hunan, to his decade of leadership in the Yellow Earth Plateau, to his triumphant rule in Peking, every step he took was via lies, deception, purgings, deliberately-mis-leading orders to suppress his rivals, torture, mass murder and betrayal. His rise to power was nothing less, at every step, than sadistic satanism without any regard, to wives, children, friends, comrades, or any other human being. Next week I will take a broader look at Mao’s character, or lack thereof, in “The Face of Evil.” It’s the only phrase that comes to mind when studying Mao Tse Tung’s leadership style.

What I gleaned from Jung’s amazing expose of China’s real 20th century story is that things are not what they seem.Much of history and what we “see” is a lie, or at the least, extremely in-complete.

How do we appy this to our own life and times? Here are just a few examples:

1. We need the truth about what happened in Ben Ghazi, Libya when Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other brave Americans were killed. We were first flummoxed to believe it was the result of a You Tube video. Now we are slowly learning that the cover-up may have taken place because the United States was involved in an illegal arms deal to Syria.

Things are not what they seem.

2. The uprisings of the so-called Arab Spring did not take place to usher in a season of freedom and democracy in the Middle East. The election of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt did not portend the coming of liberty to the land of the Nile.

Things are not what they seem.

3. American’s economy in 2013 is not getting better, real estate values have not hit bottom, real unemployment is not seven percent, and seventeen trillion dollars in debt is leading us toward a financial Armageddon.

Things are not what they seem.

4. We must not forget that life on earth is a titanic struggle between good and evil. The Devil and his demons are unseen actors–angels and their commanders do the Lord’s bidding–and much of what we are told in the secular world about history and reality is one big scam from the satanic underground.

So what are we to do to combat our ignorance?

Talk to God about all things. Let his Word be your compass and inspiration. Choose your counselors and sources wisely. Do your homework and don’t believe the demonic cheerleaders. Seek the truth about all events and histories and ask God to enlighten you.

Truth is power– in your own life and in the life of nations.

Don’t just accept what you hear and see. Always remember that, because of the magnitude of human and satanically inspired propaganda, things are not what they seem.

I’ve been thinking lately about “family” from a number of standpoints.

This week we finalized the sale of our family home–the house we birthed one child in and in which we raised five others. We treasure many fond-memories from that quarter-of-a-century of blessing.

All of our parents are in their latter years–the pillars of the two families we brought together through marriage in 1976. Most days I’m in town, I go to visit with my 93-year old dad and faithful mom who cares for him. I cherish these family moments which will soon be altered.

Last night I heard a passionate commentary from Bill O-Reilly on the desperate need to re-build the African-American family. You can watch his moving video here.

But Michael Barone puts in historical perspective why the American family is our secret to national success.

Michael Barone, senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner, and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is one of the wisest and studious analysts on the American scene. In the following article, based on the new book America 3.0 by James Bennett and Michael Lotus, Barone argues that it is the genius of the nuclear family that stands at the apex of American exceptionalism.

What he doesn’t say is that the American idea of family is a God-given concept that comes straight off the pages of the Bible.

The influential founders of this nation were God-fearing, Bible-based people who came to the New World to practice their faith unhindered by governmental restraints. Their beliefs had deep roots in Christian Europe and its magnificent Reformation which gave rise to civil liberties, free enterprise capitalism, faith-based republics, and an array of discovery and freedom that changed the trajectory of the world.

America’s European colonists took those ideas one step further–building their societies around the nuclear family where husbands loved their wives and were “prophets, priests and kings” in their homes, and wives respected their husbands and raised their children in the “fear and admonition of the Lord.”

This best-in-history expression of the Christian nuclear family is the secret of American freedom, prosperity, mission and greatness.

Read Barone’s article below and add America 3.0 to your summer reading list.

And treasure the family you came from (even with its heartaches), build the family you have on the sure biblical foundation, and pray for all families to experience a re-birth of greatness.

With Its Roots in the Nuclear Family, the Nation Evolves Into America 3.0

By Michael Barone

The Fourth of July is always an occasion to think about what the United States of America has been, is and will be. A good way to reflect on that is to pick up a copy of “America 3.0” by James Bennett and Michael Lotus and ponder its lessons.

As the title suggests, Bennett and Lotus see the nation as having evolved from an agricultural America 1.0 to an industrial America 2.0 and struggling now to evolve again into an information age America 3.0. That’s a familiar framework.

Where they differ from other analyses is that they see the roots of American exceptionalism, our penchant for liberty and individualism, stretching far back — more than 1,000 years — beyond 1776. Back to the Anglo-Saxon invaders of England after the fall of the Roman Empire.

Drawing on the 19th century historians Edward Augustus Freeman and Frederic Maitland and contemporary scholars Emmanuel Todd, Alan Macfarlane and James Campbell, they argue that the Anglo-Saxons brought with them a unique institution, the absolute nuclear family, “the continuous core of our distinct American culture.”

In nuclear families, individuals, not parents, select spouses; women have comparative freedom and equality; children have no rights of inheritance; grown children leave parents’ homes and are not bound to extended families.

On each point this is contrary to longstanding family patterns in the rest of the world.

This enduring family pattern has consequences. It has made Americans liberty-loving, individualistic, keen for equal opportunity but not equal outcomes, venturesome, mobile and suspicious of big government.

From early on in England and then in America, the absolute nuclear family fostered a market economy, property ownership and the common law, which evolves through individual court cases rather than a rigid code like Europe’s Roman law.

These mores have promoted economic growth and enabled societies to adapt to economic changes. America 1.0 had very decentralized government, with new states left to pursue their own policies and courts determined to protect the common law. It peaked at the end of the Civil War.

Economic innovations required changes. Railroads and giant corporations required military-style bureaucracies. Rapidly booming cities required larger governments.

The result was America 2.0. Politicians experimented with German models but settled in the 1930s for a “Social Lockeanism” that “wisely left room for individual initiative and entrepreneurship.”

World War II policies put 16 million Americans in uniform, rationed food, controlled wages and prices, and converted factories to war production. “The end of World War II,” Bennett and Lotus write,”was the moment of maximal centralism and minimal autonomy in America.”

Wartime success gave great prestige to America 2.0 and confidence that it could continue in place indefinitely. But with economic change it started sputtering. “2.0 corporations, unions and governments,” the authors write, “have been rendered unworkable.”

Big corporations flailed, and government got bloated. Lower birth rates meant there wouldn’t be enough taxpayers to finance benefits for the elderly.

Responses included deregulation in the 1970s, lower tax rates in the 1980s, welfare reform in the 1990s. But that was not enough.

Barack Obama has made the trajectory worse, the authors say. They ridicule “the strange assumption that Americans genuinely want government-run health care.” Polls back them up.

They believe public debt is unsustainable and call for discharging much of it in bankruptcy (“the Big Haircut”). They grant that the Treasury can keep selling bonds, but only so long as other countries’ credit is worse.

They see families moving far out in the exurbs (using self-driving cars) and earning money increasingly from individual enterprises rather than W-2 jobs. Therefore we should abolish the federal income tax and devolve government except for defense, civil rights and free internal trade to states and localities.

Most ambitiously, they would allow states to split into parts or to form compacts with other states, so likeminded citizens can have congenial policies.

Looking abroad, they see “a global collapse of the 2.0 model.” America should continue to purchase weapons (but get rid of defense procurement rules) and maintain our alliances.

But the U.S. should give up on nation-building and democratization. Other cultures — Iraq, Afghanistan — simply don’t share our concepts of freedom.

America’s main task is to police “the world’s maritime and aviation commons” — which Britain or America have been doing off and on for three centuries.

I don’t agree on every point. But I share the authors’ optimism that America can once again adapt consistent with our enduring values.

I agree!

Especially if we fight for the revival of the biblical family.