Now that I can tweet without a hundred tankies telling me my family deserves the guillotine, let’s do a quick history lesson about Mao.

Mao might have killed a few landlords, but the collateral damage was orders of magnitude beyond what you’d recognize as the capitalist class

During the Great Leap Forward (which was when my grandparents nearly starved to death), most of the tens of millions of deaths were peasants in the countryside. The cities got prioritized for food because the regime needed to hide the extent of the famine.

During the Cultural Revolution (which was when both my grandfathers were imprisoned and my dad and three aunts were sent to do years of hard labor), the regime encouraged every citizen to denounce members of their own families, especially schoolteachers and other intellectuals

My dad and aunts were sent to the rice paddies as teenagers, along with all the urban youths who could read and write.

My dad’s dad was a bureaucrat in the Guangzhou post office. My mom’s parents were petty shopkeepers. So the victims weren’t exactly people with servants.

So yeah, if you’re a 20 year old white kid in Fort Collins trying to rehabilitate Maoism, good luck.

The rest of the world knows what he and his regime did. And it will continue to learn about it because we’re gonna keep telling people about it.