Oh, Poor Cameron Diaz! She got roasted for carrying a bag with a red star and a quote from Mao Tse Tung on it while traveling in Peru, a country that suffered massive bloodshed at the hands of Maoist rebels. People who survive civil wars are so uptight.
It is not like she was wearing a bag with a Hitler quote and a black swastika on it. That would have been really bad. And she wasn't wearing a KKK bag that said "White Power" on it.
Let me be straight with you for a moment. Since the communists took control of China in the 1940s, they have killed more than 80 million people. When Mao took power he had all the intellectuals and religious people executed, shut down the universities, and took away private property. According to the book Hungry Ghosts, during Mao's "Great Leap Forward" campaign 30 million people starved to death during a time of plenty; other sources put the death toll at over 40 million—in any case, several times the number killed during the Holocaust. Mao's murdering henchmen all wore red stars.
That's just the beginning of Mao's crimes, and his legacy of terror lives today in various persecutions in China, as well as in the minds of terrorist groups in Latin America and Asia, including in the recent violence in Indonesia and Nepal. He is not chic, campy, nor a mis-understood hero. Mao is a mass murderer.
If Cameron Diaz wants to understand this, perhaps she should talk to Richard Gere—he would never be caught accessorizing with a Mao bag. He knows that Mao invaded Tibet, slaughtered ten percent of its population, colonized it, and began wiping out its ancient culture. The soldiers conquering Tibet all wore red stars.
In the case of Peru, the Maoists tried to duplicate China's brutal revolution by destroying the native Incan culture, sowing discord in the rural areas to choke off the cities, and carrying out mass executions for minor "counterrevolutionary" offenses such as selling vegetables independent of the central government. The brutality of its "popular trials" included slitting throats, strangulation, stoning, and burning. Maoist victims were never allowed burials.
Theodore Dalrymple, famous English writer and retired prison-physician and psychiatrist wrote that "The worst brutality I ever saw was that committed by Sendero Luminoso [Shining Path] in Peru, in the days when it seemed possible that it might come to power. If it had, I think its massacres would have dwarfed those of the Khmer Rouge."
Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission revealed in its 2003 report that 69,280 people had died or disappeared—22,507 fully identified as dead and 46,773 disappearances. Human Rights Watch confirms those numbers.
But Cameron is not alone in her red-star ignorance. Those Che shirts are everywhere, and Che was a communist versed in Maoist logic. Even Macy's Department Store has a red star for their logo. I cringe every time I see it. Wearing the five-point red star is not cute; it is culpable ignorance.
I live in Washington DC, so I go to the Smithsonian museums from time to time. A big disappointment to me is the Freer and Sackler Museum gift shop. The Freer has a superb Asian art collection, but the gift shop has some Mao stuff in it, including a book called The Tao of Mao, which offers up Mao quotes as daily inspiration. The Smithsonian is run by smart people; why would they have such a thing?
I guess the squeaky wheel gets the grease. The Chinese people have been pretty quiet about their Communist experiences. It is no wonder. They know what Mao's heirs do to those who complain.
Plus, nobody has made a movie called Jose's List about a Latino businessman who saves the villagers from the brainwashed communist rebels waving Mao's Little Red Book in the streets of Lima. After all, don't the Chinese still have a communist government today, and it's been more than ten whole years since they massacred thousands of students on Tiananmen Square. And those Che shirts are just everywhere.
We are so quick to forget. Some things are just simply off-limits. Mao and communism need to be added to that list, and the public notified.
Feeds