Indictment of Mao

The following somewhat vivid indictment of Mao Zedong (毛泽东) came from The White-Haired Girl, Bittersweet Adventures of a Little Red Soldier by Jaia Sun-Childers and Douglas Childers.

"Thanks to you, Chairman Mao, to your three million Cultural Revolution deaths, your hundred million exonerated victims, and all the horrors of your decade-long geriatric madness. We close your Little Red Book of fairy tales, where the sublime and the absurd joined hands with a nightmare in a convulsive dance. Where we drank your myth and went mad together, and tore our world apart for your Great Illusion.

"Keep your struggle meetings and labor camps, your Utopian chaos, and your revolutionary apocalypse. We survive your mad assault on history and don't want any part of you now. We don't want to hear one more story that ends singing your praises. And we don't want to spend our future crouching in your shadow, swimming in your abyss, worshipping your sanitized myth.

"What did you teach us through all your chaos, your purges, and your class-hatred wars? To outsmart, flatter, and be slippery, and act dumb to survive. To gird ourselves in steel and wear ambiguous masks. To smell danger, to fear one another and pinch our throats against the truth. That friendship is a practical equation, a shield of flesh in a world of potential enemies, a back door to a better deal. That we are only a wink, a blink, an insignificant flash in the millennial darkness. That the only immortals are Taishan Mountain, the Yangtze River, and You."