by Kindler
When Trump went before the cameras to shamelessly lie about the crime rate in Washington, DC, it was a textbook example of how dictators (actual or would-be) struggle to bend reality to fit their need for power. He wants to project the image of power, so he completely makes sh** up in order to create the thinnest of fig leaves to cover up what he’s doing.
The appropriate response to this insanity is not to issue some sort of mealy-mouthed “Trump is right about [x] but…” response to try to triangulate your way to an imaginary “center” between insanity and reality. The best response is to recall how other nutjob leaders in history have pulled equally bizarre stunts with utterly disastrous results.
And so my mind went (as minds do) to Mao Zedong’s 1958 “Smash Sparrows” campaign. No, that’s not a typo. The leader of one of the largest countries on Earth, with absolute power to do anything he chose, decided to wage all-out war against…those cute little birds begging for crumbs in the outdoor seating area of your local restaurant.
Why sparrows? Well, Mao’s constituency was in the countryside, in a then-overwhelmingly rural country, and farmers would get pissed off about sparrows “stealing” their grain. The fearless leader wanted to show he wouldn’t let anyone push him around – not even birds that weigh an entire ounce!
If you know even a bit about how ecosystems work, you will guess that an all-out campaign to destroy a common bird species is a very bad idea with God knows what sorts of consequences. However:
“As Judith Shapiro wrote in her 2001 book Mao’s War Against Nature, the Chinese leader held disregard for science throughout his rule. Even before the crisis, his agricultural policies had caused mass deforestation and hydrological problems. Mao even sent one hydro engineer to a labor camp for criticizing his plans.”
Attacking science – does this sound familiar? Yeah, it’s a common tic of authoritarians because scientists have the annoying habit of revealing the truth while absolute rulers believe they have both the right and the ability to control the laws of nature, even though they have neither.
But what Mao’s Smash Sparrows campaign lacked in scientific reality or common sense, it made up in enthusiasm. As a Shanghai newspaper excitedly reported:
“In the city and the outskirts, almost half of the labor force was mobilized into the anti-sparrow army. Usually, the young people were responsible for trapping, poisoning and attacking the sparrows while the old people and the children kept sentry watch…In the parks, cemeteries and hot houses where there are fewer people around, 150 free-fire zones were set up for shooting the sparrows. The Nanyang Girls Middle School rifle team received training in the techniques for shooting birds. Thus the citizens fought a total war against the sparrows.”
Look at all the military language employed in this propaganda piece — yet another authoritarian tell. How many “wars” against so-called enemies in America are Trump and the MAGA GOP engaged in right now? Although the pile-on in DC has deep American roots in racist politics, it’s not any more grounded in reality than Mao’s war on sparrows. Ditto Trump’s wars on wind turbines, vaccines, “voter fraud”, immigrant murderers and rapists, etc., etc.
And just like MAGA, Mao’s Communist party had its glorified icons, e.g.,
“The national hero was Yang Seh-mun, 16, of Yunnan. He had killed 20,000 sparrows by sneaking around during the day locating nesting trees. At night, China Youth proudly reported, he then climbed trees and strangled whole families of sparrows with his bare hands.”
Indeed, if Trump declared war on sparrows or robins or squirrels tomorrow, you can easily imagine Sean Hannity relating a story like this with tears in his eyes.
So what happens when a country declares total war against millions of innocent little birds? Very bad things. Yes, sparrows eat grain but they also eat tons of insects. So, once their key predators were destroyed, locusts literally had a field day in China, destroying the crops that those diligent farmer-warriors were told they were saving from sparrows.
The Smash Sparrows campaign thus ended up as a major contributor to the Great Famine that followed, killing an estimated 30 million Chinese. To be sure, Mao’s other terrible, arbitrary, nonsensical campaigns were also to blame, like his Great Leap Forward, for which he ordered millions of peasants to stop tilling their fields so that they could mine for iron ore and turn it into steel in homemade furnaces to spur economic progress (or something).
Overall, Mao’s horrible ideas to Make China Great Again caused unspeakable death, poverty and destruction. But his propaganda made people feel good! And he even had standard hats made for his followers to wear to show their eternal loyalty to him. Sound familiar?
I’m going to now emphasize my point here in boldface and capital letters so that even the thickest skulled Cro-MAGAnon can’t miss it:
DICTATORSHIPS ARE STUPID.
That’s it, period. Don’t talk about how “strong” or “powerful” Trump is, or deign to move a millimeter in his direction, or tell me you’re “afraid” of him. Talk about how laughably idiotic his arbitrary and capricious rule has been.
Perhaps the greatest fairy tale ever told was The Emperor’s New Clothes. You know the story, but take a few minutes to re-read it, the key line being:
“’But the Emperor has nothing at all on!’ said a little child.”
We need to all be that kid, relentlessly puncturing this big orange balloon filled with absolutely nothing at all but hot air. We need to push media outlets, reporters and commentators to play that kid – or dump them in the rubbish pile of history.
And if we don’t? We will suffer all the consequences, as the miserable subjects of Mao’s China did. It doesn’t matter if the scapegoat du jour is sparrows or immigrants or black people or Jews or even wind farms for that matter.
Democracy works because it is a smart system. One-man rule does not work because it is an unbelievably stupid way to run a country. So please toss a crumb to the next sparrow you see while doing all you can to fight Trump’s crappy, lame autocracy.
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