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Well of course they’re upset. Even top-end estimates only put five million deaths on Mao – well short of the six million on Hitler.
Actually, going by that measure, OBL’s countrymen should be livid.
Uh, the 6 million figure on Hitler is just the Jews. His total body count is at least 10 million, probably 15 million, possibly as many as 25 million, and that’s not counting soldiers and civilians who died in “legitimate” war operations. 42 million people died in the war in Europe.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we lived in a world where people didn’t apologise for insulting mass-murdering dictators to appease their degenerate supporters?
Top end would easily add one zero to your Mao figure.
That’s taking it a bit far. Chinese people have no illusions about Mao and nobody looks back on the cultural revolution fondly. Anyone alive during that period bears the scars, and people are relatively frank when they talk about it.
But Mao is still the founder of their country, and his contribution to modern China cannot be understated. Nobody has simple feelings about Mao, and plenty of people hate what he did. But without him modern China would not exist, and most Chinese people feel like modern China is a pretty good place.
And because of a political tradition going back thousands of years, Chinese people do not consider the government and the country to be a different thing. We will gladly bash the president while knowing that we love America. But China doesn’t have this concept, and never has. The country cannot be separated from it’s leaders. So to say Mao shouldn’t have existed, to them, is very much like saying China shouldn’t exist.
I’m sure you can understand why people who are proud of their country would take exception to this, even if they are not “degenerate supporters.”