this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
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United States | News & Politics
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Genocide doesn't require bloodthirst, it does just fine with sacrifice whole populations for some other goal or accepting those deaths as "collateral". The UN definition supports this.
I am obliged to note that genocide does not need to be racial (it can target religion, sexuality, nationality, etc.), but your point stands because none of those apply either. I'll just mark it in the Black Book of Capitalism and be content with that.
Think the little red book was a bad strategy for its time because it's essentially a collection of quotations, so it wasn't good for systematic understanding of Mao's thought. In the modern day the internet at least makes it somewhat better because the LRB has citations, so you can just look them up and see the context for the statement.
I'm kind of curious how the LRB came about, since it feels pretty condescending, but Mao was perhaps the most optimistic political leader I've ever heard of in terms of just giving the people a small bit of advice or a revised law and letting them handle the rest (this sometimes went extremely poorly, of course).