PRI’s Director of the Humanae Vitae Project reviews Steven Mosher’s new book, “The Devil and Communist China,” recounting how Mao Zedong was “the killings ruler in history.”
“Mosher offers us a scholarly portrait that digs behind the headlines and reveals the spirit of the ongoing Communist revolution there.
Lucifer, the enemy of God and the author of evil, must have been proud of this aspiring antichrist and of the bloody path he carved through history.”
Read the full review below:
Communist China Has Been Satan’s Playground For Decades
Dr. Christopher Manion
[The Wanderer, March 22, 2024, P. 1]
(Stephen W. Mosher: “The Devil And Communist China: From Mao Down to Xi” (Gastonia, North Carolina: TAN Books, 2024)
In his tenth book on China, Steven Mosher offers us a scholarly portrait that digs behind the headlines and reveals the spirit of the ongoing Communist revolution there.
“Communist China has produced more deaths than any nation in the history of humanity,” writes Professor Paul Kengor (editor of the TAN books series on Marxism) in the introduction. “In the large sweep of history, that is no small accomplishment. It is downright diabolical.”
Mosher briefly recounts some essential basics regarding Chinese history, which he covered more extensively in his “Bully of Asia” (reviewed here in 2018). In this work, however, he goes behind the scenes, so to speak – and reveals a tortured spirit approaching that of Satan himself – because, as Mosher explains, Mao was “The Killingest Man in History.”
“Lucifer, the enemy of God and the author of evil, must have been proud of this aspiring antichrist and of the bloody path he carved through history,” he writes.
Mosher’s study probes deeply; here I mention just one theme that comes as a surprise even to an old conspiracy theorist: both Karl Marx and Mao Zedong were tortured throughout their lives by a hatred of everything that they were. They hated reality itself – so, as Marx wrote in his Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach, “the point is, to change it.”
Change reality. The essence of ideology.
Karl Marx was a Jew. He hated Jews.
He was a bourgeois. He hated the bourgeois.
He was married and had a family. He hated the family, and left his own family destitute and deranged. The sex act was the first “division of labor,” he wrote, and that evil contradiction constituted the engine of all history – and its inevitable path to violence, revolution, and destruction.
Marx hated the countryside – He derided “the idiocy of rural life.”
And what was the rural life? The life of the peasant. And that was the life of Mao Zedong as a child.
Mao disrespected his elders, his teachers, and “was equally disrespectful to his father, Li-chang. Li-chang had quite reasonably expected his oldest son to succeed him in running the family farm. But Mao proved to be both arrogant and lazy. For Mao’s thrifty, hardworking peasant father, who spent most of his waking hours working, this was intolerable.”
Like Marx, Mao hated the family. He hated his peasant life and his peasant father. Mosher sees here the foundation of his reflection of Satan’s libido dominandi, what Augustine called the ruling passion of the will that drives the City of Man (City of God, Book I, preface): the love of the will to power.
“As Lucifer rejected God’s headship, so Mao angrily rejected his earthly father’s headship and became a law unto himself,” he writes.
“Legalism” – The Opposite of the Rule of Law
“Where the laws have no authority, there is no constitution.”
- Aristotle, Politics Book IV, Chapter 4 (1292a)
“The Communist Party of the Soviet Union … is the vanguard of the working people in their struggle to strengthen and develop the socialist system and is the leading core of all organizations of the working people, both public and state.”
- Article 126, Constitution of the USSR
Ideology perverts the lexicon of liberty. It preserves the empty husk of “Lady Liberty,” fills it with hatred, and wields it as a weapon.
Amidst demands from Americans for the restoration of “law and order,” the American Left has debuted their version for all to see:
“Lawfare.”
With their hijacking of the vocabulary, they employ radical prosecutors in deep blue jurisdictions to destroy their political adversaries.
On reflection, that tactic – dare we call it a strategy – is right out of Mao, and his affirmation of thousands of years of Chinese history.
Mosher explains: Mao “took full advantage of China’s millennia-long totalitarian tradition to consolidate his rule,” Mosher writes. Mao “had become what he had long admired: the founder of a new dynasty, an emperor of the Legalist school.”
Not only did Mao use that power to eliminate his political competition (once he had exhausted their usefulness), he targeted the culture as well. To put it another way, Mao made all Chinese life political. The Chinese must have no air to breathe or sights to see that do not celebrate the glory of the “Dear Leader.” There was no “realm of freedom” for the culture, for the family, for the community, for thought.
And it’s all “legal.”
This template has been adopted by the American Left’s attack on, and corruption of, the culture. Not by accident has the Left sought power over the universities, the schools, the arts, the sciences and the family: it is by design: “society is almost totally subservient to the state,” Mosher explains, and that template is older than the Great Wall of China.
For Mao, “almost” wasn’t enough. And what he could not dominate, he attacked – in an offensive that continues to this day. Not only did he use that power to eliminate his competition (once he had exhausted their usefulness): his successors consolidated that power and used it to perpetuate his campaign “to eradicate all religious sentiment in China.”
And what alternative do they offer?
“Since the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre, the CCP has been promoting an extremely toxic form of race-based nationalism very much akin to fascism,” Mosher writes. “The Chinese people are constantly being told that they, their culture, and their country are naturally superior to any other people, culture, or country that has ever existed. To be numbered among the descendants of the dragon, party propaganda insists, is to be part of the greatest phenomenon in human history.”
Xi Jinping Finds An Unwitting Accomplice
In our own time, as Chinese “Dear Leader” Xi Jinping focuses on the Catholic Church as his most dangerous enemy, he has found an unwitting accomplice in – of all places – the Vatican.
“Cardinal Theodore McCarrick had already been removed from public ministry by Pope Benedict when Pope Francis tapped him to deal with the Chinese authorities,” Mosher writes.
We know that long before this craven corrupter was exposed as a criminal child rapist, Theodore McCarrick – still a cardinal! – had been restricted in his ministry and travel by Pope Benedict XVI.
Yet Pope Francis chose McCarrick as his envoy to Communist China to negotiate an agreement regarding the Catholic Church’s very existence in China.
The term “negotiate” we use loosely here: the agreement and its subsequent operations have all been dictated from Beijing.
“Why a notorious homosexual predator was given such a sensitive assignment, one which would affect the fate of millions of souls, is a mystery,” Mosher writes. “Now that the extent of the disgraced ex-Cardinal McCarrick’s corruption is widely-known—both sexual and financial—it seems even more incredible that he was ever allowed to negotiate with China, but he played a leading role. More corrupt politician than Catholic prelate, it is perhaps not surprising that the deal that McCarrick helped to negotiate is so deeply flawed.
The state religion of China, in other words, has become China itself. “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” is its catechism, the members of the party are its priesthood, and the head of the party serves as its high priest. The whole of China serves as its temple, within whose sacred precincts its people are encouraged to worship their own collective greatness—and the party, of course.”
The true Church in China has been driven underground. Once it is destroyed, Mosher writes, “the [official CCP-dominated] Patriotic Catholic Church can redouble its efforts to ideologically assimilate all Chinese Catholics into the political order—the people’s democratic dictatorship—that Xi Jinping controls. Xi’s ultimate goal is the same as Mao’s—namely, the total eradication of this ‘foreign’ religion from Chinese soil.”
The Vatican has kept the agreement secret for a reason. Whatever its terms, however treasonous McCarrick might have been – it is meaningless palaver, “bearing in mind,” Mosher writes,” that Communist China has broken every agreement it ever made.”