But this is not the task that folks like Lotta set out to accomplish. In fact, they take the opposite approach: they try to correct the lies that have been spread about Mao and create their own falsified historical record, one in which Mao was not a brutal dictator but a tireless defender of the working class whose record contains not a single blemish or act of tyranny. Folks who are interested in building a just society should not be employing either approach.

The fact that this person is not some random blogger, but a writer for a daily paper of the nation’s third largest city, just serves to prove Lotta’s point. Nowhere does this author try to falsify the statistics laid out by Lotta in the speech—readily available in non-Marxist sources—that China’s life expectancy more than doubled between 1949 and 1976, for example. Sigh… I guess the fastest and most widespread rise in life expectancy ever recorded just doesn’t lend itself to smug anti-communist one-liners.

The author is not even compelled to respond on a serious level, except to attack the speech as “vague and incomprehensible.” What’s incomprehensible is how they could sit through the whole lecture and still feel they have the license to trot out these ideologically charged claims…like (trust us) “Mao justified the number of a SOMEWHAT SMALLER number of Chinese citizens.” Let’s see, the Chinese population at the time was several hundred million. So according to our bonafide China expert Cullen Seaton, some page in some book somewhere says Mao supported (ordered? directly caused?) the deaths of…somewhere less than half this many. Talk about “vague and incomprehensible”!!