The evil empire

Donald Trump sent congratulations to communist China on the 70th anniversary of its founding. Let that one sink in a bit.

The lovefest with Kim Jong Un is now apparently extended to the hateful regime that kept his hateful grandfather, Kim Il Sung, in power by pushing American troops back from the Chosin Reservoir and down the

Korean Peninsula in the winter of

1950.

We might also figure into this head-scratcher Trump’s comments last year that Leonid Brezhnev’s

Soviet Union was “right” to invade

Afghanistan, apparently oblivious to the fact that Ronald Reagan’s

America spent the 1980s giving aid to the forces resisting that invasion in one of the climactic episodes of our “long twilight struggle” against communism.

Then again, no one ever claimed Trump knew much about history, even history as recent as a Cold War that he lived through.

One could perhaps interpret Trump’s congratulatory message to China as simply an atypical expression of diplomatic etiquette, a bit of insincere flattery to help grease the trade-deal skids.

But a loud, morally appropriate silence would have served better. The word “morally” can’t help but enter into it because the misnamed People’s Republic of China is arguably the most evil state that the human experience has seen.

Other claimants for that title of course exist — Adolf Hitler’s thousand-year Third Reich only lasted for 12 but still managed to touch off the worst war in human history and systematically exterminate six million Jews and lots of other specimens of supposedly inferior races; Soviet dictator Josef Stalin killed even more than Hitler as a result of “dekulakization” and the Great Terror; and Pol Pot might have been the worst offender of all when considered on a percentage of the population metric (murdering a quarter of Cambodia’s people in a mere three years in the late 1970s).

But the German Nazi Party, Stalin’s Soviet Communist Party, and the Khmer Rouge is all, thankfully, long gone, which means that in the morbid mass murder/genocide sweepstakes, only the Chinese Communist Party remains, in power unpunished and unrepentant for its perhaps unrivaled crimes against humanity.

The founder of what was being celebrated earlier this month, Mao Zedong, is estimated to have killed 40 million to 50 million Chinese in his misbegotten Great Leap Forward between 1958-1962. Not content with that historically unprecedented achievement in genocide, he burst back onto the scene a few years later with a Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that killed another 10 million or so (the numbers necessarily get imprecise when so many bodies are involved).

One can only wonder how many millions more would have perished if the God that the demented Mao’s ideology adamantly said didn’t exist hadn’t canceled his lease on life in 1976. He remains a prime example of the reality of human evil, as well as a powerful reason to continue to hope that a very hot place exists below Earth to which such tyrants can be sent as punishment for their sins. That his gigantic portrait still looms over Tiananmen Square tells us just about all we need to know about the state of freedom in China.

In a testament to one of the enduring truths of geopolitics — the enemy of my enemy is my friend — Communist China became an ally of sorts late in Mao’s tenure, even as the Cultural Revolution was reaching its mad climax. The Sino-Soviet split had led to skirmishes along the long Chinese-Soviet border and even an inquiry from Soviet emissaries to Henry Kissinger as to what our response might be in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack upon China.

Thus was born “triangular diplomacy” and the eventual playing of the “China card,” with the relationship flowering more fully under Mao’s technocratic successor, the gnomish Deng Xiaoping. The image of Deng wearing a cowboy hat bigger than he was while touring the Johnson Space Center is sketched indelibly on the mind.

In the three decades since Deng crushed the Tiananmen Square movement, U.S. policy has largely consisted of huffing and puffing a bit about human rights while trading and investing as much as possible under the assumption that engagement with a communist China would eventually make it a democratic China.

Everything we knew about developmental theory told us that as China’s economic growth continued, a commercial middle class (“bourgeoisie”) would emerge and demand something akin to “no taxation without representation.”

That Chinese middle class is now the largest in the world, estimated at around 400 million strong, but the demands for democratization haven’t materialized. Indeed, China’s peculiar combination of brutal authoritarianism, crony capitalism and hyper-nationalism is increasingly being presented as both a basis for regime legitimacy in the eyes of its people and as a model for others to emulate.

When the Cold War was still going strong Ronald Reagan was widely criticized for calling the Soviet Union the “evil empire” on the grounds that the accusation, even if true in both particulars, was somehow impolitic. The Soviets might be offended, said the critics, and they have lots of nuclear weapons.

Now we have a president (another Republican, no less!) who, in a remarkable reversal, can’t seem to find enough nice things to say about communist dictators.