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by christkv 1y ago

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readthenotes1 1y ago
T-shirts of Che...
- io84 1y ago
  I think the point is that Mao is in a very small club of individuals deemed responsible for tens of millions of deaths. Che is small fry in comparison.
ashoeafoot 1y ago
Hipocrits with air superiority, the best of indentions does fix the idea, though mysteriously implementation after implementation goes sour. Almost as if it were tainted with failure, but that is impossible . The idea is good, the carriers are on the right side of history and everyone else is a monster..
pimlottc 1y ago
The point of the work is to raise that question, among others. Is it acceptable? Chairman Mao was a "pop star" in China. Is that different than Elvis or Marilyn Monroe in the US? One is promoted by a repressive government while the others are promoted by capitalist media companies, but is the result all that different? Aren't they all "celebrities"? And does Warhol's treatment celebrate them, or mock them? Is it respectful or does it reduce the person into a cartoon, a caricature, a meme? Does the very act of mass-producing an image elevate the subject's status, regardless of the content?
- rufus_foreman 1y ago
  >> Is that different than Elvis or Marilyn Monroe in the US? How many millions of people's deaths was Marilyn Monroe responsible for, as a rough estimate?
  - spauldo 1y ago
    Little deaths or big deaths?
luotuoshangdui 1y ago
Mao is still considered a great leader in China. His portrait appears on literally all Chinese banknotes in the current series (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_series_of_the_renminbi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_series_of_the_renminbi).
- DyslexicAtheist 1y ago
  it just underlines GP's point. Sarah Paine EP 3: How Mao Conquered China (Lecture & Interview) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4l3Sa8ImGFQ&t=6325s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4l3Sa8ImGFQ&t=6325s
- christkv 1y ago
  I doubt that is much comfort to the 50+ million victims of the failed policies and purges.
  - hulitu 1y ago
    > 50+ million victims of the failed policies and purges. You should't believe everything you read. Especially when it comes from a secret service.
thiagoharry 1y ago
He is the founder of modern China, who ended the century of humiliation and restored the country's independence. Yes, it was messy. But what the west was doing against the country and the previous situation was not better.
- Hammershaft 1y ago
  'Yes, it was messy.' That's one way to describe Mao implementing such incompetent and exploitative policies that it leads to over 40 million Chinese people dying in famines and purges.
- DyslexicAtheist 1y ago
  oh no. Pooh, you ate all the propaganda instead of the honey. > The systemic media control in authoritarian regimes is often inspired by China’s propaganda model. China (178th) remains the world’s largest jail for journalists and reentered the bottom trio of the Index, coming just ahead of North Korea (179th). -- https://rsf.org/en/rsf-world-press-freedom-index-2025-economic-fragility-leading-threat-press-freedom?year=2025&data_type=general https://rsf.org/en/rsf-world-press-freedom-index-2025-econom...
  - vaidhy 1y ago
    Is it surprising that the places with more conflicts has poor reporting ranking (according to this model)? A media control does not need government to act openly. A mind-numbing patriotism can be as effective. Look at US reporting on the aftermath of 9/11. How many papers argued against Iraq or Afghanistan war? How many papers are talking about Gaza now? or even covering hands-off rallies?
    - spauldo 1y ago
      Afghanistan is more complicated than that, due to the collective shock of a successful attack on US soil. Bush had to do something or the American people would have lynched him. Iraq, though? There was tons of opposition to the Iraq War. It was only approved because people were lied to about the "weapons of mass destruction." Once the truth was out, a lot of us felt betrayed. Iraq is a large part of why that particular segment of the Republican party (the neocons) lost its power. Which is a shame, really, given who replaced them...
zimza 1y ago
Well, Bush is seen as acceptable too. Or any US - or western - leader.
- cooper_ganglia 1y ago
  This is satire, surely? Downplaying the severity of despots like Mao by comparing them to democratically elected leaders is incredibly disrespectful to the 45,000,000 people that died as a direct result of catastrophic and coercive policies.
  - vaidhy 1y ago
    Why is "democratically elected" so important? Democracies can also kill a lot of people. Hitler was democratically elected, so is Netanyahu. If you are so inclined, one was had good intentions, but backfired badly while other is explicitly cruel.
    - mathgradthrow 1y ago
      care to say which you think is which?
    - spauldo 1y ago
      A democratic leader remains democratic throughout their term. W did his time and bowed out at the end of it. Another party stepped in peacefully afterward. The only way Hitler could have gone out was in a pine box. That's the difference. He may have been democratically elected, but he wasn't a democratic leader.
  - danielheath 1y ago
    I assume the reference was to Bush’s foreign wars, which killed _dramatically_ fewer people (under a million even in the most expansive estimates I can find)… although they also brought widespread poverty, rather than mass industrialisation and wealth.
- jajko 1y ago
  I guess you mean Jr who consumed a lot of coke when young, not his late CIA father who was shielding Jr from jail numerous times. Middle east is as it is currently largely to his fuckups and made up invasions for reasons barely better than russian invasion of Ukraine, and Afghanistan failure is proper second Vietnam for US to the last details, just less movies about it so far so its largely ignored and people act like it didn't happen. Republicans still uncritically celebrate him, when I dared to criticize him even here I got downvoted to hell pretty quickly. Yet he is directly responsible for death of millions of innocent civilians and indirectly caused ie Isis, not on Mao or Stalin level but still.
cardanome 1y ago
Because the CCP under Mao liberated China from foreign oppression. Now whether you might argue that it was thanks to or rather despite Mao being in leadership is another matter and believe me I am in the "despite" camp but it still makes sense that he would have strong symbolic importance for the Chinese people. People that will argue "oh he killed millions of people" need to get their head out of the cold war propaganda. I do believe his economic policy was criminal and was done against the advice of Soviet advisors but it is still not murder. His policy was idiotic, he was neglectful maybe but he did not purposefully cause a famine. Saying it is the same or even worse are the purposeful, planned industrial scale mass murder that Hitler was responsible for under the Nazi regime is pure holocaust apologia. Plain and simple.
- cooper_ganglia 1y ago
  Criticizing Mao is "Holocaust apologia" because killing 45,000,000 of his citizenry was just an accident? More people died then than during the Holocaust. More people dying is objectively worse, no matter how you slice it.
  - cardanome 1y ago
    If I plan out how to kill someone, get the right weapon and execute on my plan, yeah that is murder. If I see a donation stand for children in Africa and decide to rather buy a video game from that money, well some children are going to starve because of my decision but I haven't exactly killed them. Blaming Mao for a famine is completely insane if you are not super brainwashed. He was a human not a god. But considering you took the highest death toll estimation you could find already shows you are not interested in facts but in pushing a narrative.
    - mcv 1y ago
      If only Mao had been aware that he was human and not a god. He didn't allow any criticism of his ideas, and that makes him entirely culpable for the results.
  - vaidhy 1y ago
maxglute 1y ago
Mao was broadly successful. Trading 5% of abundant population for superstructure of modern Chinese state that subsequent leadership snowballed into what PRC is today is frankly a bargin. You don't get modern PRC state capacity without Mao speedrunning industrialization and cultural heterogeneity. Nation building on scale of PRC from the shit state post war China is hard. He didn't ace it, but vs developing peers post war that spluttered, or the other billion+ country with more favourable starting conditions, grading on a curve, Mao gets top marks, especially when PRC was playing on extra hard mode with US containment.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
jltsiren 1y ago
And many Christian churches prominently display art featuring Satan. It's always less about what is actually in the picture and more about the message the picture is supposed to send and how people actually interpret it. Hitler and Nazis have been used as comic reliefs in Western popular culture. You can supposedly make anything more funny in an absurd way by adding some gratuitous Nazis. Communist leaders such as Stalin and Mao are often used ironically. Sometimes because people find the socialist realism art style aesthetically pleasing, and sometimes due to the irony of turning a communist leader into commercial art.
- socalgal2 1y ago
  Mao portraits are not posted as comic relief, nor are they posted a warnings of what not to be like picture of Satan.
  - jltsiren 1y ago
    Do you know the motivations of those who hanged Mao portraits, or are you just guessing? I wouldn't know, as I'm not even sure I had seen Warhol's Mao portraits before today. But I've known plenty of people who went to a current or former commmunist country and brought back ironic communist kitsch.
    - socalgal2 1y ago
      Bringing back communist kitsch is not the same as posting a picture of a mass murderer. I have communist kitsch, in particular from China. The graphic design is amazing. I still don't get what you don't get. I think most people get why most people wouldn't hang picture so Hitler. If anyone deserves to be considered just as bad and just as worthy of not being displayed as decoration it certainly seems to be Mao
socalgal2 1y ago
Agreed The article was a good story. Strange though that people cherish these Mao pictures and put them on display. I like Andy Warhol but putting Mao up seems like putting a picture of Hitler on your wall. And no, this isn't Godwin's Law. The comparison seems to fit given he's one of the top 3 mass murders of all time https://www.heritage.org/china/commentary/the-legacy-mao-zedong-mass-murder https://www.heritage.org/china/commentary/the-legacy-mao-zed... https://www.chinafile.com/library/nyrb-china-archive/who-killed-more-hitler-stalin-or-mao https://www.chinafile.com/library/nyrb-china-archive/who-kil...
tomhow 1y ago
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes. Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[flagged]

readthenotes1 1y ago

T-shirts of Che...

io84 1y ago
I think the point is that Mao is in a very small club of individuals deemed responsible for tens of millions of deaths. Che is small fry in comparison.

ashoeafoot 1y ago

Hipocrits with air superiority, the best of indentions does fix the idea, though mysteriously implementation after implementation goes sour. Almost as if it were tainted with failure, but that is impossible . The idea is good, the carriers are on the right side of history and everyone else is a monster..

pimlottc 1y ago

The point of the work is to raise that question, among others. Is it acceptable? Chairman Mao was a "pop star" in China. Is that different than Elvis or Marilyn Monroe in the US? One is promoted by a repressive government while the others are promoted by capitalist media companies, but is the result all that different? Aren't they all "celebrities"? And does Warhol's treatment celebrate them, or mock them? Is it respectful or does it reduce the person into a cartoon, a caricature, a meme? Does the very act of mass-producing an image elevate the subject's status, regardless of the content?

rufus_foreman 1y ago
>> Is that different than Elvis or Marilyn Monroe in the US? How many millions of people's deaths was Marilyn Monroe responsible for, as a rough estimate?
- spauldo 1y ago
  Little deaths or big deaths?

luotuoshangdui 1y ago

Mao is still considered a great leader in China. His portrait appears on literally all Chinese banknotes in the current series (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_series_of_the_renminbi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_series_of_the_renminbi).

DyslexicAtheist 1y ago
it just underlines GP's point. Sarah Paine EP 3: How Mao Conquered China (Lecture & Interview) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4l3Sa8ImGFQ&t=6325s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4l3Sa8ImGFQ&t=6325s
christkv 1y ago
I doubt that is much comfort to the 50+ million victims of the failed policies and purges.
- hulitu 1y ago
  > 50+ million victims of the failed policies and purges. You should't believe everything you read. Especially when it comes from a secret service.

thiagoharry 1y ago

He is the founder of modern China, who ended the century of humiliation and restored the country's independence. Yes, it was messy. But what the west was doing against the country and the previous situation was not better.

Hammershaft 1y ago
'Yes, it was messy.' That's one way to describe Mao implementing such incompetent and exploitative policies that it leads to over 40 million Chinese people dying in famines and purges.
DyslexicAtheist 1y ago
oh no. Pooh, you ate all the propaganda instead of the honey. > The systemic media control in authoritarian regimes is often inspired by China’s propaganda model. China (178th) remains the world’s largest jail for journalists and reentered the bottom trio of the Index, coming just ahead of North Korea (179th). -- https://rsf.org/en/rsf-world-press-freedom-index-2025-economic-fragility-leading-threat-press-freedom?year=2025&data_type=general https://rsf.org/en/rsf-world-press-freedom-index-2025-econom...
- vaidhy 1y ago
  Is it surprising that the places with more conflicts has poor reporting ranking (according to this model)? A media control does not need government to act openly. A mind-numbing patriotism can be as effective. Look at US reporting on the aftermath of 9/11. How many papers argued against Iraq or Afghanistan war? How many papers are talking about Gaza now? or even covering hands-off rallies?
  - spauldo 1y ago
    Afghanistan is more complicated than that, due to the collective shock of a successful attack on US soil. Bush had to do something or the American people would have lynched him. Iraq, though? There was tons of opposition to the Iraq War. It was only approved because people were lied to about the "weapons of mass destruction." Once the truth was out, a lot of us felt betrayed. Iraq is a large part of why that particular segment of the Republican party (the neocons) lost its power. Which is a shame, really, given who replaced them...

zimza 1y ago

Well, Bush is seen as acceptable too. Or any US - or western - leader.

cooper_ganglia 1y ago
This is satire, surely? Downplaying the severity of despots like Mao by comparing them to democratically elected leaders is incredibly disrespectful to the 45,000,000 people that died as a direct result of catastrophic and coercive policies.
- vaidhy 1y ago
  Why is "democratically elected" so important? Democracies can also kill a lot of people. Hitler was democratically elected, so is Netanyahu. If you are so inclined, one was had good intentions, but backfired badly while other is explicitly cruel.
  - mathgradthrow 1y ago
    care to say which you think is which?
  - spauldo 1y ago
    A democratic leader remains democratic throughout their term. W did his time and bowed out at the end of it. Another party stepped in peacefully afterward. The only way Hitler could have gone out was in a pine box. That's the difference. He may have been democratically elected, but he wasn't a democratic leader.
- danielheath 1y ago
  I assume the reference was to Bush’s foreign wars, which killed _dramatically_ fewer people (under a million even in the most expansive estimates I can find)… although they also brought widespread poverty, rather than mass industrialisation and wealth.
jajko 1y ago
I guess you mean Jr who consumed a lot of coke when young, not his late CIA father who was shielding Jr from jail numerous times. Middle east is as it is currently largely to his fuckups and made up invasions for reasons barely better than russian invasion of Ukraine, and Afghanistan failure is proper second Vietnam for US to the last details, just less movies about it so far so its largely ignored and people act like it didn't happen. Republicans still uncritically celebrate him, when I dared to criticize him even here I got downvoted to hell pretty quickly. Yet he is directly responsible for death of millions of innocent civilians and indirectly caused ie Isis, not on Mao or Stalin level but still.

cardanome 1y ago

Because the CCP under Mao liberated China from foreign oppression. Now whether you might argue that it was thanks to or rather despite Mao being in leadership is another matter and believe me I am in the "despite" camp but it still makes sense that he would have strong symbolic importance for the Chinese people. People that will argue "oh he killed millions of people" need to get their head out of the cold war propaganda. I do believe his economic policy was criminal and was done against the advice of Soviet advisors but it is still not murder. His policy was idiotic, he was neglectful maybe but he did not purposefully cause a famine. Saying it is the same or even worse are the purposeful, planned industrial scale mass murder that Hitler was responsible for under the Nazi regime is pure holocaust apologia. Plain and simple.

cooper_ganglia 1y ago
Criticizing Mao is "Holocaust apologia" because killing 45,000,000 of his citizenry was just an accident? More people died then than during the Holocaust. More people dying is objectively worse, no matter how you slice it.
- cardanome 1y ago
  If I plan out how to kill someone, get the right weapon and execute on my plan, yeah that is murder. If I see a donation stand for children in Africa and decide to rather buy a video game from that money, well some children are going to starve because of my decision but I haven't exactly killed them. Blaming Mao for a famine is completely insane if you are not super brainwashed. He was a human not a god. But considering you took the highest death toll estimation you could find already shows you are not interested in facts but in pushing a narrative.
  - mcv 1y ago
    If only Mao had been aware that he was human and not a god. He didn't allow any criticism of his ideas, and that makes him entirely culpable for the results.
- vaidhy 1y ago

maxglute 1y ago

Mao was broadly successful. Trading 5% of abundant population for superstructure of modern Chinese state that subsequent leadership snowballed into what PRC is today is frankly a bargin. You don't get modern PRC state capacity without Mao speedrunning industrialization and cultural heterogeneity. Nation building on scale of PRC from the shit state post war China is hard. He didn't ace it, but vs developing peers post war that spluttered, or the other billion+ country with more favourable starting conditions, grading on a curve, Mao gets top marks, especially when PRC was playing on extra hard mode with US containment.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

jltsiren 1y ago

And many Christian churches prominently display art featuring Satan. It's always less about what is actually in the picture and more about the message the picture is supposed to send and how people actually interpret it. Hitler and Nazis have been used as comic reliefs in Western popular culture. You can supposedly make anything more funny in an absurd way by adding some gratuitous Nazis. Communist leaders such as Stalin and Mao are often used ironically. Sometimes because people find the socialist realism art style aesthetically pleasing, and sometimes due to the irony of turning a communist leader into commercial art.

socalgal2 1y ago
Mao portraits are not posted as comic relief, nor are they posted a warnings of what not to be like picture of Satan.
- jltsiren 1y ago
  Do you know the motivations of those who hanged Mao portraits, or are you just guessing? I wouldn't know, as I'm not even sure I had seen Warhol's Mao portraits before today. But I've known plenty of people who went to a current or former commmunist country and brought back ironic communist kitsch.
  - socalgal2 1y ago
    Bringing back communist kitsch is not the same as posting a picture of a mass murderer. I have communist kitsch, in particular from China. The graphic design is amazing. I still don't get what you don't get. I think most people get why most people wouldn't hang picture so Hitler. If anyone deserves to be considered just as bad and just as worthy of not being displayed as decoration it certainly seems to be Mao

socalgal2 1y ago

Agreed The article was a good story. Strange though that people cherish these Mao pictures and put them on display. I like Andy Warhol but putting Mao up seems like putting a picture of Hitler on your wall. And no, this isn't Godwin's Law. The comparison seems to fit given he's one of the top 3 mass murders of all time https://www.heritage.org/china/commentary/the-legacy-mao-zedong-mass-murder https://www.heritage.org/china/commentary/the-legacy-mao-zed... https://www.chinafile.com/library/nyrb-china-archive/who-killed-more-hitler-stalin-or-mao https://www.chinafile.com/library/nyrb-china-archive/who-kil...

tomhow 1y ago

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes. Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html