It’s almost like all leaders are bastards.
I don’t know about Che, he was running the firing squads tidying up after the revolution. So much for primum non nocere!
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Perhaps neutral communist could be Khrushchev or Gorbachev?
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If we’re sticking to the 3x3 grid, a very tentative list:
LG: Rosa Luxemburg, Salvador Allende.
NG: Petr Kropotkin, Shulamith Firestone.
XG: Kurt Eisner, George Orwell.
LN: Mikhail Gorbachev.
NN: Nestor Makhno, Zhou Enlai?
XN: Volodymyr Vynnychenko (for his alliance with the UPSS, which enabled pogroms), Nikolay Bukharin, Jean-Paul Sartre, Mao Zedong.
LE: Sergey Kirov, Nikita Krushchev (for his role in the purges), Leonid Brezhnev, Deng Xiaoping?
NE: Vladimir Lenin, Lev Trotskiy, Iosef Stalin.
XE: Ivan Sorokin, J. Posadas, Valerie Solanas, Pol Pot.
I’m taking vengeful as evil. And this may be too generous to Mao.
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So we’re just going with the regular categories here? Why put Mao in the neutral position?
I like this list though, especially including theorists.
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If he was responsible for large-scale mass terror-- or complicit in it, like Trotskiy and Krushchev-- then evil would make sense. Yes he was responsible for mass starvation, but that is usually attributed to bad planning and to pressure for good news.
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I’d argue that the Cultural Revolution is the very definition of Communist mass terror, and it was directly responsible for at least a couple of million politically motivated murders, as well as torture, forced labour and McCarthy-esque purges of the educated middle classes.
Add in Mao’s gradual perfection of the tactics of asymmetric warfare against the Kuomintang, the Japanese, the Kuomintang again, then against the allies in Korea and the US in Vietnam and you have a lot of blood on his hands that he is directly responsible for. If you factor in the fact that pretty much every effective insurrection in the world since the end of the Pacific War has been modelled on Mao’s strategies, there are probably billions of deaths that he is indirectly responsible for.
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None of your fancy multi dimensional paradigms for me. I’m strictly a one dimensional man, myself.
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