"The Brilliance of Communism" – Sarah Paine

Sarah Paine explains why Communist party systems are uniquely effective at holding power while guaranteeing poverty, using Mao, Xi, and Stalin as case studies.

• Communism’s core innovation is party/commissar system: extremely effective at seizing and retaining power, but structurally produces poverty.
• North Vietnam won its war then immediately triggered famine—even in a country with three annual harvests.
• Mao launched the Cultural Revolution specifically because Khrushchev’s 1956 Stalin denunciation showed him what happens to dead leaders’ legacies.
• Mao mobilized teenage Red Guards by telling them they were in charge; they began by killing teachers, then gutted the entire education system.
• Xi Jinping’s father was purged but not killed; Xi’s cultural-revolution experience left him poorly educated but a genuine true believer in communism.
• Xi is now recentralizing China’s economy back toward pre-Deng Xiaoping orthodoxy, not just invoking Mao rhetorically.
• Mao’s portrait still hangs in Tiananmen and he is revered in ways Hitler and Stalin are not in their own countries, despite comparable death tolls.
• Paine attributes Xi’s lack of mercy partly to psychopathy, noting Stalin and Hitler also suffered childhood abuse without developing empathy.

2025-02-01 · Watch on YouTube