/vr/ - Retro Games

>>5266083
Another example of his regimes pig headed incompetence is seen in Mao instituting a plan to increase steel production in China by building furnaces in people's backyards and forcing them to melt down their farming tools and use their firewood for fuel, leading hundreds of thousands of people to starve and freeze to death, all to make useless lumps of pig iron.
It never occurred to him to ask a steel miller or a blacksmith if this would work, and peasants who tried to tell him it wouldn't were dismissed as 'intellectuals'. For knowing how to make fucking steel. When, after a year, he took a tour of a steel mill and realised that the backyard furnaces were useless, he kept the program going for another year because he was embarrassed.
Imagine being forced at gunpoint to throw your last chunk of firewood into this useless black box where your crops used to grow, and when you get nothing for it but little grey chunks of carbon, you think "Hey okay it's not the end of the world, I can maybe take this to the village blacksmith and he can forge out the impurities and make an axe or something". But then your heart sinks as you see a well fed-gaggle of soldiers cart off the fruit of your destruction to dump it in a massive hole in the woods. When you try to protest, the soldiers reply "YOU KNOW HOW MAKE IRON? YOU BIG SMAHT INTERECTURAR?" and shoot you in the face.

In the end China progressed DESPITE Mao, not because of him. Generalissimo Chaing Kai Shek tried to warn us and we didn't listen.