Evolution of Evil: The Story of Kim Jong-Il and Mao Zedong

so july the 8th 1994 at 82 years of age kim il-sung north korea's dictator for 36 years is dead despite the reality of his regime which has been one of the most ruthless and tyrannical the world has ever known kim il-sung is worshiped as a near god who north koreans believe led them to victory over japan in world war ii and america in the korean war with his death the world's first communist dynasty is born as his son kim jong-il inherits the mantle of power north korea has its founding father who's died and gone to heaven where he presides and you have his living representative blood and spirit and the lineage goes on [Music] but kim jong-il inherits a disastrous situation despite his father's attempts at total self-sufficiency north korea has to rely on its communist neighbors buying its goods when the soviet union collapses in 1991 it has catastrophic effects on the north korean economy compounded by several disastrous harvests that leave people across the country starving the myth of a socialist paradise is falling apart at the seams ever since kim jong-il got involved with everything in politics food distribution gradually started to pair in the morning i would see more than 10 street kids lying dead on the way to work back then a lot of people died around me a lot of kids without parents died from starvation [Music] remarkably north korean propaganda portrays the famine as an arduous march everyone is forced to go on including their new ruler kim jong-il who is seen touring the country reportedly surviving on just a ball of rice a day he made the case that he almost more than anyone else was suffering from this arduous march this image of austerity he was trying to give to his people that you know he had one outfit um he ate such little amounts that he had no need to defecate to go to the bathroom anymore his body had adapted to not needing fuel but in reality while his people starve kim jong-il is living the high life he was having lobster flown in he was dining on french wine he was hennessy's largest single paying customer this man liked his good food you know what's all that noise after starving messes sir you know he was literally like that it's the kind of evil where there is no feeling there's just emptiness those starving people howling out there mean nothing to me rather than introduce simple market reforms like china and russia that would keep his people alive selfishly kim jong-il is only interested in his own survival he didn't do it because he believed that such a policy would make people too independent too difficult to control and in the end of the day too dangerous to finance his extravagant lifestyle and keep himself in power he runs the government like a mafia style criminal enterprise [Music] there was talk of their involvement in various illicit activities everything from ivory trading through to being one of the largest producers of meta-amphetamine [Music] they were probably the world's finest ever forges of hundred dollar bills american hundred dollar bills i think this is one of the great contradictions of the time of kim jong-il you can create perfect fake hundred dollar bills and yet you know you can't uh grow enough corn to to feed the population while kim enriches himself he deviously comes up with a way of getting someone else to pay to keep the north korean people alive he's going to terrify the west into sending them food as well as building the world's fourth biggest army kim jong-il secretly develops nuclear weapons [Music] north korea all along intended to become a nuclear state their objective was to create a bargaining position a leverage that and that they were willing to give this up for some kind of guarantees of regime survival kim makes sure the west knows exactly what he's up to [Music] usually what they do is they start leaking the information about the nuclear program deliberately so and maybe test a nuclear and slash or missile test they suggest negotiations as a way to solve the crisis they themselves had just created a most of the world sign with relief and give them concessions through clever nuclear brinkmanship kim jong-il gets his most hated enemy to bail him out when american aid comes into the country the people of north korea are told that these are reparations from the americans for their attack their imperialistic attack on north korea in the korean war and even though food is now pouring in kim jong-il continues to escalate his nuclear arsenal it's about if you attack us if you do anything to us that we don't like we'll fire a nuclear missile at you game over and maybe just maybe i'm unstable enough i'm mad enough and enough of a nut to do it the north korean dictator's nuclear threat isn't just to get the world to feed his people his country has been so cut off it's regarded as irrelevant in world affairs but nukes get him noticed it feeds his ego [Music] kim jong-il was a master manipulator at the international level and he loved that aspect of making america you know subdominant to him submissive to him and we want to make sure he didn't have nuclear weapons he ended up with him anyway it's the cruel contradiction of kim jong-il's north korea while billions are spent on the army and nukes his people are terrified and starving surviving only through international handouts in 2002 kim jong-il reaches out to japan for talks about aid as a former sworn enemy he feels he needs to offer them something first but what he offers is a startling admission of guilt he says in the 1970s his secret agents kidnapped japanese citizens including megumi yakuda who was only 13 years old at the time because kim jong-il had become obsessed with spying he wanted adventures usually completely unnecessary the worst example was decision to kidnap a large number of japanese citizens to be used as language teachers for the north korean spies in training at least 13 japanese citizens were abducted as the north korean government eventually admitted itself but this seems to be only a part of the total which is probably a few dozen it's a level of state-sponsored depravity the rest of the world could barely believe but it's only what you'd expect from a man raised to be a dictator [Music] right from the get-go the future north korean dictator kim jong-il's life is based on a lie the official state report says he's born in circumstances that would make even jesus blush it's said that when kim jong-il was born um a glacier on the lake on mount pektu which is the most famous mountain in korea cracked double rainbow appeared in the sky a new star appeared in the heavens cranes which is the national bird of korea flew across the sky to announce the birth of kim jong-il the reality is he's born in the fog of world war ii kim jong-il was born yuri kim on the soviet military base near kabarovsk but it's impossible to admit it for the north koreans so they made up a story about him born on the korean soil his father kim il-sung is a commander fighting for the communist resistance struggle in the far east of russia with soviet backing kim's aim is to liberate the korean peninsula from japanese control in 1945 japan is forced to surrender after america brings the country to its knees but when kim jong-il's father kim il-sung returns to north korea the story of his son's birth isn't the only lie his people are fed it is a consistent distortion of history many north koreans actually believe that japan was defeated in world war ii by kim il-sung's resistance with the americans firmly in control in the south of the peninsula and the russians and chinese supporting kim il-sung in the north korea becomes divided the future dictator kim jong-il is just four years old when his father brings the family to the new northern capital pyongyang communist propaganda depicts his childhood as heroic under his father's glorious rise to power but it couldn't be further from the truth according to reports from defectors some say his descent into evil begins at an early age in 1948 kim jong-il and his younger brother are allowed to play together in the pool behind the family's mansion for whatever reason something goes horribly wrong their horse play turns nasty [Music] the younger brother drowns it's rumored kim jong-il is responsible if there's the possibility that he actually drowned his brother it shows that anti-social acts and that even murder will not be too removed from his daily behavior this story has always been spun in two different ways it has often been presented by those wishing to attack kim jong-il as he is inherently evil however that gets spun another way which is to sort of show again his hard man credentials that you know you don't want to mess with kim jong-il don't take on kim jong-il having seemingly little feelings for the loss of his brother it is the loss of another close family member just a year later that truly devastates kim jong-il in 1949 when he is just seven his mother suffers complications from an ectopic pregnancy and dies if he had a mother he would have had a sort of controlling hand and without that it seems he kind of grew up in a world where you know interacting with him was very dangerous for everyone else and very safe for him it leaves the young kim desperate for his father's attention but kim il-sung has more pressing concerns at dawn on june 25th 1950 he begins one of the most brutal and pointless conflicts of the 20th century [Music] the korean war is as close to a third world war as we've ever seen kim il-sung invades the south determined to turn it communist but an american-led united nations army pushes him back seeing their communist ally in trouble china invades and pushes the americans back the war ends in stalemate no peace treaty is ever signed people forget that the korean war has never technically ended so many families were split between those in north korea and those in south korea and for those families in south korea it was as if the other side of their family had gone into a black hole both sides agree to a demilitarized zone that still divides the two countries today the korean war instills in kim il-sung and his son kim jong-il a lifelong fear and loathing of america [Music] they go on to build a vast million-man army to make sure the north can never be invaded again [Music] one of the major ways that they maintain power is through a sort of theatrical victimhood everything is always about this continued struggle the struggle against american imperialism that dates back to the korean war in their minds [Music] the demilitarized zone is actually the most heavily militarized border in the world a four kilometer wide 120 kilometer long stretch of uninhabited countryside the dmz is a strip that goes across the middle of the country separating the two armies and it's the most completely misnamed piece of real estate in korea there's one there was an american general here many years ago commander-in-chief of u.s forces famously used to say to the press there ain't nothing d about that mz skirmishes are frequent just a few years after the zone is introduced american south korean and north korean troops are involved in an ugly confrontation [Music] with the war and the dmz isolating the country north korea decides to go it [Music] kim alone decrees north korea must now be entirely self-sufficient never again relying on china or russia to bail it out in 1955 he declares a policy of north korean self-reliance known as juche [Music] theory united the country under a blend of marxism leninism korean mythology and of course confucianism under duchess north korea will feed itself arm itself and develop without any input from the rest of the world it's a system kim il-sung uses to establish a one-man rule over the country the masses must now submit to the great leader but while he becomes a father to a nation he's not much of a father to his son kim jong-il is desperate for his attention and approval but the supreme leader has started a new family he becomes both spoiled and resentful kim jong-il grew up very sheltered and wasn't told no and one could imagine that you need to be told no to develop some sort of boundaries on what you can do and what you can't do and of course if you've been raised by the supreme leader imagine what that's going to do to your ego as a member of the communist elite he isn't forced into 10 years of military service like other boys his age instead he develops an interest in the arts it's said he becomes obsessed with elvis presley and wanting to be a star himself he demands his father's diplomats bring him foreign films completely banned to the rest of the population [Music] he watched everything from japanese gangster flicks and erotic flicks to hollywood to bollywood but it seems like he preferred you know the kind of hollywood blockbuster mainstream films the james bond films were his favorite films um he loved rambo he would probably make a good movie producer nonetheless he was born to be a dictator after graduating from the kim il-sung university in 1964 kim jong-il is given a position in the workers party his father soon promotes him to a government role he thinks he'll enjoy kim il-sung realized that you know this kid's been sitting in cinemas his whole childhood he's obsessed with films and kim jong-il found himself suddenly catapulted from civil servants with no clear role into running the whole of the country's propaganda system it's the perfect position for a young man desperate to ingratiate himself with his father he wants to spread the myth of him as a god-like figure who won the korean war by elevating him to such heights kim jong-il hopes to one day take the reigns of power himself [Music] he orders statues and paintings of kim il-sung to be displayed throughout north korea every single home should display portrait of kimerson and these portraits had to be treated cleaned and replaced according to specially designed rules and it was a crime not to follow such rules thanks to kim jong-il the cult of personality takes hold throughout the country he was the one who intensified the personality cult of the father to the point that even visiting soviets and chinese who were okay with stalinism and maoism thought man this is over the top it's kind of the mirror image of a religion of the worst sword it is like a cult and the founding father remains as the supreme being in the cult by building up the cult of his father kim jong-il hopes he will one day be anointed his successor his only fear is his younger step-brother may be chosen instead so in maneuvering for the top job he takes out some insurance [Music] it's rumored he starts spying on his father he has kim il-sung bugged to see if he is secretly considering his stepbrother over him it enables him to identify and remove anyone who might not support his taking over [Music] nam il is a partisan who fought alongside kim's father in world war but when he starts asking questions about kim jong-il's suitability for the top job he dies in a mysterious car accident and according to kim jong-il's own nephew who defected when another official suggests that he should not succeed his father kim jong-il has him shot these people were seen to be promoting one of his rivals so you got rid of all of them send them to camps or kill them his stepbrother will be quietly sent abroad never to return at just 25 years of age kim jong-il is learning his father's blueprint of terror purging is absolutely a key in the playbook of north korean dictatorship kim jong-il purged or forced people into exile or executed them or imprisoned them but purging goes all through society gradually the power kim acquires behind the scenes goes to his head with his love of the movies he regards cinema as the perfect means of indoctrinating the north korean people he wants to rival his hated enemies in south korea who are now producing award-winning films to worldwide critical acclaim but the north just doesn't have the talent he had this dilemma which was his filmmakers couldn't really learn what you know was happening elsewhere in the world because he was keeping everybody hermetically sealed away from the world so kim hatches a demented plan this is one of the most bizarre episodes with north korea and certainly i would say counts one of the most bizarre episodes in the history of modern movie making [Music] is south korea's most glamorous and successful film actress one day she receives an unusual invitation to travel to hong kong the actress was approached by a filmmaker from hong kong who was essentially offering her a script to direct and starring for several days che is flattered and cajoled until she is asked to accompany the filmmaker to the hong kong coast where a top producer supposedly lives however it's all a trap she fainted during the process she says and woke up on a ship with the beaming face of kimmel sung looking down at her from a portrait and taking her to north korea after a six-day boat ride che finally understands the enormity of her situation because kim jong-il has come to the north korean coast to welcome her personally having got his south korean star he now needs a director and who better than her estranged husband shin sang ok south korea's most famous filmmaker [Music] shin is thrown into prison after also being kidnapped from hong kong in almost identical circumstances to che [Music] the north koreans had a torture called the torture position in which an inmate was asked to sit legs crossed back straight staring dead ahead um 16 to 18 hours a day without moving a muscle or flinching and if you did you'd be beaten or punished and the logic behind it was that if you sat stuck still that was the only way to think about your crime and to repent in total shin was kept in jail almost three years shin eventually agrees to direct films for kim jong-il if they release him shin had just been freed from prison a couple of weeks earlier given new clothes fattened up with good food and was told by the people looking after him get ready kim jong-un wants to meet you [Music] five years after she was kidnapped kim jong-il arranges a party for che to be finally reunited with shinsang ok [Music] like making his own film with his victims as actors kim directs the whole scene oh there's somebody i want you to meet and he creates this drama can you imagine that there she is with the elite of north korea party time and then in comes the kidnapped husband kim jong-il tells them come on you're not going to hug each other so shin and shay hug you kind of feel dazed and kim's already dreamt up his glorious finale he basically said i got an idea when you get married again um okay i'll tell you what i'll marry you you know this man's a nutter shin and che are forced to make several films for kim jong-il [Music] until they escape to the west in 1986 [Applause] by the 1980s kim il-sung is still dictator of north korea a god to his brainwashed people but behind the scenes his health is ailing by removing all his rivals kim jong-il has persuaded his father to choose him as his eventual successor but as someone with no military experience he must prove to the army he is worthy of leading them [Music] he must establish himself as a hard man in a country where the military is is is elevated to such a high position within the society he must prove that he is tough that may be completely without mercy towards his enemies inspired by his love of james bond kim jong-il takes charge of north korea's intelligence services because he never really left north korea he sort of took what he saw in hollywood films to be realism he thought james bond films were essentially docudramas about how espionage has done in the west he decides to try to finish the job his father started to attack the south [Music] seven south korean cabinet ministers including the president are visiting the martyrs mausoleum in rangoon to pay their respects to a hero of burma's struggle for independence two days earlier kim jong-il has sent his agents to plant a terrifying surprise for the service leaderless south korea would be at kim's mercy 21 people are killed including three members of the south korean cabinet but the main target the president survives when his car is caught in traffic and he is late for the service obviously it was done on the assumption that such an assassination attempt would start a massive anti-government rebellion in south korea of course it was a pipe dream by 1987 with america behind it south korea is emerging as a successful and thriving economy and after years of dictatorship turning to democracy it's awarded the 1988 olympic games but kim thinks they should hold it jointly with the north with the cold war still in full swing he's going to orchestrate a boycott north korea's communist allies were meeting to decide whether to boycott the third olympics you know moscow got boycott by the west in 80. los angeles got boycott by the east in 84. [Music] kim plots a way of making sure the eastern bloc vote to ruin south korea's big day [Music] unknown to the passengers on board korean airlines flight 858 bound for seoul north korean agents plant a bomb before leaving the plane at a scheduled stop in abu dhabi 115 people mainly south koreans are killed in kim jong-il's twisted mind he has given communist nations an excuse to boycott the seoul olympics the north koreans were giving them a pretext it's too dangerous you've got planes dropping out of the sky this is a war zone but his demented scheme backfires south korean intelligence agents trace kim's bombers to a hotel room in bahrain realizing they're about to be arrested they attempt to commit suicide with cyanide pills hidden in cigarettes one succeeds the other is stopped by the south korean agents in the nick of time the female terrorist survives and confesses kim jong-il had sent them she came off the plane with a one of those asian type of masks and i suspect underneath the mask was a leather gag that goes into the round and it stops them biting out their tongue because the north korean commanders are trained to bite their tongue and then bleed out with kim's murderous tactics exposed eastern bloc countries vote to go to the south korean olympics [Music] the white house brands north korea a state sponsor of terrorism but kim jong-il doesn't care because on july the 8th 1994 he gets the news he's waited his whole life for his father is dead and he will soon be in total control of north korea [Music] for the people an already impoverished and repressed life is about to get even worse kim jong-il's reign as north korea's dear leader brings the country to its knees around a million people starved to death in one of the world's worst famines of the 20th century the country becomes so backward when viewed from space it lies in almost complete darkness compared to the rest of asia [Music] yet rather than an object of pity kim jong-il has turned his country into an international pariah north korea is a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction while starving its citizens states like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil but kim jong-il is impervious to american name-calling because he keeps his people in complete isolation they have no idea how the rest of the world view them no independent information can get in or out and anyone who disobeys the leader is crushed mercilessly it's said no other country on earth has more political prisoners than north korea in the beginning of this rule north korea had more political prisoners per 1 000 people then soviet union understand some estimate 200 000 are locked up for their views anyone who disagrees with the cult of personality anyone who challenges the authority the legitimacy of the korean workers party the punishments are extremely harsh right up to of course the well-known large gulag prison camp system and widespread use of execution many are tortured for acts so petty no one in the west would regard them as crimes at all sold seafood to south korea without the party's permission i was tortured in so many different ways i was tortured with electricity and by water and also suffered from pigeon torture where i was chained backwards you your hands behind your back onto a hoop 60 centimeters high so you can't sit down you can't rest you can't stand up your body becomes paralyzed then your body becomes all numb and your chest hurts as if it's going to pop out the pain is beyond description you relieve yourself in your pants is forced to make a false confession that he was a spy working for south korea and many more are sent to the same camp for merely expressing unhappiness during the famine they were caught because they talked about their travelers leaving during the arduous match most of them just because they complained and they were people who are caught because they damaged kim jong-un's portal or newspapers jung experiences conditions no human beings should witness and which haven't been seen since the nazi labor camps in winter it goes down to as much as minus 30 centigrade the ground freezes to almost two meters deep so they never let you body dead people in spring when the ground starts to defrost we would go into the storage room to dispose of the bodies it's really miserable to see because the bodies had decayed while freezing and defrosting so they were all tankers we just had to use shovels to bury them like garbage [Music] while hundreds of thousands are either starving or locked up kim jong-il carries on his life of excess in 2008 he disappears for 10 months without explanation the world waits has kim's lifestyle finally caught up with him when he reappears he looks frail and bewildered on december 2011 an announcement is made north korea's dear leader is dead the outpouring of grief is as hysterical as when his father died 17 years earlier at first many in the west hope his death could be a turning point in north korea's history after 63 years of brutal dictatorship there's a chance the country will finally open up and end its self-imposed exile as the hermit kingdom there are even whispers of reunification the very existence of thriving south korea just four kilometers away over the dmz has come to define the north things that constitute failure uh to any other leaders you know a loss of a wall at the korean war a famine or the fact that your rival country that you're claiming to be the rightful owner of is an economy like a zillion times bigger than yours none of that seems to affect it the south koreans are at the forefront of the modern tech world the great fortune for south koreans is that they were allied with america so they went the american way the north koreans went a different way for many the only hope is to escape after i became a defector and settled in south korea for about five six years i kept having nightmares about north korea i'm still having nightmares about north korea the dictatorship is that horrible hopes grow when it's announced kim jong-il's third son kim jong-un is going to take over he's been educated in the west he is the one who he's been raised abroad he's very aware of the rest of the world as it is he's been exposed to other things that kim il-sung and kim jong-un haven't [Music] at just 28 years of age he becomes the dynasty's third supreme leader kim jong-un is unusual in many regards he is very young obviously his father expected to live much longer he didn't happen so now kim jong-un is in control of the country with very little experience [Music] unfortunately for north korea he turns out to be even madder than his father it begins with a bizarre government recommendation kim jong-un announces that the nation should follow new haircut rules women can have one of 18 haircuts but men only one of 10 approved styles it's a set of rules the supreme leader pointedly ignores but there is a far darker side to the new kim kim jong-un seems to be much more ready much more inclined to use physical violence he is obviously ready to kill people whom he knows personally quite well he starts by purging his own uncle who was publicly arrested and shot [Music] he then brutally kills many of his military command with public executions [Music] at the same time he continues to test nuclear weapons and his people starve when comparing kim jong-il and kim jong-un people think kim jong-un will be different but nothing can ever change there's still a payment there are still people who are starving to death so i think it's better not to get your hopes up about kim jong-un meanwhile the man responsible for much of his country's mess kim jong-il lies embalmed in pyongyang's mausoleum quietly watching over his son's reign and the continuing suffering of the north korean people kim jong-il was the one who built this truman show for the only reason that he would not have any power if it stopped existing so north korea today has existed for the sole reason of sustaining the kim's and sustaining that leadership um and that's you know built on the pain and labor and heartbreak and tragedy of all the people who live there but even though it appears as invulnerable as it ever has some believe the house of cards the kim family has built could yet come crashing down i think the north korean system is very brittle it is one family sitting on top sucking the life out of a society for its own benefit and when the means to do that cease to be effective then this thing could be over very quickly in 1911 china's age-old imperial order is collapsing after 2 000 years of dynastic rule the people overthrew their emperor what follows is a decade of violent lawless anarchy china was in deep depression by the late 19th century early 20th century we had an imperial system that didn't permit debate or discussion or criticism so if you were unhappy with the situation which you were born you had to rebel you had to kick against you had become revolutionary out of the ruins of the empire two political groups with opposing ideologies begin to emerge [Music] the nationalists dedicated to transforming china into a westward-looking capitalist republic [Music] and the communists a small group inspired by lenin's bolshevik revolution in russia both claim to act for the 600 million peasants living in near medieval conditions [Music] but this clash of ideologies sows the seeds for a bloody civil war that will ravage china for over two decades a young farmer's son mao zedan experiences first hand both the hardships of imperial rule and the ruthlessness with which the army executes rebelling peasants if you look at the experiences that he had particularly as a teenager you can see many things that are going to influence the way that he behaves later on against this bloody backdrop mao grows into an angry rebel looking for a cause keen to be considered an intellectual he reads translations of european philosophy but when in 1917 at the age of 24 he finds marxist literature strikes a chord where he read the manifesto the comments manifesto and he read in it the perfect description of why china was humiliated in the way that it was mao picks up on that and from then on is committed communist [Music] [Music] radicalized by his mentors at beijing university by 1921 mao is a fully-fledged left-wing activist [Music] he is convinced communism is the only route to a successful revolution because the party has powerful friends it wasn't his sympathy for chinese peasants that made him a communist mao spotted one most important thing that is china's most powerful neighbor russia was determined to put chinese communist party in power so in 1922 just one year after its official inception mao joins the fledgling chinese communist party he believes only they have the ruthlessness necessary to seize power and he is intent on being on the winning side but in 1924 mao's nationalist rivals snatch power and are established as china's official government mao realizes he holds the key to how china's communists can fight back and he has what becomes the first of many clashes with his russian comrades the russians were intimately involved in the chinese revolution in the chinese communist party and certainly he was one of their anointed when they were fighting the nationalists but there was always this sense that the russians were trying to tell him how to run his revolution they were trying to tell the chinese communists how to behave and mao would repeatedly say on the ground this is not how it works mao is convinced the chinese revolution must be ignited in a completely different way to the revolution in russia the russians believed that revolution came from within the urban poor and now would say no revolution in china comes from the peasantry it comes from the people in the countryside it's a completely different system and you can't tell me what to do mao's stubborn realization that the spark of revolution has to arise from china's peasants becomes the cornerstone of his political philosophy for four decades to come over the next few years as the communists focus on building their numbers mao's attention is on climbing the ladder in 1927 party superiors give the now 34 year old mao a grand title commander-in-chief of the red army in reality it's a small ragtag militia mao's task to lead them out to the villages to stir up revolution it's a life-changing experience [Music] [Applause] [Music] his method for revolution is simple turn the peasants against their landowners recalling from his student philosophy books that the end justifies the means mao doesn't care who gets hurt in every single village the villagers are assembled [Music] and forced to denounce a number of very carefully selected victims seen as tyrants or landlords or traitors there are stories of people taking evil oppressors of the masses and stringing them up and criticizing them and executing them the violence of 1927 marks the official beginning of the bloody chinese civil war and it teaches mao a lesson one that serves him well in his inexorable rise to power violence works he said from that time on he was convinced that politics had to be violent because people don't give up power willingly has been dragged from them famously he said all power grows out of the barrel of a gun [Music] this brutality has a personal effect on mao that is positively perverse when he toured the villages and witnessed the violence and atrocities first hand as he said himself he changed he felt a kind of ecstasy that was his word as he had never experienced it before [Music] mao becomes a sadist intoxicated by violence itself and this is only the beginning within the chinese communist party mao's talents are recognized his career takes off but far away from the war's front line the leading of the army was left in the hands of others and mao found himself with this political role with with the role of a political commissar a commissar is a political fixer responsible for enforcing right thinking in the party's rank and file [Music] this role teaches him another crucial lesson controlling what people think can make you supremely powerful he was already developing a personality cult people were already talking about mao zedong thought about him as some kind of philosophical leader of the communist party appointing himself supreme authority on communist thought is a critical position that mao leverages on his mastery rise to supremacy [Music] his move to the top is accelerated further when outsiders take advantage of the political chaos in china [Music] in 1931 china's age-old enemy japan invades it seizes the entire northern province of manchuria the nationalist government puts up a fight but it's not enough a full-scale japanese invasion is on the cards the communists try to take advantage of the mayhem to topple the nationalists but fail mao's name is made during a year-long retreat to evade the nationalist army the so-called long march of 1935 as the death toll mounts mal finds himself practically the last man standing mao simply stayed alive every time more loyal communists follow the advice of their superiors and got killed mao made it another rung up the ladder and so at the age of 42 through the strategic use of violence and thought control and a degree of luck mao zedon achieves his aim he is appointed leader of the chinese communist party a position from which he can initiate his master plan to become ruler of all china [Music] by early 1937 mao zedong's communists are under attack from both the chinese nationalists led by the pro-western general chiang kai-shek and the japanese invaders looking to crush an unstable nation [Music] as the newly anointed leader of the communist party of china mao zedon bases himself at yanan it's a bombed out mountain town wrecked by the civil war but its fame spreads far and wide it's popularly believed to be a communist utopia a place for radicals intellectuals and the idealistic youth to think freely they were teenagers and of course they thought communism was for equality for a decade they've been flocking there all in the cause of liberating china they didn't think chiang kai-shek was doing a good enough job fighting japan so these young people including my own father then went to the north where mao was thinking that they would join the fight against the japanese [Music] but mao has other plans for them his intention is to turn the yanan communist faithful into a force that is utterly obedient to him and that will take him to power he actually saw japanese invasion and the war as an opportunity to destroy chiang kai-shek state to enable him to cease power after the war was over to do this he takes the lessons in violence and manipulation he learns as a younger man and enhances them into a signature toolkit of terror first he eradicates the principle of an egalitarian utopia and sets up a hierarchy with him at the top in vienna there was absolutely no equality housing was graded food was graded the clothes was graded and meanwhile mao was able to wear this sort of fine cotton imported from nationalistic areas mao then uses his power to set a trap luring potential opponents into the open mao starts to suggest that people could criticize him openly let's have a debate about this let's contradict each other let's struggle together to work out what is best for us one group takes their complaints to a man they nominate as their representative wang shiwei a writer wong shui was their hero he spoke that disillusionment with communism [Applause] wang publicizes his followers grievances posting their criticisms for all to see mao went to see wong shui's posters and saw how crowds of people regarded once we as their hero [Applause] [Music] with wang exposed mao swoops into action and puts into practice his conviction the through violence comes power [Music] mao subjects wang xi to a uniquely excruciating method of knee breaking the so-called tiger bench of all the instruments of torture available it's mao's personal favorite using torture mao can get wang xi to say anything he makes a false confession that he is a nationalist spy what's more he is forced to implicate innocent comrades though nothing he says will prevent his execution because mao is determined to send a message if you don't think the way mao wants you to think you will die [Music] once we was killed by mao's kgb [Music] that had a really devastating effect on these young people [Music] it's not long before mao extends his campaign of torture to spread terror through the ranks he develops this powerful dramatic instinct and if you're going to do something maybe done on as big as scale as you can so others learn and profit from it or learn in a frightened mind but he's careful never to get his hands dirty mao is always a shadowy figure at the back i don't think you'll find any evidence of mao pulling any triggers or actively hanging anybody violence was something that he got other people to do for him and this would escalate throughout his life just like stalin in the soviet union mao justifies his terror campaign by claiming to see spies everywhere mao had no doubt they weren't spies his real objective was to scare these young people and mold them into a army for his future use from this moment killing and torture are firmly established as the core of his personal political philosophy violence is not an accidental aspect of maoism it is a necessary part of it he said don't execute them before you've got everything out and you can the result is that mao becomes leader of a brainwashed army of half a million loyal through fear by 1945 china has been under siege by the japanese for eight years with millions homeless china is on its knees and ripe for revolution the time is right for mao to make his move mao comes down from the hills of yemen his army swells to 3 million brandishing military hardware provided by communist ally stalin by 1949 the nationalists lack both public support and the will to fight on their leader general chiang kai-shek resigns just days later mao zedong announces he is the supreme leader of 600 million people the birth of this new nation is the culmination of 27 years of terror torture and manipulation but he is greeted as a hero by the people mao was genuinely popular among ordinary chinese by 14 why because he led a pleasant revolution he'd thrown off centuries of oppression he'd overcome the landlords the warlords the japanese the nationalists he said we now stood up as a people and we can create our own world [Music] what the chinese people don't realize is that their darkest days under mao are yet to come by 1950 under chairman mao zedong's new communist regime china is still desperately poor recovering from three decades of bloody war and revolution as supreme leader mao proclaims industrialization on a massive scale is the key to transforming his nation into an economic superpower and he's going to achieve this virtually overnight no matter the human cost mao calls his scheme the great leap forward the idea of the great leap forward was supposedly to take china into the future to create this communist utopia and to do it in just 15 years the plan is to buy ready-made factories from his russian allies and pay for them with grain grown by the peasants of china mao had this dream even before he conquered china and to fulfill this dream mao needed to buy vast quantities of nuclear technology and equipment missile technology and equipment the whole range of military industrial complexes the chairman has no doubt that his vision will cede china's meteoric rise to vast wealth and global domination with him at the helm but it all depends on everyone doing exactly what they are told mouse starts by outlawing private enterprise in the countryside every scrap of grain will now be owned by the state the grain goes straight from the fields into state granaries no private market no private trading [Music] then he strips his peasants of all their possessions ordering them to live and work on vast collective farms collectivization really is nothing but stripping people from their every little bit of private property the houses are confiscated tools pots pans utensils become collective livestock is collectivized mao sets impossibly high production targets for these collective farms and the peasants are told they won't receive food rations if they don't hit their quotas quite literally people who are unable to work are starved to death this includes children pregnant women the elderly all of them are cut off from the food supply it's not long before the situation spirals out of control the starving people grow weaker and progressively unable to work so instead of leading to a great leap forward it results in an absolute disaster across the country millions starve to death as food production collapses [Music] mao believes the problem lies not with his brutal policy but with the nation's birds eating the people's grain so he issues a dictat the chinese people are to eradicate every last sparrow one of his maddest ideas was war on the sparrows he decided that if the chinese could kill all the sparrows in the country then the 10 grains that each of those sparrows ate would be food for humans all seems very logical so he has the chinese running around beating pots throwing rocks at sparrows keeping them awake until they fall dead from the sky they would hunt down the birds for days weeks they would rattle anything that made a noise so the birds couldn't settle and rest and sleep the birds would drop from the sky they gathered them in their thousands put them on pole parade them around show this great contribution the village had made to food production well done chairman mao except now there's nothing to eat the insects and so the following year there's a blight on all the crops because the caterpillars and the locusts are eating all the grain anyway and there's a huge famine far from alleviating his people's suffering mao's intervention has made matters even [Music] worse [Music] in beijing the story being told is very different the communist party propaganda machine portrays the chairman's great leap forward as a dazzling success even senior party members have little idea of the reality of the famine but one man for certain knows the truth [Applause] there is report after report with extremely detailed information about the famine that lands on the desks of the top leadership the reports prove mao is well aware of the deaths of millions of his people to him it is simply a price worth paying clearly he was prepared to take risks with other people's lives to the extent of 50 of his country [Music] he had the people to spare and he was prepared to do that if it meant creating the china that he wanted [Music] by the spring of 1959 the truth starts to leak out [Music] 14 million dead people can't be hidden yet rather than stem the tide of famine mao plans to extend his great leap forward even further within the senior ranks of the communist party there are mutterings about his leadership but no one is sure what they can do the problem that china had and has is there is no opposition everyone is agreed that we are already living in a utopia so no one can say that there's something wrong with this utopia behind the scenes mao's trusted second-in-command is having serious doubts joshua t is the number two he's the head of states he stands very much behind the chairman but he's truly taken aback by the scale of starvation lu xiaoqi decides to do the unthinkable and challenge his supreme leader it's a decision of extraordinary personal bravery in july 1959 mao holds a communist party conference to rubber stamp the expansion of his great leap forward what happens next takes everyone by surprise you made the most courageous act in his life basically he said there was a great famine and it was a human mistake and we must stop it to say that as a man-made disaster is actually direct attack against the whole vision proposed by mao with the great leap forward and that really is breaking it to boom to mao it's the ultimate betrayal mao was furious because he hated to be outsmarted from that moment onwards the chairman becomes extremely suspicious and thinks that he has found the very man who will destroy his legacy destroy his reputation [Music] but mao can't turn on liu immediately within the party liu is well known and well liked [Music] mao has to move slowly now mal was wise enough still to know that you will still be useful as an administrator so he keeps him on but he is a marked man from then on this will be a revenge served exceptionally cold mao's plan to destroy his second in command will be a nationwide decade-long masterpiece in cruelty by 1965 the 71 year old chairman mao has been supreme leader of china for 16 years but because of a disastrous famine caused by his policies for the first time there are murmurs within the party that perhaps the great helmsman should be replaced rather than wait for his enemies to come at him mao decides to seize the initiative he was determined to remind people that uh in his words a revolution is not a dinner party we we are going to have to break some heads we are going to have to be very tough on ourselves in not succumbing to the temptations of what he called the capitalist road mao's plan is for a revolution every bit as devastating as the first but even more sinister in its execution a cultural revolution mao proposes to purge the country of bourgeois thoughts he claims lingar in the older generation just as adanan he wants all 600 million chinese to practice true communist right thinking and again he will be the only person to dictate what this right thinking [Music] is mao now needs a wingman to help him execute his policy [Music] with a great leap forward mao makes the mistake of trusting his party deputies he does not intend to repeat that mistake this time he turns to the one person he can trust absolutely his wife zhang jin madam mao [Music] is an actress from shanghai who becomes mao's lover during the yanan decade of terror in the 1940s as mao rose through the party zhang ching adopted a role as a kind of cultural secretary she began to initiate cultural policies she began to say what plays were worth performing and what films worth performing and she started to enact an increasingly invasive role as she got older she became increasingly neurotic but no one dared argue with her she described herself as mao's dog when he said buy it i bit but the others called her the white boned demon together mao and madam mao make a formidable and untouchable typically mao begins his new cultural revolution with a statement of policy so vague it can be molded at his whim to any purpose what mao said was let's attack what he called the four olds old ideas old ways old customs old old pursuits now that covered everything it's one of those blanket for olds so anything he disapproved of came under attack as a guide to his thinking mao issues his little red book his version of marx's communist manifesto or hitler's mein kampf as a collection of over 400 of mao's sayings it's a window into the mind of a dictator intent on fueling violence war is a continuation of politics war is the highest form of struggle it is up to us to organize the people where the broom does not reach the dust will not vanish of itself let us hold the banner high and march ahead along the path crimson with our blood at over a billion copies the little red book is one of the most printed books in history mao's aim is mind capture of those he can mold most easily the young this becomes much more important later on when you have an entire generation who is raised on the thoughts of of mao zedong these children grow up to become a compliant army just like at janan to enforce mao's will his notorious red guards now his delight in violence and chaos takes a sick twist he incites this teen army to rise up and slaughter their elders he does a very clever thing psychologically he calls on the young you are china you are the future young people rise up purify our society from all those corrupting elements this was mao's standard procedure when he wanted to do something he always created terror mao's first target is carefully chosen the red guard youths turn on their teachers mao did not particularly hate the teachers he regarded himself as a teacher but in order to generate the terror he needed the victims so it was a completely cynical calculation [Music] thousands of teachers are assaulted in beijing alone hundreds are murdered in my school there was tremendous violence my headmaster couldn't stand it and he was trying to commit suicide by slashing his neck a gardener in the school he had been a nationalist officer so he was singled out and beaten to death the red guards ranks swell to millions they run riot on a rampage of vandalism and slaughter soon nothing is off limits [Music] china becomes a cultural desert art books music anything with even faintly western cultural influences are banned or destroyed but mao's real target is only just coming into view [Applause] in the fall of 1967 mao orders his red guards to extend their reign of terror to his rivals in the communist party it's mao's way of settling scores the metal of surgery was used you've got to cut out the cancer in order for the body body politic to recover so violence is not simply a means to an end it's an absolute requirement in any revolutionary situation violence is a definition of revolution hundreds of thousands of party officials are sent to labor camps driven to suicide imprisoned or simply murdered they're people who have expressed concerns about mao's great leap forward [Music] only now can he move in on his primary target his second in command liu xiaoti the man who dead wants to stand up to him will now pay the price in the most unimaginably cruel way [Music] [Applause] in 1968 communist chairman mao sedun's cultural revolution intended to crush all those who dare oppose him in china is reaching its end game he is more determined than ever to hang on to power [Applause] but he believes one man stands in his way mao has long taken sadistic pleasure in inflicting pain and humiliation and now he plots the fate of his loyal deputy liu xiaoxi but because liu is popular in the communist party first mao has to undermine his credibility nobody would have any sympathy for him if he spelled out the real reason why he hated liu xiaoji so he had to create all sorts of accusations like liu had been a traitor you know i betrayed the party and so on the state propaganda machine obediently wears into action practically overnight liu's reputation is destroyed next comes the humiliation like hundreds of his comrades before him liu is publicly accused and assaulted typically they would be stood on the stage facing a hysterical crowd and they were kicked and beaten and tortured and made to new unbroken glass being paraded in the streets eventually sent to the camps liu endures over a year of torture only then in a prison cell comes death but it's no act of mercy this final chapter of liu's life is planned personally by maha to be as slow and as painful as possible he was a diabetic by that time and mao denies him the right to treatment he said he died lying on a prison cell lying in his own filth as if to leave the scale of his depravity and no doubt mao demands liu's painful death is filmed for his personal pleasure it's a grim story because he's a man who from the long march on he'd been bound freighters associated anyway there are those who argue that had you been examined you would have found in mao aspects of personality disorder that might classify him as being clinically disturbed to the point of insanity [Music] [Applause] mao's cultural revolution instigated to wreak vengeance on his rivals real and imagined lasts a decade in all two million of china's best educated people are murdered millions more sent to labor camps far from creating a utopian society mao has made one based on terror mao didn't try to build the nation and mao destroyed the nation he didn't unify china he was not a builder he was a destroyer mao's legacy of needless deaths is so great in number the total may never be known exact figures we can never have i mean i've seen 40 million quoted and justified i mean custom really we say that in the league tables of horror he comes top [Applause] [Music] in the early 1970s as he approaches his 80th birthday mao's health begins to deteriorate we met people like nixon in 72 and others later and they said that he was still very conscious then very alert could didn't speak easily but could understand and could respond through interpreters but that decreases that capacity decreases in 1974 mao is silenced by a degenerative condition that makes him unintelligible to all but his personal nurse yet the fear he has instilled into his party means even when he is incapable of leading he remains untouchable he lost the power of speech the last two years he burbled but as long as he was alive moving of course nobody could move against him mao's declining health means china's progress as a nation is paralyzed and beneath the surface mao is ravaged by an ever-increasing sense of paranoia he was in power for 27 years and he lived as though he was in the war zone ready to flee all the time on the eve of taking power in 1949 mao would shake like a leaf as they say if he set eyes on a stranger this guy was about to take power in china and he was of intense fear perhaps it's a psychological punishment for his total lack of empathy for other people's lives most of all in his final years mao is aware his party believes he has failed he hadn't fulfilled his dream of building china into this military superpower so he could dominate the world he didn't feel satisfied he was full of self-pity none of his feelings were for the tragedy he brought for the chinese population and for the death of well over 70 million chinese in peace time as a result of him pursuing his dream on september 9 1976 after 27 years in power mao zedong supreme leader of china dies [Music] the communist party marks his passing with hysterical scenes of national mourning yet after his death mao's ideology is almost entirely spurned many of those he imprisoned become the country's future leaders though a sadist and a despot the equal of stalin and hitler today his portrait remains everywhere in part it is because to admit what he really did would undermine the rule of the communist party and in part it is because for good and ill mao zedon is the father of modern china you

Channel: criminals and crime fighters

Views: 711,055

Keywords: Evolution of Evil, Evolution of Evil Series, Evolution of Evil Full Episode, Evolution of Evil Documentary, Evolution of Mao Zedong, Evolution of Evil China, Evolution of Evil Dictator Documentary, Evolution of Evil Kim Jong Il, Evolution of Evil North Korea Documentary, Evolution of Evil Dictatorship Documentary, Evolution of Evil War Documentary, Evolution of Evil History Documentary, Evolution of Evil Mao, Evolution of Evil Kim, Evolution of Evil North Korea

Id: YMHGKNUTuFU

Length: 96min 55sec (5815 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 12 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

In this series theres a doc on Gaddafi. All leftards go apeshit in the comments. Lmao