Sarah Paine

No one's got luxury wear or anything.

Yeah, I don't know the details on Mao.

Mao had other things that had to do with little girls, but anyway.

Oh, communists are good at this.

When the North Vietnamese win, they promptly get famine.

And in Vietnam, I think you have kind of three harvests.

Like, how do you ever have famine in that place?

But...

Yeah, they did.

This is the brilliance of communism, is this commissar system and the party system and how they set up their government.

It's incredibly effective about maintaining power.

It's very effective about seizing power during warfare, maintaining it thereafter, but it does not deliver prosperity.

It delivers compounding poverty.

Take a look at North Korea.

It's a mess.

But the man's in power.

This is when you get Pang Dehuai, who was the general that was in charge of forces during the Korean War and also the Long March generation.

He had lost several of his siblings to starvation over the course of these civil wars.

And he and Liu Shaoqi pulled the plug on Mao.

And then Mao is...