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Starmer shrugs off Trump’s threat to leave NATO after president calls alliance a ‘paper tiger’
(www.huffingtonpost.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2026
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Fun fact, the term "paper tiger" comes from the Chinese term zhǐlǎohǔ. The term was popularized by Mao Zedong, who used the term to describe the imperial powers.
Say what you want about the excesses of the cultural revolution, but Mao truly had some bangers. He also said that "women hold up half the sky", and that "it is right to rebel".
I'm sure if he saw a US president calling his own military alliance a paper tiger, he'd get a real kick out of it.
The issue with Mao like all communist overlords is that their ideology is what comes first, not the facts and well-being of people living under it.
I don't think that's really fair to be honest, Mao is an entirely different breed from Stalin for example, and it seems to me from what I've read despite his flaws, he seemed to have the interests of the people at heart, and worked hard to strike a pragmatic balance between pure marxism as advocated by the 28 Bolsheviks and what would actually work best for the Chinese people.
A lot of the worst excesses of the Cultural Revolution were because of how the Red Guards were given wayy too much latitude to crack down on "counter-revolutionary activity" which basically ended up as something a bit like the Purge, where people would take revenge over old grudges and pretend that they were doing so to fight for the revolution, and there was also a lot of anti-intellectual sentiment among the agrarian societies which formed the bulk of the revolution, which resulted in purges of academics, but Mao was incredibly popular among the working class and massively improved quality of life for an average Chinese person (e.g. farmers), at least until the Great Leap Forward.
When it comes to the Great Leap Forward, I think that's really more of a case of terrible mismanagement as a consequence of information-poor decision making, as a result of top-down management of resources, and likely forced industrialization of the Chinese society would have gone just as poorly, if not moreso, under the authority of the Kuomintang, for example, although the anti-intellectualism of the cultural revolution definitely didn't help
I think the lesson to take from this for leftists and revolutionaries is that violent crackdowns on counter-revolutionary activity should be the option of last resort, we should always guard against anti-intellectual sentiment, and that bottom-up organization of resources and management should be used rather than a top-down centrally managed economy.