You can measure a nation's morality by whose graves it remembers.
And whose it ignores.
When the West speaks of Mao Zedong, it recites one number like a ritual:
"Tens of millions dead under his rule."
It is the mantra that absolves empire, the proof that whatever the West has done, someone else was worse.
But history is not a courtroom where the victor's witnesses never lie.
If we judge Mao by the same logic the West uses against him, then we must also weigh the bodies that fell under the American flag.
During the Great Depression, from 1929 to 1939, millions of Americans were thrown from their homes, their farms repossessed, their savings erased, their dignity turned into a sermon on "self-reliance."
Children went hungry while the government burned wheat to stabilize prices.
Men wandered highways in search of work.
Women buried infants in fields because there was no money for a coffin.
No one calls that a "famine."
No one counts those graves.
Yet by modern estimates, between half a million and two million Americans died prematurely during those years, by malnutrition, disease, exposure, suicide, or despair.
Scaled to China’s population in 1960, that would mean tens of millions of lives lost, a toll that would rival the famines the West condemns abroad but forgets at home.
If those deaths had occurred under a socialist flag, they would be remembered as proof of tyranny. But they happened under capitalism. So they were called market corrections.
Herbert Hoover preached virtue through suffering.
He refused large-scale federal aid, fearing that hunger relief would weaken "national character."
He signed the Smoot–Hawley Tariff, collapsing world trade.
And when World War I veterans marched for their promised pay, he sent in the Army to drive them out with gas and bayonets.
America's own Tiananmen, written out of its textbooks.
Under his moral discipline, unemployment reached 25 percent, industrial output collapsed by half, and suicide rates rose 50 percent.
But Hoover is not remembered as a murderer.
He's remembered as a "man of principle."
Franklin Roosevelt is praised for fixing what Hoover broke.
And yes, he helped millions survive through the New Deal.
But the Depression's worst years were not undone by policy.
They were undone by war, by the same industrial machine that would later burn Dresden and Hiroshima.
When Mao's China starved under embargo and drought, the world called it ideology.
When America starved under capitalism, the world called it misfortune.
When the Chinese government forced collectivization, it was tyranny.
When American banks seized millions of farms and homes, it was "the invisible hand."
When the Great Leap Forward failed, Mao was condemned for the lives lost.
When Hoover's free-market faith failed, he was praised for staying true to it.
It is not morality that separates them.
It is the power to name tragedy.
The same civilization that starved its own during the Depression now lectures others about the sanctity of life.
The same empire that napalmed villages in Asia weeps over the statistics of Chinese famine.
If deaths from policy are crimes, then the architects of American austerity stand beside Mao in the dock.
If the human cost of ideology is unforgivable, then capitalism's own famines, from Bengal to the Bronx, should be written in the same red ink.
But they are not.
Because the judge still wears the flag.
The West never counts the deaths it causes, only the ones it can use.
It never calls its hunger "famine," its poverty "policy," or its arrogance "ideology."
It buries its victims under words like growth, progress, and necessary adjustment.
And when others rebuild from the ruins it left, it demands moral purity from the survivors.
If we must count the dead, then let us count all of them.
The millions who died under Mao.
The millions who died under Hoover.
And the hundreds of millions who died under centuries of Western empire.
Because the question is not who killed more.
The question is who killed to rule, and who suffered to rise.
Mao's revolution was brutal.
But it was the brutality of rebirth, not conquest.
He didn't save China by perfection.
He saved it by survival.
And that is the one crime empire never forgives, when the world it tried to bury learns to live again.