Lone Wolf
There was a Mao Zedong
There was a Mao Zedong, and he had a little gun,
And his bullets were made of lead, lead, lead;
And he won a lot of wars, and wrote a lot of laws,
But his citizens were barely getting fed, fed, fed.
He gathered new recruits, who hadn't any boots,
And the colour of his Guards was red, red, red;
And he chided them to cheer his clever new idea
To harrow every field sparrow dead, dead, dead.
'For sparrows eat the seed our hungry peasants need,
Go and kill them all,' is what he said, said, said;
They parroted his words, and murdered all the birds,
And made a pigeon pie and went to bed, bed, bed.
So many sparrows died, the insects multiplied,
And famine came to visit as they bred, bred, bred;
So Helmsman Mao Zedong took his nasty little gun,
And shot a lot of traitors in the head, head, head.
Chairman Mao Zedong's 'Great Leap Forward' in the late 1950's helped to kill 20 million Chinese peasants in the famine that followed - equivalent to half the population of Spain. Part of his plan demanded that all the sparrows in China be exterminated to reduce crop losses. The results were catastrophic and not just for the sparrows. Truly, folly wreaks more havoc than malice.