"Vandal damages China's iconic Mao portrait," reads the Reuters headline. But a vandal didn't deface a massive, cult-of-personality painting of Mao Tse-tung near Tiananmen Square. A hero did. Vandals painted it. They hung it to humiliate the Chinese populace. They are now trying to clean it up. But there's no cleaning up the murderous record of Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Communists.

The Vandals sacked Rome in the fifth century. Fifteen centuries later, the Chinese Communist Party sacked China. They killed tens of millions of people, aided and abetted such lunatics as Pol Pot and Kim Il Sung, and wiped Tibet off the map. Ever since the Vandals destroyed Rome (which, in truth, had done much to destroy itself in the previous 500 years), their name has been synonymous with senseless destruction. But defacing a portrait of a mass murderer in a society that stomps on freedom of speech is anything but senseless. It's a brave and intelligent act of political expression. It's the necessary consequence of a society that denies the masses a say in its government.

If the Chinese had political expression, not only would nobody louse-up pictures of Chairman Mao, they would neither hang pictures of Chairman Mao nor choose such a person as a leader. It's the gigantic portrait of a murderer that is uncivilized. That someone would besmirch it is civilized. Passivity in the face of oppression isn't civilization.

We think of vandals as outside the system. Indeed, the term "barbarian," in some instances used interchangably with "vandal," simply meant "outsider" to the Greeks. But vandals and barbarians have run governments. Our association of government with justice and order makes it hard for some to accept the idea of vandals on the throne. But vandals ran Germany for a dozen years, China for the last 58, and Russia for much of its history. Government may mean justice and order in the West, but in other places and in other times it means (meant) a more effective manner of looting, killing, and manipulation.

Chinese police arrested a 35-year-old man in connection with the case. If he defaced the oversized billboard (and, perhaps, even if he did not), he will likely spend the next decade under state supervision. The penalty for such transgressions against state-sponsored iconography in sister-state North Korea is death. Who, really, are the vandals?