Saturday, December 22, 2012

Collectivist tyranny's bitter harvest.

Mao Ze-Dong, the worst mass murderer in history. Counting the famine and purges in China and Tibet, he probably killed almost 80,000,000 people.
I am currently reading several books in my insomniac nights, among them Yang JiSheng's Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine. (Here's a Boston Globe Review.)
No one knows exactly how many Chinese perished in this government-created holocaust from 1958 to 1962, a period the Chinese call ""Three Bitter Years". Jisheng, a Chinese journalist whose father died in the famine, estimates at least 35 million (the low end of the scale). Western analysts place it as high as 45-50 million. While its own people were starving, Mao actually INCREASED China's food exports to other Communist Bloc countries for foreign policy leverage. (Here's an excellent resource on-line to get you acquainted with this horror.) Not surprisingly, Jisheng's book is banned in China.
The bodyguard of lies that protects the murderers. A PRC propaganda poster "To show giant ears of wheat and maize to Chairman Mao" while its own people were starving by the millions.

1 comment:

Paul X said...

Strangely, Mao remains pretty popular in China, just as FDR and Wilson does here. Mass murderers are always hugely popular. People must share certain characteristics with lemmings.