Posted on 10/01/2019 12:07:36 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Today is the 70th anniversary of the establishment of the People's Republic of China, which marks the occasion when the Communist Party seized power in the world's most populous nation. The regime established then remains in power today, and is holding a massive celebration. But today is more properly an occasion for mourning. It is an appropriate time to remember the horrific injustices of the government that committed the biggest mass murder in the history of the world, and numerous other injustices and atrocities.
Though it gets nowhere near the level of attention it deserves, Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward was in fact the biggest mass murder in all of human history. I discussed its enormous scale here:
Historian Frank Dikötter, author of the important book Mao's Great Famine recently published an article in History Today, summarizing what happened:
"Mao thought that he could catapult his country past its competitors by herding villagers across the country into giant people's communes. In pursuit of a utopian paradise, everything was collectivised. People had their work, homes, land, belongings and livelihoods taken from them. In collective canteens, food, distributed by the spoonful according to merit, became a weapon used to force people to follow the party's every dictate. As incentives to work were removed, coercion and violence were used instead to compel famished farmers to perform labour on poorly planned irrigation projects while fields were neglected."
A catastrophe of gargantuan proportions ensued. Extrapolating from published population statistics, historians have speculated that tens of millions of people died of starvation…."
The basic facts of the Great Leap Forward have long been known to scholars. Dikötter's work is noteworthy for demonstrating that the number of victims may have been even greater than previously thought, and that the mass murder was more clearly intentional on Mao's part, and included large numbers of victims who were executed or tortured, as opposed to "merely" starved to death. Even the previously standard estimates of 30 million or more, would still make this the greatest mass murder in history.
What happened in the Great Leap Forward was similar to what occurred in the Soviet Union and other communist regimes when agriculture was collectivized. But the death toll in China was much higher than anywhere else.
While the Great Leap Forward was the biggest atrocity committed by the PRC, it was far from the only one. The Cultural Revolution of 1966-76 also took millions of lives. And there was no shortage of other instances of official repression and mass murder during the Mao era, ranging from the brutal conquest and occupation of Tibet (which persists to this day) to numerous purges.
After Mao died in 1976, the regime liberalized much of the economy and eased up on repression. The resulting economic growth was impressive and helped lift millions out of poverty. But it is important to recognize that most of this progress was the result of the government's ending some of its own previous oppressive policies. For example, much of the economic growth occurred because rural Chinese were freed from being forcibly confined to collective farms, and allowed to move (relatively) freely to other parts of the country, where there were better opportunities.
Post-1976 China is far less awful than it was under Mao's rule, and the regime no longer adheres to many of the tenets of communist ideology, which has largely been supplanted by nationalism. But severe oppression nonetheless persists. The Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 is only the most famous example. The regime has also forcibly displaced tens of millions of people for various "development" projects, including over 1 million forced out of their homes just to build the facilities for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. The cruel "one child" policy for a long time imposed state control over one of the most intimate aspects of private family life. in addition to its inherent injustice, the that policy have created serious social and economic problems that the regime will find it hard to overcome, including a serious gender imbalance in the population, and a rapidly aging work force.
And, of course, the government continues to be a one-party dictatorship, with severe limitations on freedom of expression. I got a first-hand view of some of this when I was a visiting professor at a Chinese university in 2014.
Sadly, under the rule of President Xi Jinping, the government has become much more repressive over the last few years. It has established massive detention camps in which hundreds of thousands of members of the Muslim Uighur minority have been confined for purposes of "reeducation." The regime's increasingly intolerant nationalism is bad news for other minorities, as well. Even the tiny community of Kaifeng Jews has been targeted for harassment and persecution.
There has also been a crackdown on real and imagined dissent even among Han Chinese, the majority ethnic group. The closure of the Unirule Institute—a widely respected think tank critical of regime policy—is just one of many examples. I gave a talk at Unirule's offices in Beijing back in 2014—something that sadly would no longer be possible today. China is also trying to repress the liberal democratic protest movement in Hong Kong, in a dramatic confrontation that has captured the attention of the world.
The horrific history of the PRC is notable for exemplifying the evils of both of the ideologies that have caused enormous harm around the world over the last century: communism and nationalism. The regime's gradual transition from the former to the latter, while still being a brutal dictatorship, is a textbook example of how the two have many common flaws.
The unspeakable death toll created by the PRC doesn't necessarily prove it has been the very worst government in history. The numbers are so high in part because the Communist Party ruled over such a large population, and stayed in power for many years. If the likes of Stalin, Hitler, or Pol Pot had ruled over a comparably large population over a similar length of time, it is entirely possible they would would equaled or even surpassed Mao Zedong's dubious record. It is also possible to argue that genocide—mass murder inflicted based on race, religion, or ethnicity—is qualitatively worse than mass murder whose victims are chosen because they are "class enemies" or political dissidents, or just obstacles to the implementation of the regime's ideology. I don't buy this theory myself, but I can understand the sentiment behind it.
But even if the PRC is "merely" one of a handful of contenders for the title of worst regime in human history, rather than the clear winner of that dubious title, its awful record is still worthy of mourning. And such remembrance should be combined with a determination to learn its lessons, and use them to prevent the repetition of similar horrors.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1178986524630802432
@realDonaldTrump
Congratulations to President Xi and the Chinese people on the 70th Anniversary of the People’s Republic of China!
6:54 AM · Oct 1, 2019
Sometimes, being in the position of leadership requires you to say things IN PUBLIC that you find repugnant in private.
So Mao murdered 45 million. The USA has murdered 63 million of its children, with the blessing of its government and most of its church bodies. To make up the loss, it imports millions of foreigners, many of whom have no love for this country. It will not end well, but God will not be mocked.
RE: So Mao murdered 45 million.
Well, technically he didn’t murder them as in gun them down or execute them. His policies caused mass starvation and disease. Unintended consequence of course.
RE: The USA has murdered 63 million of its children, with the blessing of its government and most of its church bodies
Well, if you include abortion in the mix, then China has murdered hundreds of millions more babies than the United States through their one-child policy — most of them baby girls.
It is so bad right now that there are 30 million more men than women in China.
Where are these horny men going to find their brides ?
He’s the POTUS. Should he have tweeted what he REALLY thinks of Red China? He’s speaking as a world leader. As such, he can’t say what he really thinks, this time. And as POTUS, he had to address the issue. Leaves a bad taste in someone’s mouth, either way.
But FYI the article seems to have left out the practice of harvesting organs from the people in the prison camps.
That said-We need to be asking ourselves why this is NEVER talked about, or taught in schools. (Hope the reason isn't because TPTB have this system in mind for us.)
It should also be noted that that CPUSA(Communist Party USA) and the Democrat party have nearly identical goals.
The statement below applied to the communist take over of Russia.
The same thoughts apply to Red China and to America when they try the same murderous path here.
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn’t love FREEDOM enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn ,
The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
If you like Solzhenitsyn, and want to get a concise “PG rated” example of how the traits of selfishness, ambition, corruption were encouraged by the lack of justice and law in Statist regime you may like one his short reads...
Wiki quote
“For the Good of the Cause” is a novella by Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, published in the Russian magazine Novy Mir in 1963. The story is unusual in Solzhenitsyn’s canon in that it is set contemporary time, the early 1960s. The action takes place in a provincial town like Ryazan where the author lived after his release from the gulag and his return from exile in the 1950s.
“In the town, the students of the local college help to build new college premises by doing most of the work themselves. On completion, the Soviet authorities order that the building should be handed over to a research institute and the students are told that this is “for the good of the cause”.
The story is an overt criticism of the lack of democracy that prevailed at the time and the lack of integrity of political leaders.”
endquote
I recall the spirit of provincial young people he describes, so full of virtue and good intentions, voluntarily selling private handcrafted items and small heirloom items etc to raise money for the wheeling and dealing of used building materials, and the pride they took in their communal labours -after their dayjobs- (ex-hippies would get flashbacks reading these scenes) and how a local communist official (ignorant of the project until accidentally hearing of it), saw the building as a ready-made opportunity to bignote himself over a rival in a city office and appropriate the new building, calling it a State Asset for his own uses)... the district’s spirit and loyalty was crushed. The young realise the regime is a delusion, a concentration camp from one border to the other. Why should anyone make any effort at all? And the people are simply livestock in the hands of small minded provincial (well-protected) dictators.. who organise family dynasties and seek out and cement a network of ruthless sycophants.
“Why should anyone make any effort at all?” is a zinger aimed at the Bernie Sanders and AOC far left idiots. “Hey, everything is free, just go to work all day and pay taxes, or not...”
https://i.postimg.cc/x8vCfbZg/sign-up-cartoon.jpg
A society where people are free, law abiding, ambitious and hard working, and brought up to honour themselves and their family has been proven to build strong Nations.
https://i.postimg.cc/RCRWVCzR/MAGANA2020.jpg
The Clintons, Bidens, Kerry’s, Mitch McConnels, probably obama plus etc etc other politicians all taking bribes from the communist Chinese mass murderers.
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