Soviet Communism aka Bolshevism was a disaster, having ignored the Mensheviks’ point that you can’t redistribute wealth if there is no wealth, and that the only way to create wealth is capitalism (but they in turn overlooked the fact that creating wealth and then abandoning its creation doesn’t work because wealth is perishable).
The Chinese Communists apparently got the message and encourage just enough capitalism to produce wealth to seize and redistribute. The result is sustainable, but still retards progress, leaving large fractions of the population in poverty and pollution is of the charts.
Goggle “Great Leap Forward” and you get nothing but positive propaganda.
What is the true story?:
The death toll is staggering. “The most officials have admitted is 20 million,” he says, but he puts the total at 36 million. It is “equivalent to 450 times the number of people killed by the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki … and greater than the number of people killed in the first world war,” he writes. Many think even this is a conservative figure: in his acclaimed book Mao’s Great Famine, Frank Dikotter estimates that the toll reached at least 45 million.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/01/china-great-famine-book-tombstone
The Great Leap Forward killed 50 million people.
The Cultural Revolution “only” killed a few million people.
I guess it was a kind of progress.
Libromaniacs always come through ....
The Bern is essentially talking about a Great Leap for America.
Zero dreams of being one of the pantheon of Great Socialist Leaders.