Posts Tagged ‘Mao’

The 120th Birthday of the Greatest Mass Murderer In History

Thursday, December 26th, 2013

From Dwight comes word that today is the 120th birthday of Mao Tse-Tung (aka Mao Zedong). Most people know he ruled Communist China and published his “Little Red Book” of quotations.

Fewer people know that he’s the greatest mass-murder in history, having killed somewhere between 65 million and 77 million of his own people. (Whether Hitler or Stalin comes in second depends on just how you apportion World War II deaths among them. Does the fact that Stalin waited a whole 16 days before helping Hitler dismember Poland absolve him of all blame for the final body count? I think not…) Between the mass collectivization famine of the Great Leap Forward, the subjugation of Tibet, and the Cultural Revolution, Mao was a very nasty piece of work indeed.

And his political heirs are still running China today.

Further Reading

  • Becker, Jasper. Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine. The Free Press, 1997.
  • Rummell, R. J. Death by Government. Transaction Publishers, 1994.
  • Werth, Nicolas; Panne, Jean-Louis; Paczkowski, Andrzej; Bartosek, Karel; Margolin, Jean-Louis; Courtois, Stephane. The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Harvard University Press, 1999.
  • Current Death Estimate for the Great Leap Forward: 45 Million

    Thursday, December 16th, 2010

    According to historian Frank Dikotter, who examined hundreds of documents across China from 2005-2009.

    Dikotter is author of Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962, which I haven’t read yet. But some of the descriptions of the famine echo those that Robert Conquest relayed in The Harvest of Sorrow, his book on Stalin’s terror famine in the Ukraine.

    Between 2 and 3 million of these victims were tortured to death or summarily executed, often for the slightest infraction. People accused of not working hard enough were hung and beaten; sometimes they were bound and thrown into ponds. Punishments for the least violations included mutilation and forcing people to eat excrement.

    One report dated Nov. 30, 1960, and circulated to the top leadership — most likely including Mao — tells how a man named Wang Ziyou had one of his ears chopped off, his legs tied up with iron wire and a 10-kilo stone dropped on his back before he was branded with a sizzling tool. His crime: digging up a potato.

    When a boy stole a handful of grain in a Hunan village, the local boss, Xiong Dechang, forced his father to bury his son alive on the spot. The report of the investigative team sent by the provincial leadership in 1969 to interview survivors of the famine records that the man died of grief three weeks later.

    Starvation was the punishment of first resort. As report after report shows, food was distributed by the spoonful according to merit and used to force people to obey the party. One inspector in Sichuan wrote that “commune members too sick to work are deprived of food. It hastens their death.”

    As the catastrophe unfolded, people were forced to resort to previously unthinkable acts to survive. As the moral fabric of society unraveled, they abused one another, stole from one another and poisoned one another. Sometimes they resorted to cannibalism.

    The overall 45 million figure Dikotter comes up with is slightly lower than the previous figures for the death toll by Mao’s communist government I’ve reported here:

    My working assumption is that Dikotter’s research is solid, and that his estimate of 45 million is probably the floor for the number of people killed under Mao. A total twice that high is also possible.

    Somehow, despite an ever-dwindling pool of apologists contending otherwise, communism has been more congenial to genocide as a instrument of policy than any other transnational ideology in the 20th century. The Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Mengistu’s Ethiopia; different countries, same results. Communism, everywhere and at all times, is a ticket to oppression and death.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit, who has several other readers and bloggers chiming in on the issue.)

    Today is Victims of Communism Day

    Saturday, May 1st, 2010

    The fine folks over at The Volokh Conspiracy have come up with the brilliant idea of making May 1st Victim’s of Communism Day. If the victims of a brutal ideology that killed over 100 million people doesn’t deserve a memorial day, then who does?

    Here’s an Amazon carousel widget featuring a small selection of books on victims of communist oppression.

    More on estimating just how many people communism killed on R. J. Rummel’s Democide page.