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Friday, September 17, 2010

New Report: Mao Killed 45 Million (But He's Still Cool)

Mao Zedong caused the death of 45 million people according to a scholar who was given unprecedented access to Chinese Communist Party archives.  As reported by The Independent in Britain:
Mao Zedong, founder of the People's Republic of China, qualifies as the greatest mass murderer in world history, an expert who had unprecedented access to official Communist Party archives said yesterday.

Speaking at The Independent Woodstock Literary Festival, Frank Dikötter, a Hong Kong-based historian, said he found that during the time that Mao was enforcing the Great Leap Forward in 1958, in an effort to catch up with the economy of the Western world, he was responsible for overseeing "one of the worst catastrophes the world has ever known".
Mr Dikötter, who has been studying Chinese rural history from 1958 to 1962, when the nation was facing a famine, compared the systematic torture, brutality, starvation and killing of Chinese peasants to the Second World War in its magnitude. At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in China over these four years; the worldwide death toll of the Second World War was 55 million.
Not that it's a big deal.  Mao's still cool.  And one hell of a political philosopher.
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9 comments:

  1. It's what people that worship the anti-establishment don't know about their heroes that keeps scum like this alive in the hearts of many a freshman student. If you think about it, Che killed or had killed plenty himself along with any other person of this leaning.

    You have to give Mao credit for one thing: His writings on the Protracted People's War have inspired thousands of exploding Al Qaeda members and their like.

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  2. When Glenn Beck was covering Mao during his Van Jones/Anita Dunn exposures earlier this year, he had this information on, with documentary images to illustrate the horror. Quoth Anita Dunn: "....one of my favorite philosophers, Mao Tse Tong..." (aka Mao Zedong, the "cool" PC name).

    The people who surround Obama, the "select chosen" of his administration, are of the same mind as Anita Dunn, when you delve into their character and beliefs. Sickening.

    Thanks for helping to expose this evil murderer for what he was - and is: the "cool" mass murderer of his own people, who the Left reveres. Shameless, evil - the Left worldview.

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  3. well, murderer or not, he wasn't a dummy when it came to politics.

    For instance, Mao is absolutely correct to say that power comes at the end of a gun. The difference is that he applies that to mean the people shouldn't have guns. I, on the other hand say, that this is exactly why we have a second amendment.

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  4. If you want to be depressed just read the comments section. For the most part it consists of excuses, justifications, and whining about capitalism.

    One person actually claimed that the Church's refusal to push condoms was an even worse crime than the state sanctioned murder of 45 million people.

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  5. "Whatever the price of the Chinese Revolution, it has obviously succeeded not only in producing more efficient and dedicated administration, but also in fostering high morale and community of purpose. The social experiment in China under Chairman Mao's leadership is one of the most important and successful in human history."
    --David Rockefeller, August 10, 1973 in the New York Times
    He made this statement after Mao murdered 60 million people!

    I don't understand why we don't watch influential people who idolize Mao more closely.

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  6. @Christopher,

    it truly amazes me how some people manage to trot out the old canard about the Catholic Church's refusal to "push condoms". Of course they will refuse to do such a thing, since its use remains an intrinsic evil. Individuals within the Catholic Church have the right to make up their own minds on the matter.

    Mostly, people who use that false argument aim it at the AIDS situation in Africa. Never mind that the majority of Africans afflicted by AIDS are either animists (not Christian) or Muslim!! Also, they never mention that the areas where there is an AIDS epidemic are not Christian regions in the first place. In other words the Catholic Church has no influence on the policies of those particular African governments.

    It is truly a patenly false argument that is meant to smear the Catholic Church and I might add that these people have never provided any support for their smears.

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  7. It's seldom noted that Mao (like Che and Ho Chi Minh) enjoyed the benefits of an upper middle class upbringing. Mao's father started out poor but eventually worked his way to become a wealthy landowner. You'd think this would validate the virtues of individual enterprise and capitalism in the mind of young Mao.

    But typical of the susceptibility and circumstance of a young, bored and self-loathing bourgeoisie, Mao contracted the fashionable ideology of class warfare from liberal professors during his student days at Beijing University. Not unlike a certain someone in the WH.

    All these self-appointed advocates and revolutionaries for the 'poor' had something in common. They were narcissistic, morally disingenuous and too lazy to practice what they preached. For someone who fetishized the 'poor', Mao never gave to the poor directly. Same can be said of Che, who was supposedly moved by the poor's inability to pay for healthcare and yet did not think to put his medical training to use and start a free clinic. None used their educational and economic advantage to start their own business, acquire their own resource, attain the means to employ the poor, pay them a 'living wage'. None would had the instinct to part with their wealth voluntarily.

    And that's how I pull the brakes on my well-educated liberal pals whenever they go on a diatribe about 'economic justice' and the necessity of taxing the rich to help the poor. To which I ask, how many poor people do they know and have helped personally. 45 million, perhaps?

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  8. In fairness, that cafe press Mao shirts, water bottles, etc. may not be intended to glorify him or pretend he's cool. If you open the large image of the products, the black fine print text under his name reads "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun". I certainly hope that sort of "progressive" point of view isn't being glorified; I hope that the actual intention is to call out Mao fans on what a monster their hero was.

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  9. Socialism in China saved lives. And the Chinese people revere Chairman Mao ---especially those who lived through the 1950s and 1960s.

    The country directly comparable to China of course is India – the largest so called ‘democracy’ (comparing the performance of Taiwan, a province of China, with a population of slightly more than 20 million with mainland China - is just manifestly stupid)

    China’s life expectancy in 1976, at the time of Mao’s death, was already higher than what India’s is today (Mao doubled Chinese life expectancy). Today China’s life expectancy is 73. India’s is 63. Literacy in China is well above 90%, in India it is about 50%.
    The eminent Indian economist Amartya Sen, has estimated that “compared with China’s rapid increase in life expectancy in the Mao era, the capitalist experiment in India could be said to have caused an extra 4 million deaths a year since India’s independence…India seems to manage to fill its cupboard with more skeletons every eight years than China put there in its years of shame, 1958-61’”

    That’s about 240 million excess deaths caused by Indian ‘democracy.’

    Now of course one will say the figures I quoted for the period during Mao's time are unreliable.

    Very well. Let us look to the present. Every single expert on world hunger praises China in this area and slams India.

    From: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8309979.stm

    “China is also praised for cutting the number of hungry by 58 million in 10 years through strong state support for smallholder farmers.”

    “But the report criticises economically liberal India where, it says, 30 million people have been added to the ranks of the hungry since the mid-1990s and 46% of children are underweight.”

    “It says hunger exists in India not because there is insufficient food, but because people cannot access it, and that the exploitation of natural resources has led to “horrific displacements” of people, pushing many into poverty. “

    From: http://tinyurl.com/2b86bvc

    “A new government estimate points to 37.2 per cent of the population living in poverty, which means the hunger tally in India is officially at 450 million. Even this is an understatement. The poverty line is kept so stringent in India (at Rs 17 per person per day) that in the same amount you cannot even think of feeding a pet dog. I wonder how can the poor manage two-square meals a day under this classification.”

    Here is the progression of life expectancy over the past 50 years for both India and China:
    http://tinyurl.com/29g8gyd

    Socialist China has over the past 60 years consistently outperformed India on every single human development indicator and continues to do so. Almost half of India's population goes chronically hungry. Almost half of India's population is illiterate. Thus again every year there are tens of millions of excess deaths in India - a so called 'democracy'

    As Maurice Meisner so correctly said "that the Chinese Revolution saved, prolonged, and bettered the lives of more people than any other single political even in world history"

    If you were to be 'reborn', and you had only a choice of India or China, which of these two places would you choose? Socialist China or 'democratic' India? Which place would you have less chance of dying in early childhood, being malnourished? Which place would give you the chance growing up healthy and literate? Which of these two places would you choose for your own children if there were no other alternatives? Be honest now.

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