September 3, 2010

Ideological man...

Mike Plaiss send me a Bloomberg book review, Starved by Mao, Cannibal China Ate Earth, Robbed Graves. (Gee Mike, you really know how to cheer a guy up!) But the histories of the destruction caused by socialism should be told over and over again. People don't want to know, but Mao was a far greater murderer than Hitler...

After "Mao's Great Famine," Frank Dikotter's chronicle of how that regime killed at least 45 million people in what he calls the greatest man-made famine the world has seen, no one will have any excuses for modish Maoism.

Dikotter, a professor at the University of Hong Kong on leave from the University of London, has broken through the lies and obfuscation surrounding Mao's crazed attempt to vault over Soviet Russia and snatch the leadership of the socialist camp by achieving communism at one bound in the Great Leap Forward of 1958 to 1962. His sources -- central and local Communist Party records he nosed out -- are solid, and the result is a shattering book.

Mao's aim was to "walk on two legs" -- to boost farm production and modernize industry simultaneously. In the countryside, the means were ending private property in favor of forced farm collectives that left peasants gobbling up whatever they had -- animals, grain, seeds -- rather than handing them over. In towns, the result was massive imports of machines that rusted or were broken by famished, comatose workers putting in impossible hours.

Such was the efficiency of Maoist terror that no photos of the famine are known to exist, Dikotter says. Yet the facts are enough, and nothing you read will be so harrowing. The inhumanity of man, ideological man especially, scorches every page...
Posted by John Weidner at September 3, 2010 8:09 AM
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