Frank Dikotter writes in the NYT’s op-ed page, Mao’s Great Leap to Famine
Historians have known for some time that the Great Leap Forward resulted in one of the world’s worst famines. Demographers have used official census figures to estimate that some 20 to 30 million people died.
But inside the archives is an abundance of evidence, from the minutes of emergency committees to secret police reports and public security investigations, that show these estimates to be woefully inadequate.
In the summer of 1962, for instance, the head of the Public Security Bureau in Sichuan sent a long handwritten list of casualties to the local boss, Li Jingquan, informing him that 10.6 million people had died in his province from 1958 to 1961. In many other cases, local party committees investigated the scale of death in the immediate aftermath of the famine, leaving detailed computations of the scale of the horror.
In all, the records I studied suggest that the Great Leap Forward was responsible for at least 45 million deaths.
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.
Mao was fully in charge (emphasis added):
The term “famine” tends to support the widespread view that the deaths were largely the result of half-baked and poorly executed economic programs. But the archives show that coercion, terror and violence were the foundation of the Great Leap Forward.
Mao was sent many reports about what was happening in the countryside, some of them scribbled in longhand. He knew about the horror, but pushed for even greater extractions of food.
At a secret meeting in Shanghai on March 25, 1959, he ordered the party to procure up to one-third of all the available grain — much more than ever before. The minutes of the meeting reveal a chairman insensitive to human loss: “When there is not enough to eat people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.”
Mao’s Great Famine was not merely an isolated episode in the making of modern China. It was its turning point. The subsequent Cultural Revolution was the leader’s attempt to take revenge on the colleagues who had dared to oppose him during the Great Leap Forward.
In a rare post, Instapundit says,
Communists are as bad as Nazis, and their defenders and apologists are as bad as Nazis’ defenders, but far more common. When you meet them, show them no respect. They’re evil, stupid, and dishonest. They should not enjoy the consequences of their behavior.
One of Instapundit’s readers thinks “it is possible to be a communist with the “good will,” i.e. to sincerely wish the best most prosperous future for everyone.” The thing is, the “good intentions” argument is done for.
Whether Marx or Lenin [typo corrected] had good intentions ever (which they didn’t), or whether Communist apologists “sincerely wish the best most prosperous future for everyone”, is besides the point: The moral blindness and lack of compass of anyone who can possibly defend the Communist system, knowing that Communism is directly responsible for the deaths of some 100 million people*, is indefensible as of itself.
* Yes, here’s the footnote:
The Black Book of Communism estimates that perhaps 65 million people died in China under Mao.
That estimate has to be recalculated. Dikotter states,
In all, the records I studied suggest that the Great Leap Forward was responsible for at least 45 million deaths.
The Great Leap Forward started in 1958, lasted for a couple of years, and was followed by the bloodbath of the Cultural Revolution. Mao was in power from 1949 to 1976.
Cross-posted in The Green Room.
