In my previous post, I wondered aloud why we are getting yet again another "proof" of something their should be no question about, that Mao officially murdered millions of people. Let me be clear, this was murder for land. It was also murder for steel. Just because the land and the steel were squandered, the latter in the sense that destroying good steel to make bad steel in an effort to win a steel making 'contest' with the UK, does not make it any less of a theft.
What NPR's Louisa Lim followed up with today sounds like a reforging of the old Cultural Revolution, the one from the 1960s which followed the Great Leap Forward. Back then, the children of Red China were "unleashed" on the first "post-Mao" wave of reformist bureaucrats, teachers, and others, to drag down the new order and reinstall Mao. The counterrevolutionaries were not revolutionary enough, so the slate was 'wiped clean' and Mao got to resume control of the world's largest penal colony.
Today, school children are going door-to-door recording the stories of death from The Great Leap Forward. It is too early to tell what the aim of the central government is with this latest "memory" project:
This is the Folk Memory Project, which has sent 108 young interviewers out to 130 rural villages to gather oral histories. So far, nine of them have completed documentary films about the death toll during the Great Famine of the late 1950s and early 1960s in their own villages.
Through film and stage performances, these young people are reclaiming history, telling for the first time these personal stories of some of the millions who starved to death as a result of Chairman Mao's Great Leap Forward.
Odd that NPR, and presumably Red China actually link the famine to Mao. Will this fit of honest about a Communist failure last? Since nobody listens to NPR, especially those who brag about it, I doubt that it will. I am sure that Student Unions across the fruited plain will still be blaming this mass murder on "Capitalism", weather, and "Right Wing Media" for decades to come.
Looks like NPR has "discovered" that millions were murdered in Mao's "Great Leap Forward". Stop the presses! Read and hear all about it here (A Grim Chronicle Of China's Great Famine by Louisa Lim)
Now, I am not sure how many times this historical tidbit needs to be "discovered" before it will sink into the collectivist heads of the Left that, yes indeedie, central planning kills people. In this case, it was exceptionally bad central planning, but central planning is the culprit here.
Before we cross that bridge, we have to get it through their heads that it actually happened at all. If by chance you get a Maoist to agree that the famine did indeed happen, you then have to get over the "dust bowl" excuse. What is the dust bowl excuse, you ask? It is the utter nonsense that China's Great Leap Forward starvation of millions was due to bad weather "not unlike the American dust bowl of the 1930s."
Be forewarned, that is their answer for every Communist famine, including the Holodomor. No, I am not kidding:
- WHAT CAUSED THE FAMINE AND RELATED DEATHS?
1. Severe drought across the Ukrainian SSR and southern RSFSR from 1931 through 1933 literally burned up the crops in the field.
Meteorological records from that time period can confirm this.
2. Epidemics of typhoid, typhus, and dysentery broke out when much
of the limited water supply was infected. Hundreds of thousands
died from these diseases.
3. In resistance to collectivization the kulaks (private, rich
peasants), with the blessing of underground White counter-
revolutionaries, burned their crops and slaughtered their animals
rather than bring them to market. This exacerbated the situation
and cost hundreds of thousands of lives that could have been saved
by kulak food supplies.
4. The incompetence of more than a few local Communist officials
and, in many cases, their direct disobedience to the directives of
the Central Committee and Stalin caused situations that
contributed to the problem in a number of regions.
The truth is, the Bolsheviks/Soviets, Red Chinese and North Koreans all used mass starvation as a weapon against their populations. The "famines" never started when collectivism was on the rise in popularity, it always appeared when voluntary collectivism stopped working.
Mao's brilliant idea was to tell his staff to increase grain production, in part to pay back debt to the Soviets. Problem was, the grain quotas were higher than the farmers could produce. He piled onto that more brilliance of trying to industrialize his agrarian country "quicker" than the Soviets did theirs. Steel quotas were given to all of the collectives and the way they met it was to melt down everything they had made of steel. Soviet made tools, paid for with Chinese grain, was destroyed into "steel" that was not useable for anything.
Mao's intentional starvation of tens of millions has been well known and well documented since just a few years after it started. It was not like there was a Great Duranty making up stories for the New York Times was throwing anybody off the trail . . .
Oh, wait. Yes there was. For some reason, "The Great" never got pinned on John Roderick, so I will pin it on him. The Great Roderick was pulling Duranty duty in China during Mao's grand starvation:
On 3 Dec., 1961, The Great Roderick checked up a bit and did not go Full Duranty in - Industrial 'Leap Forward' Curtailed to Strengthen Farm Front Where I discovered that Field Marshall Viscount Montgomery was the one doing The Full Duranty.
Here are two movies from the 1960s (or late 1950s). Oh yes, they appear to be training films from the CIA, which oddly are more factual than anything you will get from your typical Maoist of any period, and they match what Yang Jisheng's writes Toumbstone, as well as what was mentioned in the NPR piece.
This one from May, 2007 by Philip Short, "reveals" everything that the NPR story reports about Yang Jisheng's new book Toumbstone and it matches the CIA movies too. It includes testimony from Sidney Rittenberg, a US Army linguist who joined the Chinese Communist Party while stationed in China in the 1940s.
By golly, here is one from 1997 covering that period. Includes testimony from Li Rui, Mao's Secretary speaking of the Great Leap Forward (about 0:36:00):
Seriously, how often do these atrocities need to be proved? Don't worry, this latest proof will be swept into the dustbin of Leftist history in short order, only to be "discovered" anew in a couple of years.
Less Socialism Equals More Freedom and More Prosperity
A Mao Fan-boy
If you read and believe folks like Thomas L. Friedman, you would think that everybody in China now makes $40,000 per year and that their embrace of "Capitalism" done right brought them there. Well, Friedman and his cronies are right, but not in the way that they think. You must give them a little leeway. They live in a world where Mao is a hero, "The Great Leap Forward" is viewed as a stroke of brilliance gone awry, "The Cultural Revolution" is a great awakening, and Chiang Kai-shek was the fly in the ointment who prevented a 'superior' International Socialist Utopia from emerging in Asia.
For many Chinese and other normal folk, the real government of China is in Taipei, Taiwan. Some hope that any day now the Maoist writers in the West will realize that true freedoms and commerce exist in Taiwan and the wise thing to do is spread that wiseness to the mainland. Some of us are not holding our breath. After all, the per capita GDP of Taiwan was $37,209 in 2010, with 1% inflation and less than 1.2% of the population below the poverty line.
A Maoist
Now, the China that Friedman and his lemmings think that they are talking about has some not so shining stats: GDP (PPP) $8,289, 4.1% unemployment and almost 3% below the poverty line. The last two statistics are questionable.
The People's 'Republic' of China just began allowing private property in 2007 and the state still owns all land. Proponents of the PRC's recent growth cite the adoption of "capitalism" in the same way that they throw other words around: without meaning or substance. Sure, China has invited in corporations from the rest of the world and supplied slaves to work in the new factories as China becomes the biggest crony capitalist regime since Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy.
Granted, Red China set some incredible records in the 20th century. During Mao's "Great Leap Forward" Red China produced more unusable steel than all of the other nations of the world combined. In the process, they destroyed forests (in the manner that American tree farms are falsely accused of) and starved tens of millions of people to death.
A Nationalist
In the mean time, that other China, Taiwan, endured a state of Martial Law, necessary to repel the Red Chinese military incursions that lasted well into the 1960s. When the state of emergency eased, so did Martial Law, which was replaced by a democracy in the 1980s, that endures to this day. Something key throughout the evolution of the Republic of China (Taiwan) was something known as the Taiwan Miracle. This "miracle" was commerce, ownership of private property and a gold standard currency. Taiwan 'suffered' the same "fate" as Singapore, South Korea and Hong Kong.
A phrase I have heard a few times in the past from Socialists is "You are not more free, you just have more stuff." In a tragic way, this backwards comment describes the current Red China perfectly. It is a dictatorial regime without the simplest of freedoms, but the slaves have a bountiful choice in consumer goods. George F. Will expressed some needed concern about this state of affairs on the Charlie Rose Show in 2008. That a prosperous, market allocating, semi capitalistic economy and an unchanged oppressive regime is quite dangerous.
For some reason, to the likes of Friedman and others, Taiwan is invisible to them at best and the 'reason' for Red China's problems at worst. It is as if Taiwan is the Israel of the Pacific for all of the failed Socialists to blame their problems.
