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.
Something quite interesting, it seems that nobody, Left or Right, listens to National Public Radio (NPR). If the Left listened, they would be yelling about "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me!" just like they yell about Sean Hannity. If the Right listened, they would be applauding, while standing by their principles to end public funding of NPR, PBS, and the rest.
In this episode, the Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me gang discusses and jokes about President Barack Hussein Obama eating ice cream from a waffle cone with a spoon. In the second half, they discuss the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency's (NOAA) report that mermaids have not been found, yet.
Images and additional video added by me, includes James Carville eating ice cream.
In a nation where anything associated with Jews requires a 24/7 security staff, to protect them primarily from Islamofascist arsonists and shooters. Let's listen in to Eleanor Beardsley as she reports from Toulouse, France and speculates on who could possibly be behind the latest murders of Jews and Soldiers:
To be fair, Beardsley did tack on the possibility of a "terrorist" at the end. This is just more proof that the extreme Left believes their own propaganda. They ignored the butchery of Stalin, Mao, and others while hoisting Hitler up as the poster boy for atrocities. He certainly deserves a place there, but so do Stalin and Arafat.
In their twisted zeal to hate all things commercial, they embrace radical Islam as allies and provide cover for them at every turn. Who was responsible for these murders? Mohammed Merah, Islamic Terrorist.
NPR's Eleanor Beardsley is in Toulouse and joins us now. And Eleanor, today's attack occurred just before classes started. The man arrived on a motorcycle. What more can you tell us about the attack and the victims?
ELEANOR BEARDSLEY, BYLINE: That's right, Robert. I went to the school today. I arrived here, you know, after the shooting, obviously. And there were still a lot of parents and students and just, you know, neighborhood people - the school was in a really nice, quiet neighborhood of Toulouse - still standing out the street. And I spoke with witnesses who actually saw it.
And they said about 8 o'clock in the morning, you know, tons of students and their parents were out in front of the school because actually, it was a pickup point for a bus to another Jewish school, just for younger children. This was like, a middle school, and people would bring their smaller children to go to a - take a bus to a, you know, an elementary school.
And so he pulled up and apparently, shot a rabbi, who was the teacher at the school; and his two children, who were ages 3 and 6; and then walked into the school. And there was a younger girl - 8 years old - and point-blank held the gun to her temple and shot her, and then calmly got on his motorcycle and left.
People said he was dressed in black - and, you know, everything - his face was covered; but a few witnesses said he had very clear, green eyes. People were very shaken up; it was like a state of shock. And you could feel that the neighbors and people involved actually wanted to talk about it. They were all out there, It was just a scene, all day long.
SIEGEL: Now, this is the third attack on unarmed people in the region. Where were the previous attacks, and who was targeted in those?
BEARDSLEY: That's right. We've been hearing about those and those were kind of strange because, you know, paratroopers outside of military bases were attacked - again, by a guy on a motorcycle who pulled up, all in black, and had obviously - knew who he was going to go after because one report says he pushed an old man out of the way to shoot a guy. And there was a couple guys getting money out of, you know, an ATM machine outside of the base.
So in two different attacks, he killed three other people. Now, police are saying it's the same - he left his cartridges everywhere on the ground, wasn't careful - it's the same gun. They've got the license plate of the scooter - it's the same - you know - moto, they're calling it. And we think it's the same person.
SIEGEL: And again, his victims in those prior shootings, while they were all in the military, the notion that these were racist killings - the connection here, I gather, is that they've been identified as having been either - three of them North African, and one West Indian.
BEARDSLEY: That's right. Three of the people targeted were Arab Muslims serving in the French military. And one was from the Antilles so he was, you know, dark - black. And then today, it was Jewish children. I mean, who kills soldiers and children? So it's a very strange mix. And people are very much on edge by someone who would go after these different, you know, kinds of people.
SIEGEL: And do we know anything about the search for the suspect?
BEARDSLEY: Well, they're talking about that - everyone is on edge because there's a manhunt going on in France. Yeah, people are saying, you know, they can't quite figure out who would kill these disparate people. But they're saying - the biggest theory is that it's some sort of racist, neo-Nazi person who targeted Muslims and Jews and Africans. And that's the biggest thing we're going on now.
And everyone - you know, there's high-security. And they're saying he could be a terrorist or a serial killer, and he may strike again.
SIEGEL: Thank you, Eleanor.
BEARDSLEY: Thank you, Robert.
SIEGEL: That's NPR's Eleanor Beardsley, speaking to us from Toulouse in France.
Update: Mark Steyn got to this before me. Click through and enjoy.
