Remembering Evil
Dean
Today I was reading Rudy Rummel's story of a woman mutilated and killed by Chinese communists.
What's important to me about stories like that (go read it, please) is not the suffering of that one individual. But rather, that they help snap into focus the mind-numbing statistic that Chinese communists butchered over 30 million of their own people during Mao's bloody reign--making Mao Tse Tung history's greatest mass-murderer. Yet it means nothing, it's just a number, until you see it for what it was. For it wasn't just the 30-40 million killed, but also the countless tens of millions more tortured, displaced, brutalized, and terrorized for decades who were lucky(?) enough to escape with their lives.
Of the people intentionally starved to death, sometimes they'd trade each other's children, so they wouldn't have to bear eating their own.
Rudy's piece brought to mind a piece I wrote back in January of 2004, which I figured was worth reprinting:
The True Legacy of Karl Marx
During the years 1958 and 1959, China experienced what was hailed by Marxists as the "Great Leap Forward." During this time, Mao's regime was directly responsible for between 30 and 40 million deaths.
Please re-read that last sentence, and contemplate it for a moment.
How many people live in your state?
As it happens, I now live in Michigan, whose total population is about 10 million. The cities of Detroit, Grand Rapids, Ann Arbor, Lansing, plus all the other communities, total about 10 million.
And so I repeat: During "The Great Leap Forward," which happened within living memory, the Communists killed between 30 and 40 million people, in a two year period.
Starting in 1966 (the year of my own birth), a lesser pogrom known as the "Cultural Revolution" began, with a new wave of terror and torture that killed mostly-uncounted numbers of people.
Mao Tse Tung was, quite simply, the greatest mass-murderer in human history. Funny how most people don't know that, isn't it?
Want to know more?
"In the summer of 1966, in Beijing alone more than 1,700 people were beaten to death openly by the Red Guards. On the surface, the persecution of 1968 was not as severe as that of 1966. Some people were still beaten in public but usually were beaten to death only behind locked doors. "
"...They hacked Liu's hair, put dirt into her mouth, and beat her. [She] was forced to crawl on the playground and repeatedly say: 'I am Liu Meide. I am a poisonous snake.' ...After a journalist of the Beijing Daily took a photograph, the student kicked Liu from the table to the ground. Liu was pregnant at that time. Her baby died from prenatal injuries soon after the birth."
"At the Shanghai Foreign Languages School, after the Red Guards from Beijing came and beat teachers...during the next day students of this school followed the example of Beijing students and beat their teachers. After some teachers were wounded and bled, they forced the teachers to lick the blood on the ground."
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Youqin Wang, who teaches at the University of Chicago, has created the Chinese Holocaust Memorial. All that I've written about and more can be found on her terribly important web site.
She is also attempting to construct an online memorial for the victims of the Cultural Revolution. Like the famed American Vietnam War memorial, she is simply listing the names of every person beaten to death or otherwise executed during Mao's second and third waves of terror in the 1960s. The horror is, no one knows all their names. She has made it part of her life's work to find out as many names as she can. She has "only" several thousand so far. But viewing it is still a powerful and heartbreaking experience.
Youqin Wang is a true champion of human rights, and one of my heroes. Here's her site again: Chinese Holocaust Memorial.
Make a point of visiting it. It's important.
By the way, not long ago, someone said to me, "Communism is not Marxism." Even more bitingly amusingly, to me, someone actually recently called me an "anti-Communist bigot."
To the latter point I merely say: Guilty.
Guilty as charged.
You Commie prick.
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It also brings to mind this even earlier piece I wrote.
You know, I really don't like communists. But you know who I like less? People who laugh at me for saying so. Stalin had a word for such people: "Useful idiots."
Related Posts (on one page):
- Stalin By A Nose
- Remembering Evil
“It was for the common good. And when you look at it on a percentage of population basis, its really not so bad at all.”
I no longer have the patience to deal with such people.
So, let's say a group of a couple hundred decides that their genes are superior and wipes out "the other 6 billion". They could claim "it was for the common good" because according to their metrics the world was a better place (for the survivors, anyway).
... and of the great unburied masses? They don't care, they're dead. "It was for the common good."
Maybe with the right jury, I could have walked. But I decided, besides being just plain wrong, that would have put me on the same plane as Mao.
Now I just ignore the guy, but I sometimes wonder if I could or should be doing more.
Bueller?
Bueller?
Bueller?
Stalin rarely talked, offhandedly or othewise, anytime, about anything, to anybody. He had enough common sense to keep his damned mouth shut, let nobody get too close to or too familiar with him, and he thereby was able to rule as much by fear as by actuality.
We liked him during World War II. Simply because he was our ally against Adolf Hitler. It was in his self-interest as well as ours that the Soviet army did most of the work in tearing the guts out of Adolf Hitler's German army, thereby largely saving the world.
And if Mao Zedong had been our main Chinese ally against the Japanese in World War II, in place of the incompetant Chiang Kaishek and his spiteful wife, he too would have been America's hero of the hour. Communism or no communism. Mass murders or no mass murders. Great leaps forward or great leaps backward.
The only thing relevant in a time of war is to make sure your side wins it. Like Churchill said,
"If Hitler invaded Hell, I'm sure I would make a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons."
Sounds cynical. But that's the way the cookie crumbled back in those days of the greatest generation.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
As was Ho Chi Minh.
I am not so sure that was cynical however - the depth of communist depravity was not yet clear at that time.
Never forget the list of worst mass murderers:
Mao
Stalin
Hitler
Pol Pot
Note that that's a list in descending order of numbers killed. Why oh why we only seem to care about third place simply because the others largely killed their own people is forever a mystery to me.
The idiotic left throws around hitler &facist with the same abandon that the idiotic right throws around communist &socialist.
In fact martini, you do it in your post: "the Left ... continues to give the most murderous ideology ever devised by human beings a pass."
I am definately a liberal, a Dem, Left, Blue, etc. I do not and have never give communism "a pass", or any other form of totalitarianism for that matter. The "Che fan club" pisses me off to no end; they are part of the "scary left".
But most of the time I toss out something saying that corporations (and employees of those) should be responsible for more than just profit, or that the environment is the ultimate "tragedy of the commons" and therefore in dire need of some level of regulation, or that maybe we need to help the poor with EIC or some welfare or workfare, and so on, then I get labeled a socialist, communist, etc. rather than engaging my argument.
It goes both ways.
Can we please actually have an ongoing debate as to the role of government in our lives and our society?
Such is the nature of realpolitick.
The means a country makes alliances with other countries that are in their own best interests. Rightly or wrongly, friendship and morality have very little to do with those alliances.
Just don't shoot me or put me in a concentration camp if you disagree, okay?
Seems like basic civility, if you think about it.