The Holocausts of the Left [Fritzworth]

While I have been aware for 40 years of the hypocrisy of the Left when it comes to the horrors inflicted by leftist/collectivist regimes -- I read "The God That Failed" all the way back in 1970 -- I remain to this day dumbfounded by the Left's willingness to see Hitler and Nazism as pure evil and yet excuse or overlook the vastly greater deaths and horrors that took place under Communism via Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. As the author of this article notes, the Left tries to excuse it as being "merely" due to mismanagement and weather.

That is a lie. It was the depths of hell, every bit as much as the extermination camps of the Nazis, and just as horrific:

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.

One report dated Nov. 30, 1960, and circulated to the top leadership — most likely including Mao — tells how a man named Wang Ziyou had one of his ears chopped off, his legs tied up with iron wire and a 10-kilo stone dropped on his back before he was branded with a sizzling tool. His crime: digging up a potato.

When a boy stole a handful of grain in a Hunan village, the local boss, Xiong Dechang, forced his father to bury his son alive on the spot. The report of the investigative team sent by the provincial leadership in 1969 to interview survivors of the famine records that the man died of grief three weeks later. . . .

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.”

Until the Left truly acknowledges these crimes and ranks them alongside Nazism, they are and will remain morally bankrupt and intellectually dishonest. ..fritz..

posted by Open Blogger at 11:33 PM

| Access Comments