0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
The Worst Mass Murder of All Time As Dikötter summarizes of Mao’s Great Leap Forward:Mao thought that he could catapult his country past its competitors by herding villagers across the country into giant people’s communes. In pursuit of a utopian paradise, everything was collectivised. People had their work, homes, land, belongings and livelihoods taken from them. In collective canteens, food, distributed by the spoonful according to merit, became a weapon used to force people to follow the party’s every dictate. As incentives to work were removed, coercion and violence were used instead to compel famished farmers to perform labour on poorly planned irrigation projects while fields were neglected.But the policy turned out to be a disaster, killing tens of millions of people via starvation. But it wasn’t only starvation that left countless people dead, as new records show that several million people were also tortured to death or summarily executed in the same time-frame.For example, he writes, “a boy stole a handful of grain in a Hunan village [and] local boss Xiong Dechang forced his father to bury him alive.” The father later died of grief several days later. The Worst Mass Murder of All TimeNine Commentaries on the Communist Party – IntroductionIn another, more brutal example, a man named Wang Ziyou was accused of digging up a potato, so officials cut off one of his ears, and “his legs were tied with iron wire, a ten kilogram stone was dropped on his back and then he was branded with a sizzling tool,” Dikötter notes.Meanwhile, during the Great Leap Forward, food—or a lack thereof—was used as a means to kill.“Throughout the country those who were too ill to work were routinely cut off from the food supply. The sick, vulnerable and elderly were banned from the canteen, as cadres found inspiration in Lenin’s dictum: ‘He who does not work shall not eat,'” Dikötter writes.
Author
Topic: (Chinese Regime): The Worst Mass Murder of All Time (Read 734 times)
