Remembering the biggest mass murder in the history of the world

[DonViejo]

Who was the biggest mass murderer in the history of the world? Most people probably assume that the answer is Adolf Hitler, architect of the Holocaust. Others might guess Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who may indeed have managed to kill even more innocent people than Hitler did, many of them as part of a terror famine that likely took more lives than the Holocaust. But both Hitler and Stalin were outdone by Mao Zedong. From 1958 to 1962, his Great Leap Forward policy led to the deaths of up to 45 million people – easily making it the biggest episode of mass murder ever recorded.

Historian Frank Dikötter, author of the important book Mao’s Great Famine recently published an article in History Today, summarizing what happened:

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.

A catastrophe of gargantuan proportions ensued. Extrapolating from published population statistics, historians have speculated that tens of millions of people died of starvation. But the true dimensions of what happened are only now coming to light thanks to the meticulous reports the party itself compiled during the famine….

more
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2016/08/03/giving-historys-greatest-mass-murderer-his-due/?wpisrc=nl_az_most

[whatthehey]

1. And the biggest, at least proximal, cause?

Nobody dared pass up bad news along the command chain, a weakness incidentally in every single employer I've had however genially managed, so Ishtar knows how bad it is in a totalitarian state in a rigidly hierachical culture. So for a long time anyone with real decision making authority thought things were going swimmingly (as indeed they had done at the very begiining under Mao) with surpluses aplenty as millions starved. This is one of the issues unfortunately with any proposed Communist utopia. The more control is centralized, the more power and authority comes with it, and the less open to questioning and correction. Unless you have living saints who are also towering and visionary intellects doing the centralized controlling bit, they won't have accurate information, won't make good decisions, and won't accept anything that reminds them of either of those issues...oh and they can have you killed on a word. Wanna risk socity's survival, and your own, on having a succession of saintly visionary geniuses rise to the top in a totalitarian system? Me neither.

[awoke_in_2003]

2. Off to the greatest

Mao was always the biggest bastard. Life means nothing in China