Little Red Butcher

“Mao Zedong, founder of the People’s Republic of China, qualifies as the greatest mass murderer in world history, an expert who had unprecedented access to official Communist Party archives said yesterday… At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in China over these four years [of the Great Leap Forward]; the worldwide death toll of the Second World War was 55 million.” [Independent UK]

10 Comments

I was always bewildered by the fad for him. Particularly on the part of the British Left. I hope that David Hare is kept awake at night by his simple-minded dramatization of Fanshen. A work as laughable as it is dishonest.

I think a Stalin vs. Mao smackdown for worst mass murderer would get a lot of viewers.

I still think Joe “One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic” Stalin is still the king.

As to Mao… well. His Great leap forward would have been hilariously comical if it weren’t for the starvation.

What about the deaths from the VD he spread?

/Recruitment TJ/

Breaking: Stinquer favorite and “Midwest young gun” Aaron Schock will be in Chicago (well actually a suburb wayyy out there) for the Right Nation Crayzee-Fest this weekend. Isn’t it our duty to dispatch Generalissimo Homofascist on assignment to try to breach the turquoise belt??

@flippin eck: He is the new face of the Republican Party. And also its abs.

@ flippin: Oh hay-ell to the fucking yes. But you should go along to report (all the closeted Rethugs will be there with their wives, HF needs to blend in) and if you kids have to rent a car to get out there I’ll throw 20 bucks in the kitty for that.

@SanFranLefty: There’s always Celebrity Deathmatch, but they ran into some “censoring problems” from time to time, for example:

Ron Jeremy vs. Tommy Lee Ron Jeremy: Stabbed in the eye by Tommy Lee’s enormous penis. The fighters wore rooster costumes in a mock “cock” fight in an underground dirt ring in an undisclosed location (inadvertenly [sic] revealed by Nick as the basement of the Arena).

Anyway, they didn’t do Mao/Stalin, but I thought they did Stalin/Hitler; it’s nowhere to be found. If anyone cares, this is the official site.

Excuse me if I want to be a little sceptical of numbers like this. A poor and developing country, experiencing the massive population explosion that all developing countries experienced, when they first gained the benefits of vaccination and other basic medical advances, which drastically reduced infant mortality, and then ran into food deficits because they did not yet have industrial agriculture to meet the demands of the population explosion, how can you say Mao caused the starvation and deaths? is it possible to determine what would have happened if they had a wonderful free market economy like, say, Haiti or Liberia?

This is a study based on some theoretical baseline of natural deaths compared to the actual death rate in China for those years. China has, what, 1.5 billion people? An error of what, 4% in your calculation of what the death rate would have been under some hypothetical non-Mao government, would result in, presto-change-o, a massacre of 60 million.

Any time you compare what happened in the real world, with what you think might have happened, if the real world was a different world, a fantasy world, really, you are into the realm of just making shit up.

Its not that I am a fan of mao, god knows, I am not, but this is fantasy.

By the way, how many are going to the Colbert rally? I am. I express my intention of going to lots of things, doing lots of things, but its only real if Mrs. Prom agrees, and she is more amped then I am, so this is going to happen, I am going to DC on October 30, anyone else?

@Promnight: I’ll go if you help me hold up Apocalyptically Vulgar signs.

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