Mao Zedong became the symbol of the communist revolution in China. Leading the famed Long March, proclaiming the new People's Republic of China, sending forth Red Guards waving a little red book of his quotations, meeting Richard Nixon when the two governments ended decades of unremitting hostility. And killing tens of millions of Chinese.
Mao is one of the greatest mass murderers in human history, on par with Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. The numbers simply boggle. Writes French researcher Jean-Louis Margolin in The Black Book of Communism:
"Although the estimates are quite speculative, it is clear that there were between 6 million and 10 million [non-battle] deaths as a direct result of the Communist actions, including hundreds of thousands of Tibetans. In addition, tens of millions of 'counterrevolutionaries' passed long periods of their lives inside the prison system, with perhaps 20 million dying there. To that total should be added the staggering number of deaths during the ill-named Great Leap Forward – estimates range from 20 million to 42 million dead for the years 1959-1961 – all victims of a famine caused by the misguided projects of a single man, Mao Zedong, and his criminal obstinacy in refusing to admit his mistake and to allow measures to be taken to rectify the disastrous effects."
Read Full Article »
