Holocaust Survivors Quiet Allies of a Wall St. That Once Invested in Nazi War on Russia & Jews
That WW II was a 'good war,' ‘good’ triumphing over ‘evil’ a madman had brought about, has been a gargantuan deception solidified in Wall St owned media & movies ominously conditioning us to tolerate profitable genocide ad infinitum! Criminally insane Hitler was used by wealthy capitalists to invade the USSR. Even Jewish Holocaust survivors quietly support new genocides by the same Wall St that facilitated Jewish genocide.
There is no way Hitler could have begun a world war and a multi-nation Holocaust when he did without the mega enormous financial help he received from a fascism supporting USA. There is simply no way an impoverished Germany could have built its Armed Forces up to the number one military in the world during the first seven years of Hitler's rule without Wall Street’s colossal and crucial investing in, and joint venturing with, Nazi Germany, made possible by the US government, which with other governments colluded to permit outright violation of the Versailles Treaty prohibition of German rearmament.[1]
The horrendous and ominous point of this stimulus essay is not a thesis, but an incontrovertible, indisputable, incontestable, undeniable, irrefutable, unquestionable, beyond doubt unarguable, undebatable, heavily documented fact: World War Two and the multi-nation Holocaust could have never taken place without the rearming of a prostrate Germany in open violation of its prohibition in the Versailles Treaty, that ended World War One. The point is ominous, because the Second World War, which filled the skies with warplanes, the seas with warships above and below the surface, the land with tank battles between thousands of tanks, and armies of millions that took the lives of millions, made so much money for Wall Street’s investors that it augured the future we have been living, namely, more and more of the same murder, maiming and destruction, murder, maiming, and destruction Americans are forced to accept for criminal media inculcated fear and patriotism based on lies and selective reporting. No one, not Americans or anyone else seems to notice that the killing, maiming and destruction is profitable for powerful investors, and that is why it continues.
“The Western public, inculcated with decades of brainwashing versions of history, have a particular disadvantage in coming to a proper understanding of the world wars…
European fascism headed up by Nazi Germany, along with Mussolini in Italy, Franco in Spain and Salazar in Portugal, was not some aberrant force that sprang from nowhere during the 1920s-1930s. The movement was a deliberate cultivation by the rulers of Anglo-American capitalism. European fascism may have been labeled "national socialism" but its root ideology was very much one opposed to overturning the fundamental capitalist order. It was an authoritarian drive to safeguard the capitalist order, which viewed genuine worker-based socialism as an enemy to be ruthlessly crushed.
In his book, Mission to Moscow, (later a film as well), US ambassador to Russia from 1936 to 1938, Joseph Davies, chronicled the desperation of the Russians in 1937, unable to get a defensive alliance with England and France, and fully aware that the rearming of Germany was directed at the Soviet Union, and most certainly not meant to be only a 'bulwark,’ as it was excused as being in US media. By the surprising non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, Stalin derailed for the moment the West's plan to have Hitler invade the USSR. This gained the Soviet Union the time to build the tanks in the East that would later defeat the Nazi invasion. What Hitler called "a war of extermination" in Western Poland began only one week after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Hitler would again call for "a war of extermination" with the German invasion of the USSR, June 22, 1941, and at the same time called for the extermination of all Jews in Nazi occupied nations, that will forever be called the Holocaust.
The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, (Advisory Committee Chair Elie Wiesel Nobel Peace Prize Laureate) describes the reaction to Kristallnacht in the US:
Germans were brought to Detroit to learn the techniques of specialized production of components, and of straight-line assembly. The techniques learned in Detroit were eventually used to construct the dive-bombing Stukas .... later I. G. Farben representatives in this country enabled a stream of German engineers to visit not only plane plants but others of military importance. Contemporary American business press confirm that business journals and newspapers were fully aware of the Nazi threat and its nature.
“Behind the patriotic propaganda that encouraged the working class to slaughter each other in the interests of competing national interests, international capital quietly kept the commodity circuits flowing and profits growing across all borders, trading with the enemy – war means business as usual for international capital. Higham starts with an account of the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland – a Nazi-controlled bank presided over by an American, Thomas H. McKittrick, even in 1944. While Americans were dying in the war, McKittrick sat down with his German, Japanese, Italian, British and American executive staff to discuss the gold bars that had been sent to the Bank earlier that year by the Nazi government for use by its leaders after the war. This was gold that had been looted from the banks of Austria, Belgium, and Czechoslovakia or melted down from teeth fillings, eyeglass frames, and wedding rings of millions of murdered Jews.”
This truth somehow never reached any substantial part of the public. During and afterwards, WW II was heralded in Wall Street owned media and solidified in feature films more than ever as a 'good war,' a clear fight against what a madman had brought about. A recognizably insane Hitler was used by hard pressed wealthy capitalists to invade the Soviet Union while the madman plundered, tortured and murdered Jews. A simple truth with devastating implications that seems to be of little interest now and during all the post Second World War era. It is a real mystery why Russians are so ‘kind’ not to bring this horrific genocidal crime against their people up for serious acknowledgement.
If no multination genocide of Jews, then no 250,000 displaced Jewish survivors refused refuge .
Seven years before the outbreak of WWII, during this rearming of Nazi Germany, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the last aristocratic insider US President, wrote to his confidant Colonel House "as you and I know, this government has been owned by a financial element in the centers of power since the days of Andrew Jackson."[11]. FDR most certainly meant that they both knew that the “government owned by a financial element” included all three branches, Legislative, Executive and Judicial, and therefore Congress, the Supreme Court and the Presidency. During the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt had been chosen to institute a critical amount of capitalism-saving social programs (Social Security, Unemployment Compensation, Civilian Conservation Corps and the WPA Works Progress Administration) in having government employ the unemployed in building up the country. FDR was most certainly aware of what all his wealthy friends and cronies were up to as they counted on fascism and war to resecure their world wide rule over society. To save their plundering colonial rule over most of humanity they surpassed the European empires’ record of lives lost in the genocides within the more than five centuries of Caucasian conquering and plundering of Africa, Asia and the Americas. WW II also topped as well the earlier genocides in the short history of the American empire, namely, the African slavery genocide, the genocide for the lands of Native Americans, Mexicans, Filipinos, Chinese, and the mega lucrative loan-sharking which sustained and prolonged the genocide that was World War One. After Wall Street bankrolled Hitler’s greatest genocide of them all, and had its criminal media monopoly cartel of giant entertainment, news and information corporations screen their crime of having promoted war and facilitated the Holocaust, Wall Street was free to make profitable genocide an acceptable way of militarized life with invasions, bombings and covert violence in China, Philippines, Korea, Greece, Albania, Iran, Guatemala, Guyana, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Congo, Brazil, Bolivia, Dominican Republic, Cuba, Indonesia, Somalia, Lebanon, Chile, East Timor, Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, El Salvador, Haiti, Yugoslavia, Sudan, Libya, Syria, South Sudan, Honduras, and Pakistan.
What uncomfortable realization of the enormity of American and European society’s complicity in the Holocaust there was, formed a backdrop for additional basic business considerations entertained by many of the same influential U.S. politicians beholden to Wall Street’s avarice and economic aggression, who had rearmed Germany. Highly placed villainous capitalist gangsters saw an opportunity to make use of the plight of a quarter million ‘undesirable’ Jewish Holocaust survivors to create a client colony of Europeans in the midst of oil rich Muslim countries. Using AngloAmerican power over an incipient and incomplete United Nations they produced a genocidal stratagem of torching the Holy Land with a phony Partition Resolution never intended to be implemented. Until this deadly partition stratagem is recognized an archetypical colonial crime against humanity there will be no peace in Palestine.[see author’s US Economic Facilitation of Holocaust and Middle East Destabilizing Partition, Minority Perspective, Birmingham, UK, 12/6/2012
July 9, 2015, Author Richard Gunderman Chancellor's Professor of Medicine, Liberal Arts, and Philanthropy, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis
See: The Horrifying American Roots of Nazi Eugenics
By Edwin Black
In 1934, as Germany’s sterilizations were accelerating beyond 5,000 per month, the California eugenics leader C. M. Goethe upon returning from Germany ebulliently bragged to a key colleague, “You will be interested to know, that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought.
In 1945, US ally Ho, from a balcony overlooking the large square and flanked by an American Major and a British Colonel, declared Vietnam independent. Everyone in the orchestra lost family, “killed by the Americans” they would mention simply, with kind Buddhist equanimity. Jay can be reached at: tdmedia2000@yahoo.com. Read other articles by Jay http://dissidentvoice.org/author/jayjanson/Jay Janson, spent eight years as Assistant Conductor of the Vietnam Symphony Orchestra in Hanoi and also toured, including with Dan Tai-son, who practiced in a Hanoi bomb shelter. The orchestra was founded by Ho Chi Minh,and it plays most of its concerts in the Opera House, a diminutive copy of the Paris Opera. In 1945, our ally Ho, from a balcony overlooking the large square and flanked by an American Major and a British Colonel, declared Vietnam independent. Everyone in the orchestra lost family, “killed by the Americans” they would mention simply, with Buddhist un-accusing acceptance. Read other articles by Jay.
JAY JANSON—What uncomfortable realization of the enormity of American and European society’s complicity in the Holocaust there was, formed a backdrop for additional basic business considerations entertained by many of the same influential U.S. politicians beholden to Wall Street’s avarice and economic aggression, who had rearmed Germany. Highly placed villainous capitalist gangsters saw an opportunity to make use of the plight of a quarter million ‘undesirable’ Jewish Holocaust survivors to create a client colony of Europeans in the midst of oil rich Muslim countries.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report
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Participants in 2014 Ukrainian coup confess
The overthrow of the democratically elected President of Ukraine in February 2014 was one of the most important geostrategic occurrences during the past century, because it led to the breakaway from Ukraine of the two regions — Crimea and Donbass — that had been the most opposed to the overthrow, and that had voted over 75% for the President who had been overthrown. And those two breakaways from Ukraine were then presented in the U.S.-allied “The West” as having resulted from ‘Russian aggression’, which then became punished, first by economic sanctions against Russia, and then by massive NATO military buildups on Russia’s borders. But, now, some of the participants in the coup are going public about the matter, because the people who had hired them cheated even them. The Italian newspaper Il Giornale, and Italian Mediaset Matrix TV, Chanel 5, issued, on November 15th, confessions by a few of the snipers who on 20 February 2014 fired down into the crowd of “Maidan” demonstrators and police, in order “to sow chaos,” as they say that they had been instructed to do. (See video in Addendum.) The Georgian mercenary Alexander Revazishvilli said: “Everyone started shooting two or three shots at a time. It went on for fifteen, twenty minutes. We had no choice. We were ordered to shoot both on the police and the demonstrators, without any difference.” This account is entirely consistent with the leaked phone-conversation on 26 February 2014 in which Urmas Paet, the investigator whom the EU had assigned to determine whom to blame for the snipers and their massive bloodshed during the overthrow, informed the EU’s Foreign Affairs chief, Catherine Ashton, that the anti-Yanukovych, pro-U.S. and pro-EU side, were to blame, and that Paet had just been informed of this by Petro Poroshenko (who shortly thereafter became elected as Ukraine’s figurehead President). Paet said: what was quite disturbing, the same oligarch [Poroshenko — and so when he became President he already knew this] told that well, all the evidence shows that the people who were killed by snipers, from both sides, among policemen and people from the streets, [this will shock Ashton, who had just said that Yanukovych had masterminded the killings] that they were the same snipers, killing people from both sides [so, Poroshenko himself knows that his regime is based on a false-flag U.S.-controlled coup d’etat against his predecessor] Revazishvilli, and the others confessing, have never yet received the $5,000 each, that they say they’d been promised, and so they finally are going public against the person whom they say had actually hired them for the coup. They name him as “Mamuka Mamulashvili, Saakashvili’s military advisor.” That’s Mikheil Saakashvilli, the U.S.-imposed President of Georgia, during 2008-2013, who, after becoming extremely unpopular in Georgia, and convicted in absentia there for corruption, became subsequently the U.S.-imposed Governor of the Odessa region of Ukraine. He always suppressed speakers of the Russian language (such as Odessans are), in both countries, both of which nations border Russia (which is why the U.S. regime especially wants to place its missiles there). He now has no citizenship of any country, because he is outlawed both in his original country, Georgia, and in his adopted country, Ukraine. As being the 30 May 2014 appointed Governor of Odessa (where on 2 May 2014 had been perpetrated by the U.S-imposed regime a horrific massacre of locals there against the coup), he turned out to be too rabid a hater of Russians to be acceptable even to the U.S. regime’s figurehead President of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, and so was removed and expelled from Ukraine. The coup itself had been in preparation by the regime of U.S. President Barack Obama ever since 2011. It was a major plan of Obama but kept secret from the public until the coup was sprung in February 2014, such as is shown in this recorded phone-conversation, where Obama’s agent on Ukraine, Victoria Nuland, tells Obama’s Ukrainian Ambassador, Geoffrey Pyatt, whom to place in charge of Ukraine after the coup will be completed, which occurred 22 days later. The coup itself hired far-right mercenaries from not only Georgia and Lithuania (such as are here confessing to these Italian newsmedia), but also from Israel and unnamed other countries, but above all from Ukraine itself — members of both of Ukraine’s two racist-fascist or idelogically nazi Parties, the Right Sector, and the “Freedom” or “Svoboda,” Party (which latter had previously been called the Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine until the U.S. CIA told them to change their name to “Freedom,” which sounds much better to Americans). The two heads of the coup, organizing it on the ground in Ukraine, were the Right Sector’s founder Dmitriy Yarosh, and the co-founder of Svoboda, Andriy Parubiy. Parubiy, who had actually planned and led that violence, had hired Mamulashvili and others like him; Parubiy was referred to, even by wikipedia, in this way: “From December 2013 to February 2014 Parubiy was a commandant of Euromaidan.[16] He was coordinator of the volunteer security corps [i.e.: of the mercenaries] for the mainstream protesters.[17].” In addition, there were paid ‘protesters,’ to add mere bodies and voices to the crowds. And, “Parubiy co-led the Orange Revolution in 2004.” That was a straightforward CIA operation. So, Parubiy was an expert at organizing a coup for Washington. But, the people who now are going public about their participations in the coup didn’t know anything above the man who had hired them: “Mamuka Mamulashvili, Saakashvili’s military advisor.” In March 2016, Parubiy (the man who had actually hired Mamulashvili and a few others like him) was specially honored and received in Washington as a hero of democracy, by NATO’s PR agency, the Atlantic Council. All of this is kept secret, from the American public, by the U.S. regime’s ‘news’media. This is important for them to do, because when Obama in 2014 imposed economic sanctions against Russia, and when the U.S. regime’s NATO military alliance against Russia, began sending missiles, troops, and bombers, to and near Russia’s borders in order to ‘defend’ NATO against ‘the Russian threat’ and ‘Russia’s aggression against Ukraine’, it was all ‘justified’ on the basis of that coup’s having been not a coup at all that the U.S. had perpetrated right on Russia’s border, but instead a ‘revolution’ that brought ‘democracy’ to Ukraine by (unconstitutionally) overthrowing Ukraine’s democratically elected President, Viktor Yanukovych. George Orwell’s 1984 Big Brother is alive and well in ‘the free world’, the ‘democratic West.’ But apparently, Italy isn’t quite as much of a dictatorship as is today’s United States. This news-report is — like all that I do — being sent free of charge for publication to all U.S. and many of its vassal-nations’ ‘news’media; and, so, if you don’t read about it, or any such news, in the New York Times, or in the New Yorker, or in the Washington Post, or Mother Jones, or National Review, or CNN, or Slate, or the Guardian, or the Independent, or etc., then you know why you don’t. It’s not because the ‘reporters’ and the editors and managers who hire and fire them, really believe that the coup in Ukraine wasn’t a coup, and that Russia, instead of the U.S., is the world’s ultimate aggressor-nation; it’s instead because they themselves are part of the aggressor-regime, the national government (both public and private) that’s overwhelmingly recognized, by people outside the U.S., to be “the biggest threat to peace” in the entire world. They know this — that they’re propagandists for America’s dictatorship — but Americans don’t; because the ‘news’ they receive never reports it (just like they never report that they had covered up George W. Bush’s lying about ’Saddam’s WMD’ etc.). The biggest news-stories are therefore the ones that the press won’t report, because the press are a crucial part of the perpetrator-regime itself. And this is called ‘democracy’. It’s ‘democracies’ such as this that perpetrate such atrocities as Iraq 2003, Libya 2011, Syria since 2012, and Ukraine 2014; and they couldn’t do it without the crucial lying. Up next are Iran, Lebanon, and maybe, finally, Russia itself; and the lying against Russia is and has been nonstop, especially after 2011. Russia lies about small matters such as about sports-doping, but America lies about big matters, such as about which of the two nations is the aggressor against the other. Regarding the serious matters, Russia’s newsmedia are vastly more-honest than are America’s, and should therefore be read in preference to TIME, NYT, WP, CNN, etc. But, of course, none of the U.S. regime’s ‘news’media will allow this fact to be published. And a world-ending nuclear war could result from that. Ukraine was seized by the U.S. regime as part of the plan to conquer ultimately Russia. This plan crucially includes adding, to NATO, Ukraine — which has Europe’s longest border with Russia. The only way to end that neo-Hitlerite plan is to end NATO now. In the U.S. regime’s ‘news’media, any such proposal cannot be debated, much less advocated. So, wherever you are reading this, is definitely not a part of the regime. It is an authentically free and independent newsmedium, a reliable news-source regarding serious international matters. All the rest — they’re liars; that’s their job.
The regime of Barack Obama had been preparing the coup in Kiev since 2011...around the time it began in earnest its push to overthrow the legitimate government of Syria. In this dispatch, historian Eric Zuesse makes all of this perfectly and irrefutably clear.
MAIN IMAGE ABOVE: Coup figurehead president Petro Poroshenko with the empire’s proconsul, Vice President Biden.
ERIC ZUESSE, Senior Contributing Editor Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity. Besides TGP, his reports and historical analyses are published on many leading current events and political sites, including The Saker, Huffpost, Oped News, and others.
ERIC ZUESSE—The biggest news-stories are therefore the ones that the press won’t report, because the press are a crucial part of the perpetrator-regime itself. And this is called ‘democracy’. It’s ‘democracies’ such as this that perpetrate such atrocities as Iraq 2003, Libya 2011, Syria since 2012, and Ukraine 2014; and they couldn’t do it without the crucial lying.
Addendum—
As published in Italy, which while still very much part of the imperialist west, retains some important traces of responsible journalism.
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Revisiting Revolutions, a Comparison
After a fitful fever (1) of debates and round-tables, often packed with common sense and sometimes with uncommon nonsense, the dust of antique time (2) may gradually settle on the memory of the 1917 Russian Revolution.
In 2117, assuming but not given that schools may still teach history, a question in a standardized test may read, “Which of the following countries is associated with the 1917 Revolution? (mark one) – Bangladesh, Denmark, Russia, Vanuatu, Uganda.”
But this year the controversy was still agitated with great vehemence, and some disputants seemed to be walking upon ashes under which the fire is not yet extinguished – especially those addicted to the radicalization of inequality. Anti-egalitarians, corrupted by ill-gotten wealth, and fearful of even a remote threat to their privileges, employed all the force of ingrained malevolence and sarcastic contempt to berate the event and its memory.
On the other hand, sections of whatever is left of the Left of old, continued to pace through their dialectical labyrinths, and to argue whether the shortcomings of the revolution were Stalin’s fault for having confined Communism to one nation, instead of striving for global Communism, as advocated by Trotsky.
It should be noted that while people make history, their lives (of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Nicholas II, Kerensky, etc.), can only be reliably written from personal knowledge, which grows less every day, and in a short time is lost forever. Unfortunately what is known in the present (I refer to the actual times of the Russian Revolution) can seldom be immediately told; and when it might be told, it is no longer known. With the obvious conclusion that historical truth can be at best acknowledged in the gross, with much latitude left for conflicting interpretations.
In the circumstances, rather than telling my twentyfive readers what they already know or have already heard, I will here examine the mechanism, the similarity, the differences and the circumstances that affected the major revolutions that we know of – however narrow be the limits of a blog.
Two different situations may break up a regime. Skepticism may alter established beliefs and disrupt mental habits. If so, only naked power can maintain social cohesion. Or a new ideology, involving new modes of thought, filters through the minds at large. Eventually, the new ideology becomes strong enough to establish a government in tune with the new convictions, replacing those become obsolete.
If so, the new revolutionary power is different both from traditional and naked power. The adherent of a new ideology are not (usually), power-grabbing adventurers. Their effects and actions are more important and more permanent.
The first revolution of our era, historically defined as Christian, has indeed to do with Christianity, considered as a social organization rather than a religion. From what we know, at its inception, Christianity was apolitical, a characteristic of most small sects. But the Christians gradually increased in numbers, and the Church in power. They became a group and group-power directly or indirectly ends up influencing the State.
[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hy emperor Constantine converted to Christianity is unknown – which is why myth is a tolerable substitute for uncertainty of information – in the instance, the appearance of the Cross in the sky, during Constantine’s victorious battle against Maxentius in 312 AD.
That myth, however, also means that Christianity had become influential. And given the antithetical difference between the doctrines of the Church and of the Roman State, Constantine’s adoption of Christianity as a state religion, may be the most important revolution in the history of Western civilization.
Luther could not succeed in his struggle without the support of secular princes. Which explains why the Lutheran Church remained always loyal to non-Catholic princes.
As an example, the revolutionaries of the “Peasants’ War”, erupted in Germany shortly after the Reformation, appealed to the Gospels for the relief of oppression. But Luther firmly opposed them, and inveighed against those who wish to “strike, smite, strangle and stab” established authority. And a “(reactionary) prince can better merit Heaven with bloodshed (of the peasants), than another prince who instead uses prayer.” He also added, “No one should think that the world can be ruled without blood. The civil sword shall and must be red and bloody.”
Tawney, author of “Religion and the Rise of Capitalism” wrote,
“… the axe takes the place of the stake. The maintenance of Christian morality is to be transferred from the discredited ecclesiastical authorities to the hands of the state. Skeptical as to the existence of unicorns and salamanders, the age of Machiavelli and Henry VIII found food for its credulity in the worship of that rare monster, the God-fearing Prince.”
As a result of the Reformation, the Church ceased to exist as an independent power and it became part of the machinery enforcing submission to the secular government. Then, through its Calvinist strain, the Protestant Revolution further evolved and ended by giving social and theological grounds and reasons for the triumph of capitalism.
History has a long tail – it’s not hard to see a Calvinist connection in the addition of “under God” to the American dollar bill, in 1954.
The inventive Henry VIII, by making kings and queens of England the keeping equivalent of Rome’s pope and popesses, made religion secular and national, while keeping most of the rituals that previously helped maintain obedience to the Catholic Church among the masses.
It followed that in England the king could alter dogmas essentially at will and execute those who objected. The attendant dissolution of the monasteries increased the crown’s revenue, which also proved useful to repress revolts by rewarding the repressors.
In comparing the Church of England with the Church of Rome, the king was functionally equivalent to God, while the Archbishop (of Canterbury), performed the Papal function – in Rome the Pope served God, but in England the king was God. A setup that proved the job of any Archbishop of Canterbury to be quite hazardous to his life and safety.
Henry VIII’s penchant for changing wives, and his quarrel with the Pope for refusing to annul his marriage with Catherine of Aragon, have obscured a more important issue. Namely the similarity or even identity, in England, of the root causes of the Reformation Revolution that had just occurred in Germany. Namely, the corruption of the Church, in turn associated with its wealth and the independent administration of that wealth.
But those who hoped that the English Reformation be true to its reforming objectives were sorely disappointed. The dissolution of the monasteries was similar (allowing for changes in time and circumstances), to the rape of the Soviet resources in 1991, literally stolen by sordid profiteers, instantly turned billionaires.
In England, the wealth of the dissolved monasteries attracted a similar strain of profiteers, thieves, greedy merchants, speculators and usurers, who drove the majority into poverty and despair, especially those employed in agriculture. Rebellions comparable to the Peasants Wars in Germany were quickly crushed in blood.
The original sincere Reformers could not believe their eyes. Martin Bucer, tutor of Edward VI, Henry VIII’s son who briefly reigned before dying of illness, wrote a manual for the young king. Appalled at the turn of events, Bucer outlined in the manual what an orderly reformed kingdom should be. Just one quote is illustrative,
“It (the kingdom), is to take a high line with the commercial classes. For, though trade itself is honorable, most traders are rogues – indeed, next to sham priests, no class of men is more pestilential to the Commonwealth.”
Make minor lexical changes and it’s like reading about Wall Street.
Still, the religious arrangement with the King as God was shaky, but then with Elizabeth I, it became necessary to defeat Spain, a very Catholic empire – wherefore Church-of-England Protestantism become associated with a new form of nationalism.
A few decades later, the Left, represented by Cromwell, sprang into action, leading to the English Revolution and the Civil War of 1642-1648. Though Cromwell’s Protectorate was defeated and King Charles II returned, the situation could not satisfy the growing number of Independents who rejected both State and Church as theological authorities.
They claimed the right to private judgment and religious toleration. That ideological trail led to a revolt against secular despotism. Hence the Glorious (English) Revolution of 1688. ‘Glorious’ because England was still tired from the Civil War and the shift from the Stuarts to the Hanoverian (German) royal dynasty was essentially bloodless.
But if everyone has a right to his own theological opinion, may he not have other rights as well? How far could a government intrude into the life of an individual? These ideas, developed and matured in the 18th century, issued in the Rights of Man. Those very ideas, already carried across the Atlantic by Cromwell’s defeated followers, were embodied in the American Constitution by Thomas Jefferson, and were brought back to Europe via the French Revolution.
In a sense, the French Revolution was the Revolution of the Rights-of-Man. It produced a bloody Civil War, just as the Civil War in Russia that followed the 1917 Revolution. And, just as in Russia, foreign powers gathered their forces to defeat the French and their new ideology.
They finally succeeded at Waterloo, but unlike in England immediately after Cromwell, the restoration of the old regimes did not go according to plan. For by 1848, the Rights-of-Man movement transformed itself into nationalism, in Germany and throughout Europe. And in the end, the idea of nationalism overpowered that of the Rights-of-Man. Overpowered, but not dead, for we still enjoy today the freedoms it helped to win. Including the principle that no man should be deprived of life or liberty without due process of law.
Similarly, the forces of reaction managed to end the Soviet Union and to reduce Russia for a while to the brink of starvation. But the spirit of egalitarianism that was the cornerstone of the USSR is not dead.
To ensure that it is, the usual spit-lickers, on the occasion of the 1917 anniversary, have resurrected the ghost of Stalin’s repressions, that caused “100 million victims” – one pundit said. Citing millions of unsubstantiated victims for political purposes is established practice.
Nor they spared nonsense and deformations about life conditions in Eastern Europe, as if they had been better before the Revolution, under Czarist, Hapsburg, or Ottoman autocracies. While conveniently omitting that currently, in Eastern Europe, there is some longing for the older times and remorse for having believed as true what proved false about the West.
Nor mention was made of the structure of advanced societies and the social protections developed during the XXth century. Protections and social advancements that owe their existence to the presence of a Communist entity. Entity powerful enough to frighten the ruling bourgeoisies into granting concessions otherwise impossible. Proof being that as soon the USSR was gone, the same bourgeoisies have launched a furious aggression against the previously conquered rights.
Looked-at in the same spirit adopted with those previously reviewed, the Russian Revolution preached doctrines, like early Christianity, which were international and, at least at the beginning, anti-national. Like Islam, but unlike Christianity, the Revolution was essentially political and it challenged Liberalism.
Paradoxically, until 1917, only reactionaries challenged Liberalism. Marxists advocated democracy, free speech and free press. But when the Soviet Government seized power, it adopted the teachings of the Catholic Church in its days of splendor. Namely that it is the business of authority to propagate truth, by positive teaching and by suppressing rival doctrines.
Invitably, this led to establishing an undemocratic dictatorship in the name of democracy. Though we should consider that the Western bourgeoisie kept Russia under siege, but for the short and brutal five years of WW2.
For what is worth, historians who make a living by repeating the establishment’s line, usually omit referring to the conditions arising from a siege mentality. Equally, they conveniently disregard some social and psychological traits, uniquely Russian, which had a significant weight in the prelude, the preparations and the denouement of the 1917 Revolution. Those interested may watch my video of the “Historical Sketches” series, “The Historical Roots of Russian Communism – part 1”
Also, new and unique to the Russian Revolution was the amalgamation of political and economic power, which gave unlimited rein to government control. On the other hand, the Revolution’s rejection of Liberalism was extraordinarily successful and enthusiastically imitated, in Italy at first and then in Germany, thanks to Mussolini and Hitler. And even in countries that remained ‘democratic’, Liberalism lost much of its popularity.
For example, true Liberals maintain(ed) that if terrorists destroy public buildings, a serious effort should be made by the police and the law courts to discover the actual culprits. The new political executive(s) of the 1930s believed that the guilt should be attributed, through manufactured evidence, to whatever party, personality or state they dislike. As it happened with the fire of the Berlin’s Reichstag.
But in similar circumstances, the American neo-Liberals, when dealing with 9/11, behaved very un-liberally – when they attributed to 19 Saudi bunglers the organization and implementation of the operation. An operation that could be conducted only by a State or Entity with a direct interest in its bloody and apocalyptic success – and with sufficient weight, power and cover, already established in the targeted country, to make the venture feasible.
In summary, we can say that, common to all revolutions, the impetus to reform springs in every age from realizing the contrast between the external order of society and the moral standards recognized as valid by the conscience or reason of the individual.
Finally, a (probably) neglected point of personal psychology. When Mark Twain said that “In all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane,” he said more than he thought he did in jest.
For it may happen that after reaching our personal conclusions on historical, social or psychological matters, we may say to ourselves, “yes… but,” or “yes… however.” That ‘but’ or ‘however’ are the Doors of Doubt. And here doubt is the tip of a curiously slippery slope.
It starts with “There is nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” (Hamlet). It continues with “Truth is in the eye of the beholder” (anonymous), “Truth is a matter of style” (Oscar Wilde), “There are no facts but only interpretations” (Nietzsche) etc. And at the bottom of the slide we find Pascal’s “To understand everything is to forgive everything.” Which, following Pascal’s discovery to its logical conclusion, makes a mockery of our established notions of good and bad, and of good and evil.
In a similar spirit, at the end of our brief meditation on past revolutions, readers may concur with the idea that history resembles the number π (‘pi’), where every new added digit increases accuracy without reaching precision, for π is an irrational number, with an infinite number of decimals.
Just like any new addition to our historical knowledge, augments perspective without nearing truth – one of the several paradoxes of life. Paradoxes that tend to fill an individual with uncertainty or anxiety, and at times make him feel “like one upon a rock, surrounded with a wilderness of sea, who marks the advancing tide grow wave by wave, expecting ever when some envious surge will, in its brinish bowels, swallow him.” (5)
Which may be why many prefer dogmatic certainty to articulate uncertainty, even when certainty is absurd.
Reference:
** 1. Macbeth
** 2. Coriolanus
** 3. King Henry V
** 4. Hamlet
** 5. from Titus Andronicus
Image Source: goo.gl/Ck3yz2
Jimmie Moglia is a Renaissance man, and therefore he's impossible to summarize in a simple bioblurb. In any case, here's a rough sketch, by his own admission: Born in Turin, Italy, he now resides in Portland, Oregon. Appearance: … careful hours with time’s deformed hand, Have written strange defeatures in my face (2); Strengths. An unquenchable passion for what is utterly, totally, and incontrovertibly useless, notwithstanding occasional evidence to the contrary. Weaknesses: Take your pick. Languages: I speak Spanish to God, French to men, Italian to women and German to my horse. My German is not what it used to be but it’s not the horse’s fault. Too many Germans speak English. Education: “You taught me language and my profit on it Is, I know how to curse.” (3); More to the point – in Italy I studied Greek for five years and Latin for eight. Only to discover that prospective employers were remarkably uninterested in dead languages. Whereupon I obtained an Engineering Degree at the University of Genova. Read more here.
Mao Reconsidered, Part Two: Whose Famine?
Mao, A Life.
Judging from the copious comments, it appears that Part One of this trilogy demonstrated conclusively that Mao Zedong did more good for more people than anyone in history. In Part Two, we examine the common belief that–whether through malice, indifference or incompetence–Mao also did great harm by starving millions of people to death.
But before we dive into the details, let’s run a plausibility check: How likely is it that the greatest benefactor mankind has ever known would maliciously starve millions of his fellow countrymen to death and, in so doing, destroy the survivors’ trust in him? How likely is it that a peasant like himself, who knew famine well, failed to notice? How likely is it that the greatest logistician in military history–who for decades fed millions of men on the march while retaining the loyalty of the peasants who fed them–could not manage to share available food among the people he’d previously saved? Not only does Mao’s record suggest the likelihood is almost zero: so does common sense. People with decades of compassionate behavior don’t–even in movies–suddenly become bloodthirsty monsters or indifferent psychopaths. And nor, as we shall see, did Mao.
It all began with his promise to redivide China’s land. For Mao, real revolutions occur in human hearts and minds; changing the ownership of assets was, he said, cosmetic, “To divide up the land and give it to the peasants is to transform the property of the feudal landlords into the individual property of the peasants, but this remains within the limits of bourgeois revolution. To divide up the land is nothing remarkable. MacArthur did it in Japan. Napoleon divided up the land, too. Land reform cannot abolish capitalism, nor can it lead to socialism”.
Nevertheless, he kept his wartime promise and, in 1950, redistributed all of China’s agricultural land to her 300 million peasants and, in 1953, announced a Five Year Plan, the first step on a gradual path to collectivize the country’s semi-subsistence agriculture through cooperative work organizations. The newly-landed peasants gave the plan a mixed reception: a third of villages radically socialized their lives (some, like Huaxi Village, still do so) a third simply went along with it and a third dragged their feet or rejected it outright.
The Plan, however, produced insufficient excess to feed the rapidly doubling population and the millions of newly urbanized industrial workers who’d left their farms and worse, it produced new inequalities. Mao told colleagues, “As is clear to everyone, the spontaneous forces of capitalism have been growing in the countryside in recent years, with newly rich peasants springing up everywhere and many well-to-do middle peasants striving to become rich. On the other hand, many poor peasants are still living in poverty for lack of the means of production, some are falling into debt and others selling or renting out their land. If this tendency goes unchecked it is inevitable that polarization in the countryside will only worsen”. He reminded them that China was in a race against time, “You say China is a big country with a huge population, huge land and socialism, which you say is a superior system. Well then, prove it. If you can’t surpass the U.S. in sixty years, what good are you? China will lose its citizenship of the planet”.
Insisting that the way lay forward, not back, he proposed doubling down.
Communications were rudimentary, the government inexperienced, goal-setting amateurish and Beijing’s capacity to coordinate implementation was primitive, yet Mao was under relentless pressure. He had already doubled food production and halved the death rate but, by 1958, the birth rate had quadrupled and he was racing to simultaneously modernize the country and feed new mouths while struggling under the West’s crushing food, financial and technology embargo and constant threats of nuclear attack. As a matter of survival, he insisted, China must develop agriculture and industry simultaneously and, to compensate for the lack of capital and technology, combine popular enthusiasm and virtuous exertion in what he termed a Great Leap Forward.
Innovative and enormously ambitious it would, he promised, overcome the growing threats of famine and foreign aggression while educating rural people about industrial production. Communalized peasants and workers would share responsibilities, communal child care and kitchens would free women to join the workforce and local, communal development would make reliance on expensive, nationwide infrastructure to transport finished goods unnecessary. Peasants ‘walking on two legs’ would develop light industry in the countryside while simultaneously erecting dikes, building dams and expanding irrigation. Increased agricultural productivity would free up labor for local manufacturing and, in the absence of capital, labour-intensive rural industries would meet local needs: locally produced cement would build local dams that, through locally made irrigation equipment, would water crops in soil enriched by locally made fertilizer.
Despite the obstacles, in three years, the Great Leap Forward raised coal production thirty-six percent, textile production thirty per cent, electricity generation twenty-six per cent and fixed national assets by forty percent. Nine of the ten biggest reservoirs in China today were built then. The gigantic Xinfengjiang Reservoir, one of thousands and a source of great national pride, holds ten cubic meters of clean water for every Chinese, has generated billions of kilowatts of electricity, powered rural and urban development and played a vital role in flood control and irrigation for the entire Guangdong and Hong Kong region, which depends on it to this day. Of all the industrial projects China would launch in the next fifteen years, two-thirds were founded during the Great Leap. Even failed experiments like backyard steel furnaces, which did not operate year-around and did not impact farm harvests, did little damage to the economy.
The people directly experienced improvements. According the the US National Institutes of Health, the rise in life expectancy under Mao “ranks among the most rapid, sustained increases in documented global history. These survival gains appear to have been largest during the 1950s, with a sharp reversal during the 1959-61 Great Leap Famine, that was then followed by substantial progress again during the early 1960s”. Given this extraordinary performance, can Mao be blamed for ‘the sharp reversal during the 1959-61 Great Leap Famine’ and, if so, to what extent?
But there was a severe famine in China in 1961-62 and the Chinese press called it the most severe since 1879. Grain harvests fell by a third: from two hundred million tons in 1958 to 170 in 1959, to 143 in 1960, to 147 in 1961 and did not fully recover until 1965. The entire Hunan region flooded and the spring harvest in southwest China’s rice bowl been lost to drought, ushering in a three-year El Nino event that would devastate the nation’s cropland. As harvests declined the death rate rose: from twelve per thousand in 1958 to 14.6 in 1959, to 25.4 in 1960, then to 14.2 in 1961.
Mao felt the impact personally. In late 1958 his wife, Jiang Qing[1], and the cook prepared a family banquet for their teenage daughter, Li Na, when she came home from boarding school. The girl was so hungry and ate so fast that Mao and Jiang Qing stopped eating and watched as she devoured everything on the table. The cook and Jiang Qing were sobbing and Mao stood up and walked out to the courtyard, lost, not knowing what to say.
Yet propaganda officials were reluctant to change their sunny predictions[2] so, as spring planting began in April 1959, Mao wrote directly to provincial, district, county, commune brigades and village production teams begging them not to boast about production ‘for at least ten years as boastful, unrealistic rhetoric, dahua gaodiao, is dangerous because food is the number one priority and food shortages have such widespread effects’.
Thanks to ration books and Mao’s logistical mastery, everyone had something to eat every day. Journalist Sidney Rittenberg recalled that Party members were forbidden to stand in line to buy food–they were to let the people go first–and remembered a cadre who broke the rule and repented, “They had a big meeting where she made a self-criticism, weeping, weeping, weeping, saying, ‘I’m not a good communist, I put my children’s health above the health of the masses’. Can you imagine that today? Anything even remotely similar? Today it’s ‘get mine.’”.
In an era when life expectancy was still only fifty-eight people over sixty, weakened by lifetimes of famine and disease, suffered cruelly. In Gao Village, Mobo Gao says that, after 1949, the only suicide in his village occurred during the Great Leap, “A woman hanged herself because of family hardship. The Great Leap Forward years were the only time in anybody’s memory that Gao villagers had to pick wild vegetables and to grind rice husks into powder to make food… Throughout my twenty years in Gao village, I do not remember any particular time when my family had enough to eat… as a rural resident, life was always a matter of survival. However, the Great Leap Forward made life even more difficult”.
In A Curtain of Ignorance, Felix Greene tells of traveling through China at the height of the famine in 1960, “With the establishment of the new government in Peking in 1949, two things happened. First, starvation–death by hunger–ceased in China. Food shortages, and severe ones, there have been; but no starvation. This is a fact fully documented by Western observers. The truth is that the sufferings of the ordinary Chinese peasant from war, disorder and famine have been immeasurably less in the last decade than in any other decade in the century”.
Ridiculing the Great Leap Forward as ‘The Great Leap Backward,’ Edgar Snow, who had seen authentic death from hunger in pre-Mao China, saw no famine, “Were the 1960 calamities actually as severe as reported in Peking, ‘the worst series of disasters since the nineteenth century,’ as Chou En-lai told me? Weather was not the only cause of the disappointing harvest but it was undoubtedly a major cause. With good weather the crops would have been ample; without it, other adverse factors I have cited–some discontent in the communes, bureaucracy, transportation bottlenecks–weighed heavily. Merely from personal observations in 1960 I know that there was no rain in large areas of northern China for 200 to 300 days. I have mentioned unprecedented floods in central Manchuria where I was marooned in Shenyang for a week…While Northeast China was struck by eleven typhoons–the largest number in fifty years–I saw the Yellow River reduced to a small stream…Throughout 1959-62 many Western press editorials continued to refer to ‘mass starvation’ in China and continued to cite no supporting facts. As far as I know, no report by any non-Communist visitor to China provides an authentic instance of starvation during this period. Here I am not speaking of food shortages, or lack of surfeit, to which I have made frequent reference, but of people dying of hunger, which is what ‘famine’ connotes to most of us, and what I saw in the past”.
What were the effects of food shortages?
If we take twelve deaths per thousand–Mao’s proudest achievement to that point–as our benchmark, then famine-related deaths from 1959-61 total 11.5 million. But this seems suspiciously high because average grain production per head remained comfortably above India’s, and China’s peak death rate, 25.4, matched India’s 24.8 that year and India experienced no general famine in that decade.
Without communal distribution–which India lacked–the impact would have been worse. And, without the 46,000 communally constructed reservoirs, the effects of later droughts would certainly have been disastrous, as William Hinton remembers in Fanshen, “When this author spent three weeks in China in 1983, visiting several communes–which still existed then–he was told every time, ‘we built our water conservation system during the Great Leap’”.
We must also remember that the Great Leap relied on a gigantic migration of the fittest young villagers to new urban industries and the entry of women into the workforce–both of which suppressed the birth rate, which was further suppressed because nutritional deficits also affect fertility: the Dutch famine of 1944-45 and the Bangladesh famine of 1974-75 cut fertility in half, as famine always did in China.
There were influential people, inside China and out, who wished to discredit Mao and who took to exaggerating–and even fabricating–statistics to make a gloomy picture darker. In assembling their arguments, Mao’s critics evidence a population deficit (fewer people around than expected) and impute births and deaths which may not have occurred.
Historical famine fabrication is a simple matter, as historian Boris Borisov, employing the same techniques as Mao’s critics, demonstrated in Famine killed 7 Million People in the U.S.A., a horrifying account of American famine deaths during the Great Depression:
“Few people know about five million American farmers–a million families–whom banks ousted from their land because of debts during the Great Depression. The U.S. government did not provide them with land, work, social aid, or pensions and every sixth American farmer was affected by famine. People were forced to leave their homes and wander without money or belongings in an environment mired in massive unemployment, famine and gangsterism. At the same time, the U.S. government tried to get rid of foodstuffs which vendors could not sell. Market rules were observed strictly: unsold goods categorized as redundant could not be given to the poor lest it damage business. They burned crops, dumped them in the ocean, plowed under 10 million hectares of cropland and killed 6.5 million pigs. Here is a child’s recollection: ‘We ate whatever was available. We ate bush leaves instead of cabbage, frogs too. My mother and my older sister died during a year’ (Jack Griffin)…The U.S. lost not less than 8,553,000 people from 1931 to 1940. Afterwards, population growth indices change twice, instantly. Exactly between 1930-31 the indices drop and stay on the same level for ten years. No explanation of this phenomenon can be found in the extensive report by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Statistical Abstract of the United States”.
Real famines are difficult to hide. Until Professor Borisov reported it, no-one had heard of a famine during the Great Depression yet, when one million people starved to death in colonial Ireland in 1846-47, the world knew immediately and when three million died in the 1943-44 Bengal famine the news raced around the globe. The idea that eight million died in the USA or thirty-million died in China without anyone’s noticing seems farfetched. After all, China’s weather-related harvests were no secret and China’s El Niño also brought drought throughout the Prairie wheat belt and reduced Canada’s 1961 crop from 490 million to 262 million bushels. Yet nobody starved to death in Canada.
Taking advantage of the world wide grain shortage, the United States Government blocked grain shipments to China and assigned the CIA to monitor the success of the embargo. The Agency reported:
ECONOMIC SITUATION IN COMMUNIST CHINA. National Intelligence Estimate. Director of Central Intelligence. 4 April 1961. CONCLUSIONS: The Chinese Communist regime is now facing the most serious economic difficulties it has confronted since it consolidated its power over mainland China. As a result of economic mismanagement, and, especially, of two years of unfavorable weather, food production in 1960 was little if any larger than in 1957 at which time there were about 50 million fewer Chinese to feed. Widespread famine does not appear to be at hand, but in some provinces many people are now on a bare subsistence diet and the bitterest suffering lies immediately ahead, in the period before the June harvests. The dislocations caused by the ‘Leap Forward’ and the removal of Soviet technicians have disrupted China’s industrialization program. These difficulties have sharply reduced the rate of economic growth during 1960 and have created a serious balance of payments problem. Public morale, especially in rural areas, is almost certainly at its lowest point since the Communists assumed power, and there have been some instances of open dissidence.
PROSPECTS FOR COMMUNIST CHINA: National Intelligence Estimate. Director of Central Intelligence.2 May 1962. CONCLUSIONS: The future course of events in Communist China will be shaped largely by three highly unpredictable variables: the wisdom and realism of the leadership, the level of agricultural output, and the nature and extent of foreign economic relations. During the past few years all three variables have worked against China. In 1958 the leadership adopted a series of ill-conceived and extremist economic and social programs; in 1959 there occurred the first of three years of bad crop weather; and in 1960 Soviet economic and technical cooperation was largely suspended. The combination of these three factors has brought economic chaos to the country. Malnutrition is widespread, foreign trade is down and industrial production and development have dropped sharply. No quick recovery from the regime’s economic troubles is in sight.
Forty-five years later, a miracle happened: A sensational book, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, claimed to have discovered forty-five million famine deaths. Reviews in the Western media were ecstatically horrified: Must rank as one of the most powerful, moving and yet frightening insights into The Great Leap Forward. Readers cannot help but be distressed by this book for when one tragedy leads to another and then another you cannot read this historical truth without being moved. Of course the tragedies that are revealed involved tens of thousands of citizens leading to the largest human disaster of all time.
But when a curious reader asked why the author had photoshopped a wartime 1946 Life Magazine photo on his book cover to portray a famine that occurred fifteen years later, he confessed that he could find no photographs of a Great Leap famine.
Then another reader observed that the crucial quote the author attributed to Mao seemed utterly unlike Mao’s known statements: “When there is not enough to eat, people starve to death. It is better to let half the people die so that the other half can eat their fill”. An archive check revealed it was from the transcript of a meeting convened to cut the number of ambitious Great Leap enterprises in half and the ‘people’ who would starve were not people at all, but large industrial projects.
The book insisted that, had Mao maintained his 1953 growth rate, China’s population would have been twenty-seven million higher in 1961 and attributed the gap to famine deaths. But University of Chicago demographer Ping-ti Ho pointed out that the 1953 figures are not from a census, but from provincial estimates showing a highly dubious population increase of thirty percent between 1947 and 1953–a period of warfare, famine and intense revolutionary struggle–suggesting that the twenty-seven million ‘missing’ people probably never existed.
As Professor Borisov’s article demonstrates, historical demography is more art than science and the claims of tens of millions of famine deaths are based, as British historian Gwydion Madawc Williams suggests, on ‘comparing Mao to Mao in order to condemn Mao’ by using leaps of faith and suspensions of disbelief. The process works like this:
- Use the lowest death rate attributed to Mao as the baseline but don’t tell readers that the baseline was Mao’s accomplishment.
- Note the increased death rate during the Three Bad Years.
- Ignore the fact that people were better off in 1961 than in the previous 100 years.
- Ignore the weather.
- Ignore the fact that life expectancy was fifty-six and almost all the dead were over sixty.
- Ignore the exodus of workers moving to cities.
- Ignore the fall in birth rates when women join the labor force.
- Ignore the fall in fertility that accompanies food shortages.
- Ignore universal food rationing.
- Ignore the USSR’s withdrawal of aid in 1960.
- Ignore the fact that the peasants, armed for the first time in history, showed no discontent.
- Ignore the grain embargo.
- Mistranslate the key statement attributed to Mao.
- Select an evocative famine image from a previous era.
- Fit a linear time trend to the falling death rate.
- Claim deaths should have continued to decline steeply.
- Blame famine for the difference.
- Blame Mao for the famine.
Victor Marchetti, formerly of the Office of the Director of the CIA, testified that the Agency provided eighty-million dollars annually to The Asia Foundation for ‘anti-communist academicians to disseminate a negative vision of mainland China’. The academician author of Mao’s Great Famine received $2 million from the US and UK Governments.
However severely his critics judge Mao, he did not initiate the Great Leap with the aim of killing anyone and claiming that he did obscures his accomplishments and even a superficial investigation like the present one demonstrates the opposite. Historian Han Donping, who lost two grandparents during the Great Leap, later traveled through Shandong and Henan provinces, sites of the worst shortages. Yes, farmers told him, the apparent abundance in 1958 led to carelessness in harvesting and consuming food and, insidiously, to the assumption that the government had absolved them of responsibility for their own food security. “I interviewed numerous workers and farmers in Shandong and Henan and never met one who said that Mao was bad. I talked to a scholar in Anhui who grew up in rural areas and had done research there. He never met one farmer that said Mao was bad nor a farmer who said Deng Xiaoping [Mao’s successor] was good”. As Gwydion Williams dryly observes, had the peasants’ faith in Mao been shaken, “Would the survivors have shown the enthusiasm for Mao’s Cultural Revolution that they demonstrated from 1966 onwards?”
In reality, China’s population increased from 650 million in 1958 to 680 million five years later, so Mao’s actions cannot be compared to the vengeful murder of 10 million Congolese by the armies of King Leopold, nor the death of 35 million Chinese at the hands of Japan’s imperialist armies during 1937-45, nor the policy-driven famines created by the civilised British administrations in India, Ireland and Persia. But the narrative of ‘Mao the monster’ is assiduously cultivated, and at great expense, to prove that socialism is a failure. But direct, comparisons suggest precisely the opposite.
In their Hunger and Public Action, Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze wrote, “Comparing India’s death rate of 12 per thousand with China’s of 7 per thousand, and applying the difference to the Indian population of 781 million in 1986, we get an estimate of excess mortality in India of 3.9 million per year. This implies that every eight years or so more people die in India because of its higher regular death rate than died in China in the gigantic famine of 1958-61. India seems to manage to fill its cupboard with more skeletons every eight years than China put there in its years of shame.” [my emphasis]. Sen and Dreze conclude, “Starvation deaths and excessive deprivation are newsworthy in a way the quiet persistence of regular hunger and non-extreme deprivation are not”. In democratic India today, two million children starve to death every year and nobody notices.
Instead of ‘How Many People Died Because Of Mao?’ it is fairer to ask, ‘How Many People Lived Because Of Mao?’ If it’s reasonable to attribute all unnatural deaths in China since 1949 to him, then it’s reasonable to attribute the billions of lives beyond the 1949 life expectancy to him, too. In reality, bad weather, famines and the US embargo caused most of the deaths and even today’s neo-liberal globalization is inflicting more death and suffering world wide than the Great Leap.
[1] Gao, Mobo. The Battle for China’s Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution (pp. 89-90). Pluto Press. Kindle Edition.
[2] Wu Faxian (2006), (Difficult years: Wu Faxian memoirs, volume 2), Hong Kong: 2006. Chairman Mao: several important historical events and episodes that I was personally involved in), Beijing: Xinhua chubanshe. In Gao, Battle for China’s Past.
DID YOU MISS PART 1 OF THIS PRESENTATION? CLICK HERE.
ADDENDUM: Dr Roberts answers a rather typically ill-informed question.
This question should be phrased with neutral and sincere language
This question’s wording makes it seem like a joke, or intended rhetorically to make a statement, rather than looking for helpful answers. It should be rewritten to be a neutral, non-leading question. See Quora’s policies on questions.
This question should be phrased with neutral and sincere languageThis question’s wording makes it seem like a joke, or intended rhetorically to make a statement, rather than looking for helpful answers. It should be rewritten to be a neutral, non-leading question. See Quora’s policies on questions.
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he question assumes that Mao enjoyed killing, when the historical record reveals precisely the opposite.
The war had created millions of criminals and Mao’s instructions are characteristic, “The principle is that those who owe blood debts or are guilty of extremely serious crimes and have to be executed to assuage the people’s anger and those who have caused extremely serious harm to the national interest must be unhesitatingly sentenced to death and executed without delay. As for those whose crimes deserve capital punishment but who owe no blood debts and are not bitterly hated by the people or who have done serious but not extremely serious harm to the national interest, the policy is to hand down the death sentence, grant a two-year reprieve and subject them to forced labour to see how they behave”.
When furious colleagues demanded executions, he asked repeatedly, “What harm is there in not executing people? Those amenable to labour reform should go and do labour reform so that rubbish can be transformed into something useful. Besides, people’s heads are not like leeks. When you cut them off, they won’t grow again. If you cut off a head wrongly there is no way of rectifying the mistake even if you want to”.
Japan’s military had committed war crimes of immense scale and horrific savagery during their twelve-year occupation and popular bitterness was boundless, but Mao forbade retribution: “Our policy towards prisoners captured from the Japanese, puppet, or anti-Communist troops, is to set them all free except for those who have incurred the bitter hatred of the masses and must receive capital punishment and whose death sentence has been approved by the higher authorities. We should not insult them, take away their personal effects or try to exact taxation from them but should, without exception, treat them sincerely and kindly. However reactionary they may be, this should be our policy”. He permitted the execution of forty-six war criminals then pardoned and repatriated a million Japanese soldiers. He even dissuaded Japan’s puppet Chinese emperor, Pu Yi, from suicide and helped edit his memoirs because, he told the remorseful man, he would find it therapeutic.
Above all, he ended the worst centuries of suffering in China’s long history, prompting historian Maurice Meisner to compare him to its greatest emperor, “However harsh the rule of the new Communist state, the establishment of order and security brought enormous and immediate benefits to the great majority of the Chinese people…In this sense, 1949 stands as a milestone in Chinese history comparable only to 221 BC, when the various feudal states of antiquity were united into an empire under the Qin dynasty”.
But the best measure of Mao’s dislike of killing is the hundreds of millions of lives he made possible:
GODFREE ROBERTS—There were influential people, inside China and out, who wished to discredit Mao and who took to exaggerating–and even fabricating–statistics to make a gloomy picture darker. In assembling their arguments, Mao’s critics evidence a population deficit (fewer people around than expected) and impute births and deaths which may not have occurred.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report
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The Biggest Threat to World Peace Is NATO
On November 8th, Britain’s Daily Mail bannered “NATO tells Europe to prepare for 'rapid deployment’:” and sub-headed “Defence chiefs say roads, bridges and rail links must be improved in case tanks and heavy vehicles need to be quickly mobilised” (to invade Russia, but the newspaper’s slant was instead that this must be done purely defensively: “In October, NATO accused Russia of misleading them, saying that Moscow had deliberately violated international rules of military drills”).
ERIC ZUESSE, Senior Contributing Editor Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity. Besides TGP, his reports and historical analyses are published on many leading current events and political sites, including The Saker, Huffpost, Oped News, and others. ERIC ZUESSE—Anyone who is supportive of the formation of a non-profit “End NATO Now” is hereby invited to indicate so, in a reader-comment to this article, at Washingtonsblog; and, if enough people indicate there that they would be willing to donate time or money to such an organization, then I shall establish it. Because: if we don’t end NATO now, then maybe NATO will end us all, surprisingly soon. [premium_newsticker id=”154171″]
What will it take to bring America to live according to its own self image?