I see dead people. – The Sixth Sense
It really will be different this time, right?
The biggest famine in human history was caused by communism, based on a bad idea and a stubborn decision to hold with ideology over reality. It was known as, ironically, The Great Leap Forward. Mao decided in 1957 that within 15 years, China could surpass the United Kingdom (The Guys Who Supply Evil Accents to Movies) in economic production. Mao was egged on to make this pronouncement based on Nikita Khrushchev’s 1957 pronouncement that in fifteen years that the U.S.S.R. would surpass the United States in economic production.
Spoiler alert – none of these things happened, and Bruce Willis was the ghost the whole time.
That’s the entire world death rate. Who says communism isn’t powerful!
The Great Leap Forward killed about 45 million people in China. Mao decided that he wanted to collectivize farming to consolidate power (more on this later). In addition to this, Mao also decided that to increase economic output, he’d have the peasants make steel. In their backyards. This worked about as well with an I.Q. above room temperature could have predicted, especially once the farmers started melting down the tools they farmed with to meet production targets, thus decreasing food amounts even more than replacing experienced farmers with office workers did.
Oops.
Another victory for environmentalism under communism!
Farmers had to melt down steel farming tools to meet Mao’s steel production targets. Even though Mao was informed relatively early on that the policy wasn’t working, he stuck with it because he didn’t want to look weak because his wife told him he never would get that raise unless he stood up to his boss at work. In the end? 45 million people starved to death so Mao could keep his day job.
But this was just stupid, not vengeful. This is known in China today (as related by the Internet) as the “Three Years of Natural Disasters.” Even in death Mao cannot be challenged publically, so you can bet he finally got that raise. The rumor is that even his ghost can kill. But Mao’s ghost kills via bad breath, but George Washington’s ghost kills with laser eyes, so we’ve got that going for us.
Stalingrad? No, Stalinsad™. I may have to really trademark that for a series of teddy bears I sell to leftists so they can hug them after rallies.
Although Josef Stalin only gets the Silver Medal in the “Killed My Own People” sweepstakes, it’s not due to lack of trying – he managed to kill, by many estimates, 20 million of his own people in activities completely unrelated by war. How did we get there?
Soon after Lenin died, Stalin and the Soviet Union benefitted from a strong and robust economy. The local farmers, called Kulaks, were producing record grain yields. And if there’s one thing that people like, it’s grain, especially James at The Bison Prepper (LINK).
That’s a good thing, right? The grain production gave the U.S.S.R. a source of currency, and the Kulaks imported farm machinery to increase farm production even more. The Kulaks were the engine of the economy. As a leader, Stalin must have loved these guys, right?
No. Stalin hated them. They were a threat to his power, and he didn’t like any power structure existing outside of him. So, he went after the Kulaks.
But what was a Kulak? Well, a Kulak was a peasant. But this was a peasant that was slightly less poor than the other peasants. That meant, for reals, that this peasant had a slightly nicer hovel, and had some regular gruel. It wasn’t even as good a job as the assistant manager at McDonalds, but it was still really good in the Soviet Union where a bowl of warm mud was considered a major prize. As such, these Kulaks were often looked up to locally because they were successful. Their position in society was earned through merit.
But Stalin didn’t like Kulaks, and decided he was going to break them. One of the first things he did was to create an army because Stalin had declared a Revolution© against . . . his own people. This army was called the Twenty-Five-Thousanders. They were steel and factory workers that were armed, given a quickie six-month training program on farming, and told to go make collective farming work. Essentially they were dim-witted college interns with guns.
One of the interesting (to me, at least) measures of communism is how the system selects, on purpose, those of no real merit to be placed in positions of authority. The factory worker given a gun and told to enforce Stalin’s will was being given the best job they had ever had, and power beyond anything a typical factory worker ever had. This policy of promoting the unworthy and stupid into positions of power made the unworthy and stupid really zealous communists. Where else could they go to get that kind of power? They owed everything they were to the state. Where else could a former prostitute or pimp decide on the summary execution of a former doctor or engineer?
So, faced with the army of 25,000 idiots, the Kulaks decided to do what a reasonable person does: they decided to get together to go to Moscow to work out a solution. Stalin was glad to meet them, and worked with them on a solution to all of their problems: those Kulaks that weren’t summarily executed were shipped off to “leisure” camps in Siberia. You might have heard of the camps – they called them Gulags.
Ahh, just like Disneyland®!
But that wasn’t enough. Stalin sent his 25,000 strong army to confiscate every bit of grain from problem areas. Every bit. He encouraged the poorer peasants to raid the houses of the Kulaks and take . . . everything. Envy is powerful, and here was a license to steal.
So they stole. But that wasn’t enough.
Stalin essentially shut the border down of the Ukraine after pulling all food out of the area. In a stunningly familiar Communist plan, armed troops kept the people in. Mao was an inadvertent murderer, but Stalin starved millions of people to death, on purpose.
Why? James Mace explains:
I remain convinced that, for Stalin to have complete centralized power in his hands, he found it necessary to physically destroy the second-largest Soviet republic, meaning the annihilation of the Ukrainian peasantry, Ukrainian intelligentsia, Ukrainian language, and history as understood by the people; to do away with Ukraine and things Ukrainian as such. The calculation was very simple, very primitive: no people, therefore, no separate country, and thus no problem.
Even today, the Western Press has a love affair with Stalin. I won’t go into reasons why, and I’m not sure I care, but it’s obvious that the New York Times has never met a communist it didn’t love. Walter Duranty privately noted on a telegram to London that over 10 million had died of starvation in 1934 during the Holodomor, but wrote publicly rosy pictures about the Soviet Union. But what did Duranty say in public?
Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda. There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.
Showing that they are perfectly unbiased, the Pulitzer™ committee has refused to rescind the Pulitzer Prize® given to Duranty for his participation in the cover up of Stalin’s mass murder of millions. I wonder if complicity is in any dictionary they own?
At least someone got it right, but he didn’t win a Pulitzer©.
Rumor is that he was murdered by the Soviet NKVD. Because truth is the biggest enemy a dictator has.
It might occur to a discerning reader that, while Democracy Dies in Darkness™, tens of millions can be killed by communism and lying about it, even when proven, gets prestigious awards! And who says the press is biased.
But just like in the Olympics®, communists can be proud. The got the gold and the silver!
GBD 2017 Mortality Collaborators [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)] – Mortality graph.
