Mao - Mass-Murderer??

When reading about Pol Pot... I found this tidbit:

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Pol Pot is today regarded as one of the five worst mass-murderers of modern history, along with Belgium's King Leopold II, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Mao Zedong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pol_pot

A Oxfords Encyclopedia of military history also states this.


Without dismissing this as Western propaganda... where do they come up with this accusation? I never heard of any purge in China, or any bloody rampage Mao went on.

{sigh} are you sure you really want to go there?

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it's a load of crap..

and it's wiki..

Exactly, which is why I want to know where they get this from. I'm not trying to start some flame war, I just want to know where they base this accusation from.

The only thing I can see large loss of life coming from in China was the famine. At least with Stalin and Pol Pot you understand where they base their arguments from, but this is news to me.

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Wiki is publicly edited. anyone can write and provided they have a source, it is understood to be true

I think I realize that -_-

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A Oxfords Encyclopedia of military history also states this.

Which is why I didnt ignore it. The book has a clear bias towards the west, but I still want to know where they come up with this.

Erm... I doubt they would post one their Encyclopedias online out of the several that they have.

This is the book though:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=sovietempire&path=subst/home/home.html/Oxford-Companion- ... 0198662092

So for that point, I'm afraid you are going to have to take my word for it.

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Mao now stands revealed as one of the greatest monsters of the 20th century alongside Hitler and Stalin. Indeed, in terms of sheer numbers of deaths for which he responsible, Mao, with some 70 million, exceeded both.

Please read the book "Mao: The Unknown Story
by Jung Chang and Jon Haliday"

You know the book is also been ridiculed by non-marxist academics?

Ps. I'm not pro-Mao, tbh I'm not really interested in those debates and/or maoism.

Like I said, I'm not trying to start some debate.

With Hitler and Stalin, you can at least understand where they are coming from (if not heavily debated)... I don't see where they base this from.

Do they base this off of the famines?

The greater threat a person poses to the imperialist hegemony, the bigger the pile of BS surrounding that person gets.

Lenin abused his children, Stalin mass-murdered 60 million people, Pol Pot killed everyone who wore glasses, Ho Chi Minh and Jiap raped women, etc etc

I think we already established that its totally outrageous... but do you know where they base it from?

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You know the book is also been ridiculed by non-marxist academics?

Would you have a link to any of them? I am interested to see their arguments.

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The greater threat a person poses to the imperialist hegemony, the bigger the pile of BS surrounding that person gets.

Well can you name a book that has a relatively neutral account of Mao (not an arse-kissing state-sponsored version)?

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Well can you name a book that has a relatively neutral account of Mao (not an arse-kissing state-sponsored version)?

Neutral? No sorry. There is no such thing as a neutral point of view when it comes to people. The only "factual" and therefore neutral science comes from Math. All else is subjective, thus making the "truth" very relative.

LOL! Those people are not mass murderers! They manipulated weak-minded masses to kill people.

From a Nehruvian perspective (what I was exposed to), basically Mao tried to do achieve volume in industry (especially Steel) by using lots of small scaler agricultural contingents, who were mostly doing subsistence / small scale agriculture.

The concept of building a national infra w/ decentralized backyard furnices didn't work out too well. On an industrial level, this meant that the produce was seldom enough for an industrial project such as mechanical spare parts, leave alone nationwide initiatives such as construction.

On the agricultural sector, since massive manpower was redirected, the result was mostly rotting crops. On the ground, assuming the following chain of events are true, this would most certainly constitute massive deaths.

In the Nehruvian Socialist POV the notorious deaths in the PRC were a byproduct of bad planning more so than Mao's Red Guards. He wanted to rapidly industrialize & initiate a national industry initiative. But his method of production worked relatively ok for agro but not so for industry. As a result, his industry couldn't produce the necessary quality & quantity of inputs needed for his initiatives. And to complicate matters for Mao- agro labour was converted into industrial labour- which yielded no results whatsoever. To highlight, when Deng Xiao Ping took over, the communal steel mills were disbanded.

While I haven't seen the backyard steel mills in the PRC itself, we have most certainly seen them in India (considering quite a few Chinese fled to India during that period). I've seen the quality first hand. And before the 60s war, such steel was also exported in raw material in bulk. Mostly, they'd sit & rot in storehouses due to quality. Often times, you'd only find scrap merchants buy small amounts of the stuff for practically peanuts, for making simple household vessels. Most of it would just accumulate & stockpile in warehouses.

It can pass off as a food storage jar, but most certainly not for machine spare parts or for construction projects (something that was Mao's main agenda).

There were key factories in the cities that did make the production in terms of quality & quantity, but they couldn't cover China's geography at the time. Mao banked on an accelerated solution that didn't work & backfired in terms of civilian casualties.

But I haven't been in China during these years. Comrade Fontis???

Your assessment is correct arif, Mao's GLF was an attempt to implement Stalin's planning but it failed since China was in a way worse shape than Mao had anticipated. This was obviously one of the mistakes Mao did, but then again seeing as how there isn't any "HOW TO IMPLEMENT SOCIALISM 101" manual out there, it's fully understandable.

What China needed to rapidly industrialize was a "NEP", which was introduced and still is under effect.

Anyhow, the chain of events leading from the GLF and due to the war more or less put huge pressure on China. The overpopulation became another pile of pressure. There were simply too many mouths to feed and too little to work with.

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There is no such thing as a neutral point of view when it comes to people. The only "factual" and therefore neutral science comes from Math. All else is subjective, thus making the "truth" very relative.

Well aware of this Comrade, keyword 'relatively'.
Nevermind though, I assume the best method would be to work ones way through opposite slants of the story and try to find a middle ground.