Mao's Great Leap Forward 'killed 45 million in four years'

I can already see where definitions can alter our discussion. As you say capitalism taking over the state machine. While I dont disagree that happens and has happened, I disagree that it is capitalism or perhaps I should say I disagree that is liberal capitalism. The consequence of interventionism is favoritism, capturing regulators etc. It may be called that corporatism or crony capitalism or state capitalism but not real capitalism in the original sense.

If one understands that socialism is not really a share-the-wealth program, but is in reality a method to consolidate and control the wealth, then the seeming paradox of superrich men promoting socialism becomes no paradox at all. Instead it becomes the logical, even the perfect tool of power-seeking megalomaniacs. Communism, or more accurately, socialism, is not a movement of the downtrodden masses, but of the economic elite. (IE politicians, bankers, other super rich)

Mises was no fool. He, Hayek, and many others were able to see through the fascist/socialist intellectually popular thought of its time and had saw them both as destructive and oppressive systems or organization for human civilization. They were also against a central banking monopoly, for economic reasons but it also fits in well for conspiracy folks. Its not capitalism that creates war, its government. Capitalists may want to make a buck in providing products for war, but it is only possible because of the State. Otherwise, they have only persuasion and providing something people voluntarily desire as their tool for success, not force. It is peaceful in its purest sense because the freedom of exchange can make people who hate each other, tolerate each other and even help each other simply because of the reliance on voluntary and mutually beneficial trade.

"The socialist movement takes great pains to circulate frequently new labels for its ideally constructed state. Each worn-out label is replaced by another which raises hopes of an ultimate solution of the insoluble basic problem of Socialism?until it becomes obvious that nothing has been changed but the name. The most recent slogan is "State Capitalism."[Fascism] It is not commonly realized that this covers nothing more than what used to be called Planned Economy and State Socialism, and that State Capitalism, Planned Economy, and State Socialism diverge only in non-essentials from the "classic" ideal of egalitarian Socialism.? - Ludwig von Mises

Right on Jermey. I am in that boat with you. Anti-fascist, anti-socialist.

Part of the problem is very different understandings of left and right, especially as it is has different meanings in different countries. Or if "left wing" and "right wing" is different than "Leftist or rightist". Some,like myself, use right as anarchy and left as total government regardless of a "wing". A wing on a bird shares the same body. Anyways, James Gregor, well known for his deep research on Marxism, Fascism, and nationalism concludes that it is fascism's ?national socialism? in the name of modernization, national unity, and international political rivalry among states has been the dominant form of socialist ideology in the 20th century. And most fundamentally what bound communist, fascist, and Nazi socialism together as a single force in our time was their common hatred and opposition to individualism, limited government, free-market economics, and a civil society outside and independent of political control. Gregor locates the origin of the false dichotomy between "right wing" revolution and "left wing" revolution in the first Marxist-Leninist interpretations of Fascism. According to this original interpretation, Fascist dictatorships arose when the ruling bourgeoisie attempted to stave off the impending socialist revolution by installing a dictatorship that would protect their interests. Gregor dismisses this argument as being "at best, a caricature of the actual political and historical sequence" (p. 36) and argues that the regimes of both Mussolini and Hitler displaced the traditional bourgeoisie from power and subordinated the bourgeoisie's interests to the collective national interest (pp. 40-42). According to Fascist ideology, the means of production and the forces of the market, under the control but not the ownership of the state, are seen as instruments to coordinate and harmonize the productive forces of the nation for the good of all classes. Gregor concludes that Fascist regimes are not in the service of any one particular class, but seek a harmony between all the classes. Source Gregor also delves into the writings of Fascist theorists in order to show that Fascism is a "variant of revolutionary Marxism designed to address the reality of lesser developed nations" (p. 133). Traditional Marxist theory argues that Capitalist economic practices contain within them conflicts that only a proletarian revolution can transcend. However, social liberation via revolution of the proletariat can only be achieved after the Capitalist industrial system of a nation develops to the point where it can provide the material conditions and abundance needed to achieve social harmony. In lesser industrially-developed countries, which do not have the material conditions for a genuine Marxist proletarian revolution, a different mode of industrialization had to be achieved that did not leave those same countries subservient to the interests of international capitalists. It is out of this background that Fascism arose. Source-The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century: A. James Gregor Mussolini was a marxist socialist until he realized he would not be able to collectivize society under a "workers of the world unite" slogan.It had already become fairly clear even before the war that the workers were nationalistic and patriotic rather than class-conscious -- so the Marxist vision of the workers of the world uniting regardless of nationality was just not going to happen. And all that was thoroughly confirmed when the mainstream Leftist parties of the various European countries lined up behind their respective national governments in World War I. So it was nationalism and patriotism rather than class-struggle that would most move the workers. And, as the aspiring leader of the workers, Mussolini had to follow that. It was more pragmatic and realistic at the time. The truth is that leftist progressives in America and Europe were originally fond of much of what Mussolini and Hitler were doing with control of private property, eugenics, population control, etc. H.G. Wells as just one example. He coined the term "liberal fascism" and not meant it to be negative. It was not looked down upon back then like it is now.

A truly horrifying man, even more so because Americans and Europeans still do not grasp the origins of these atrocities. When absolute power is given to the State, it is inevitable the worst people will end up in charge and use mass murder to retain and expand their power. The only way to prevent tragedies like this from occurring in the future (and they will if we continue on this path) is to take away the power of the few to control the many. The ideology doesn't matter. Who cares whether Mao, Stalin, Hitler, etc. were influenced more by Marx or Nietzsche? The point is that they all believed in the power of the State to create a more perfect world. Free people and free markets, in other words, Democratic Capitalism, is the answer. It is the only way to keep the State at bay, while still providing for economic growth and equal protection under the law. Sadly, both of the major parties in the United States have abandoned these values in favor of Communism-lite economic policies and military Authoritarianism.

Ok so Mao didn?t killed these people because: 1) You don?t know anyone that knows anyone that died 2) Frank has some ties to Taiwan (that darn island of oppression right next to free happy China) so his estimates are false. 3) People that are fed with Mao?s red book from kindergarten end up loving him. Yep, really strong argument.

Oldgittom, You seem to be dragging me into a debate I never entered here, but if you really want my views/comments here it goes. First It would be nice not to repeat here the same nonsense being told for the past +150 years, that the industrial revolution brought misery to the proletariat. To quote Mises: ?The history of capitalism in Great Britain as well as in all other capitalist countries is a record of an unceasing tendency toward the improvement in the wage earners' standard of living?. Read http://mises.org/daily/4604 Second, conservatives have a ?bias against helping to end world poverty in an effective way?? And what bias is that exactly? We believe that the free market is the best way to deliver prosperity, can you tell me then what system would deliver that in a more ?effective way?? Socialism? Statism? Bankrupt the nation with bloated welfare programs? And I didn?t fail to mention the environment, I choose not to. If you want to drink the cool aid, believe the pseudo-science of global warming, and pray on Al Gore?s church of Doomsday its your choice. Lastly, America is not being undermined by communism, but by the progressives. However other areas are, go say ?lordy lord? to the political prisoners in cuba, to the thousands killed by Farc and their satellite gangs, to the people of Vietnam still living under a red dictatorship (way to go hippies), to the falun gong practitioners, to the people of Tibet, and to anyone that types ?tianmen square? in the chinese google.

They are not diametrically opposed when it comes to individual rights and economics. That is an old myth.

Where socialism sought totalitarian control of a society?s economic processes through direct state operation of the means of production, fascism sought that control indirectly, through domination of nominally private owners. Where socialism nationalized property explicitly, fascism did so implicitly, by requiring owners to use their property in the ?national interest??that is, as the autocratic authority conceived it. (Nevertheless, a few industries were operated by the state.) Where socialism abolished all market relations outright, fascism left the appearance of market relations while planning all economic activities. Where socialism abolished money and prices, fascism controlled the monetary system and set all prices and wages politically. In doing all this, fascism denatured the marketplace. Entrepreneurship was abolished. State ministries, rather than consumers, determined what was produced and under what conditions. (Source-Concise encyclopedia of economics)

When he broke with the Socialist party in 1914, it was over whether or not Italy should enter World War I. Following Marx's internationalist doctrines, the "Socialist" (Marxist) party was neutralist and anti-patriotic but Mussolini soon became uncomfortable with that for two reasons: 1). It had already become fairly clear even before the war that the workers were nationalistic and patriotic rather than class-conscious -- so the Marxist vision of the workers of the world uniting regardless of nationality was just not going to happen. And all that was thoroughly confirmed when the mainstream Leftist parties of the various European countries lined up behind their respective national governments in World War I. So it was nationalism and patriotism rather than class-struggle that would most move the workers. And, as the aspiring leader of the workers, Mussolini had to follow that! 2). Mussolini correctly foresaw that the Austro/German forces would not win the war and therefore wanted Italy to join the Allied side and thus get a slice of Austrian territory at the end of the war.

?Fascism is likewise opposed to trade-unionism as a class weapon. But when brought within the orbit of the State, Fascism recognises the real needs which gave rise to socialism and trade--unionism, giving them due weight in the guild or corporative system in which divergent interests are coordinated and harmonised in the unity of the State.? ?Mussolini (P.15)

Fascist Mussolini himself praised the New Deal as following his own corporate state, as quoted in a July 1933 article in the New York Times, "Your plan for coordination of industry follows precisely our lines of cooperation."


Norman Thomas, leading spokesman for avowed socialists, correctly puts Nazism in the anti-private enterprise camp:
?The social and economic consequences of fascist triumph under the German form were revolutionary, unless one insists on reserving the word revolutionary for a triumph of the working class. In no way was Hitler the tool of big business.?

Communism and socialism are more honest about what they claim to be: they admit that no one has a private life any longer, and that all goods, services, and human beings are the property of the state. One may argue, as I do, that this is evil, but it is also honest.
Fascism and national socialims, however, is both dishonest and evil. The fascists claim that there is such a thing as private property, with all the responsibilities of ownership, and the facade of ownership ? yet, the state controls the ?owner?s? every decision on penalty of fine or imprisonment (or both).

Corporatism is actually business, unions, special interest brought into unity with the state. Much of the world is that way today to varying degrees.

Hitler was no tool of big business:

Hitler was named "Man of the Year" in 1938 by Time Magazine. They noted Hitler's anti-capitalistic economic policies:
"Most cruel joke of all, however, has been played by Hitler & Co. on those German capitalists and small businessmen who once backed National Socialism as a means of saving Germany's bourgeois economic structure from radicalism. The Nazi credo that the individual belongs to the state also applies to business. Some businesses have been confiscated outright, on other what amounts to a capital tax has been levied. Profits have been strictly controlled. Some idea of the increasing Governmental control and interference in business could be deduced from the fact that 80% of all building and 50% of all industrial orders in Germany originated last year with the Government. Hard-pressed for food- stuffs as well as funds, the Nazi regime has taken over large estates and in many instances collectivized agriculture, a procedure fundamentally similar to Russian Communism."
(Source: Time Magazine; Jaunuary 2, 1939.)


State capitalism, state socialism, planned economy etc. all diverge in the non essentials from the classic ideal of socialism.

Devil King, the reason the western media demonize Chavez is not that his 'socialist' policies have failed, it is becoz they are a roaring success. He has raised living standards, distributed wealth more fairly, the economy has expanded steadily over 5 years, & he has won three elections. The mass media that hate him so are owned by the same turkeys who own the banks & energy corps. The latter would dearly love to seize back Veza's oil industry. Tough titties, Wall Street parasites! You will have a harder fight than when you murdered similarly successful Chilean democracy. Of course, there is always Wall Street's final solution to outbreaks of democracy in its South American colonies - send in the marines - the nazi solution of tanks in the streets, secret torture & execution centers. The cause of Vezan democracy is the same as US democracy. The aristocratic mafiosi of Wall Street want to turn the clock back to the serfdom that existed before the American Revolution. Behind the Wall Street oligarchs are the same Brit aristocracy who sent in the redcoats & Hessians - & poor American schmucks are cheering them! Thank God, not all Americans! OGT

obert, "It seems my presence is not needed". Maybe; in Lenin's words, "Even the worst of us can serve - as a horrible example". OGT

I agree, preferable to arguing with those who refute their own arguments with their own examples. It seems my presence is not needed :)

I'd like your source for the idea that Mussolini & Lenin were 'on good terms'. Benito M came to power in 1925 (?). Lenin died in 1924. Benito was on very good terms with fellow-fascist, general Franco of Spain. Like Adolf Hitler, he sent troops & armaments to overthrow the democratic Spanish government. Britain & the USA blocked arms sales to the legitimate Spanish government. Franco sent a letter of thanks to nice, liberal pres Roosevelt. Perhaps around one million Spanish people died. If you don't learn the lessons of history, you much more likely to suffer the same tragedies. That's what Homeland Security & Patriot Act are for. OGT

Socialism is by definition the ownership & control of everything by the majority (the people). Corporatism is the merging together of the leading,largest corporations/banks & the state machine. Soc-corp are very different things, & the less you know about either, the more convinced you can be that they are the same. National socialism = fascism = corporatism. It was the diametric opposite of socialism & communism. The members of these leftist organizations were the first to be rounded up & put in concentration camps (Dachau, etc.), by Adolf Hitler in 1933, & by Mussolini in 1926. Hitler was a street corner cockroach who was nurtured & propelled to power, mainly by large lumps of money from the German subsidiaries of Wall Street multinational corps (ITT, Ford, GM, Du Pont, etc. - see Antony Sutton's books). Mussolini was once a socialist, altho mostly an unprincipled opportunist who sold out to Fiat et al, taking money to smash the unions with his street thugs. Like Hitler, he was the toast of UK & US conservatives/capitalists, until he began messing with their rackets. OGT

obert, how old are you? If over 21, I think you would be happier knitting. OGT

If you bothered to read anything you would notice that my argument is that CHina is developing because it has resolved its INTERNAL battles to some extent. In doing so, 45 million people died. Your assertion that development can happen without having to resolve internal conflicts and without suffering is totally invalid by the example you trumpet.

some say we'll see all the atrocities in the name of Monsanto , GE, GM, Halliburton and the likes. THe human experiment is a work in progress and atrocities in the name whatever ideology should b avoided, in that regard i agree with the pope human life is sacred you should not kill mao and stalin are history. china is a world power and we shall see what they do to consolidate their power/place in the world stage.

classicliberal, you've got some quarter-good points there, in your cat's cradle of opinion. I'd just say that historically, capitalism was a very sickly infant until it could take over the state machine, & wrap that around itself for protection, then suck greedily on the tit of State. In this sense, capitalism always was 'statist' (von Mises was an ignoramus). In the UK, true capitalism began in late 18C/early 19C; in the USA, the end of 19C. In the West today, pseudo-democratic governments are actually controlled by the international banks. Altho, the existence of formal democracy holds the plutocracy in check somewhat. Capitalism never quite managed to take over the Russian, Tsarist state. Indeed, it remained essentially feudal even under Stalin, despite all the show of red banners. Capitalism began from the rubble of this pseudo-communist regime in 1990, altho still heavily pock-marked with the lingering scars of absolutism & backwardness. Poor Russia! It always seems to get the worst of all possible worlds. OGT

Another puss-poor post. If you bothered to read anything properly before airing your conservative prejudices, you would see that China was cited as proof of the effectiveness of large-scale, planned investment. Logic: all ideas for a better future are 'utopian' until realized at some future point. What you mean is that you believe my ideas are not practical, which is a feat for you, since I have not specified my masterplan. ESP? OGT

studentnick, a very interesting post; thanks. I can't add anything to your figures, I just don't know; but, it seems clear Mao's eccentric & cruel decisions helped kill millions, as was the case with Stalin. And when the Red Army turned its guns on the people in Tiananmen Square, that was the end of any attempt to paint Mao's imperial regime as 'communist'. It never was, & no peasant-based economy can be. So why does the well-funded, anti-communist propaganda bandwagon of the Cold War still trundle on? Turn a few newspaper pages, & you will find amazed reports of China's booming capitalist economy. It booms, becoz the state apparatus enforces low wages & high profits. Do the old war horses of western anti-communism snort on to hide this embarrassing confusion - whether China is a capitalist or communist system? IMHO, the labels communist & capitalist are misleading, since they are based on ownership of things/resources. Far more important is who CONTROLS - a minority, or a democratic majority. Eg., it is to a degree irrelevant to argue that most Chinese people are better off thanks to the Red or capitalist 'revolutions'. Becoz slavery is still slavery, even with chromium-plated chains. OGT

Since the Opium wars in 1840s (Qing dynasty) the Chinese nation was invaded and divided by various western powers and Japan, people suffered enormously such that the population came to a standstill through late Qing dynasty and the entire nationalist period until 1949 (the year the com-munist took power) due to wars, famine, lack of basic medicines, etc., imagine 80% of the population were illiterate, the average Chinese life span was 35 years old. Before 1949 in Chinese families the women commonly gave birth to 6, 7, 8 or even more children due to high mortality, in those years to the vast poor families losing a child was like losing a pet. After 1949 the mortality went done dramatically due to social stability, newly established medical system even though it was basic, education and much improved productivity. In 1949 the Chinese population was 540 millions, it reached 600 millions by 1953, 694 millions by 1964, and 1 billion by 1982, and Chinese life span reached 60 years old. By 1970s the government started encouraging young couples to delay the age of giving birth to thier first child in purpose to slow down population growth. How fair do you think calling Mao a great murderer?

If Frank Dikötter's claimed 45 millions death is true, then that's to say 1 person died among every 13 Chinese people (45 million divided by the entire population 600 millions) during the Great Leap Forward years, that is to say on average every family with relatives would have 1 or 2 or evenmore person(s) died in those years, this is absolutely untrue. One way for you to find out the truth is to ask Chinese people in person if he/she has a family member including relatives died in those years. Throughout my school years till now I haven't met anyone including all my classmates saying they lost a family member due to Great Leap Forward, only my mom told me she heard there were people died in a rural area but not too many. Yes, many people suffered starvation including my grandparent family in those two years (not four years as claimed by the author because the first two years had very good harvest which led to some aggressive policies in some provinces) and the birth rate was lower and death rate was higher than other years, however, it was not nearly close to the sensational figures and stories told here. There are serious scholars disputing claims like this. Those who are familiar with Chinese history know that to a great degree Chinese history is an agricultural history, great famine always come with large scale peasant rebelling, it doesn't matter who is in power. But there wasn't such rebelling in Great Leap Forward.

The great Leap Forward was a collective decision made by the CCP not Mao alone, of course he was one of the key figures, however, he was also the few who first detected and corrected the problems. He has never instructed or had policies to torture people. The Great Leap Forward is a complicated story with a historical background that the western readers hardly know, those who are interested can read Henry C. K Liu's article MAO AND LINCOLN, Part 1 and Part 2, published on Asia Times.

Please do a youtube search for oikos747 to see how many Chinese people waiting in a mile long line to pay respect to Mao in Mao's memorial hall in Beijing each day, young and old, often a family, even 34 years after he passed away, keep in mind no one ask them to do so, in fact the government discourages people to go there. Can we simply dismiss such phenomenon by saying the Chinese are brainwashed or superstitious? Why don't they have such high respect to Deng Xiaoping who supposedly gave Chinese a better life? Only if readers could understand the starvation, poverty and how many people died each year in China before 1949 and how Chinese people once again lost all their social securities that Mao gave them since China's economic reform. Chinese people well understood that Mao and his revolution generation brought independence to China, now China once again fell into an economic colony.

Frank Dikötter is a historian who never landed a tenure job in his academic life in Europe yet richly equipped with over $1.5 millions in grants from foundations from UK and Taiwan including The Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation (see Frank Dikötter's website). Chiang Ching-Kuo was the late president in Taiwan, the son of Chiang Kai-shek whose nationalist troops lost the civil war to the com-munists' led Mao and fled to Taiwan. Till this day their bitterness is unrelieved, demonizing Mao is not new. Frank Dikötter's earlier book "The History of Drugs in China" which tried to excuse the British colonial crimes committed in China by saying the Chinese addiction to Opium was not due to the British dumping enforced by arms. Sacning through his website, I already can say that I am afraid that Frank Dikötter is a historian with a political agenda.

Devil King,

If you recap the debate, I hope you can spot its direction, & where your contributions fall short. To whit:

1. Altho we cannot dismiss the psychological quirks of Mao & Stalin, both were driven towards mass extermination policies by the need for a crash course in industrialization - self-financed, since there were few or no outside sources of capital investment.

2. Altho extending over a longer period, Britain's industrialization was accomplished in a similar fashion in the 18 - 19C, resulting in mass suffering & deaths, & elimination of the UK peasantry.

3. This does not 'excuse' the evils of M & S, et al, but understanding it may help us avoid such catastrophes in future. Beating our moral, liberal, western chests over the 'crimes of communism', solely, does not help. Indeed, anti-leftist (conservative) people who do this have an inbuilt bias against helping to end world poverty in an effective & efficient way.

4. You failed to mention environmental entropy, I did. That is becoz it is connected to our ongoing economic & social crises. That is your failure, but which is understandable, since even our left & right ideologues & intellectuals are stuck in obsolete theoretical grooves. They should be pioneering new thinking. They aint.

5. Most Marxists & other leftists are actually conservatives, becoz the are tied to obsolete ideas over a century old. To be a radical, you must have an analysis that understands the present movements so thoroughly, that it can predict the future to some reliable degree. Where is that?

I seem to be an isolated, hairy prophet/nut crying in the wilderness. In trying to open people's minds to new, productive ideas, I am up against the kinds of retards & rednecks who seriously believe contemporary America is being undermined by 'communism'. Lordy, lordy! I sometimes think the human race is too dumb to be capable of self-salvation. So sorry if some of my frustration rubbed off on you, since you are not wholly, or identifiably, wrong, just (probably) 75% off key. OGT

I don't need to know about all of German or European history, nor do I need to be a Jew, to know that what occurred in the Nazi concentration camps could not be justified. Similarly, I don't need to know intimately about all of Chinese history, nor do I need to a Chinese (even though I consider myself one), to know that starving 80% of villagers intentionally because they can no longer produce (assuming such events did happen) could not be justified, under any context.

please delete this testing message.

ATHEISM=COMMUNISM=SOCIALISM!!!!!

I'm feeling vindicated. My editor questioned me when I wrote that "In China, Mao's turmoil and purges killed between 40 and 60 million people in the years from 1950 to 1972...making Mao the world's greatest mass murderer ever. Not even Adolf Hitler came close to Mao's death mania..." It's in "Freeing Tibet: 50 Years of Struggle, Resilience, and Hope," published in 2009, on page 134.

You seem to make a lot of presumptions about my origins.

you say, "what's your solution." I don't have easy ones. All I know is that the proposals that so many of you guys make just fail over and over again.

"I challenged you to give one example, just one, of any poor economy which has performed this miracle of economic levitation. You fail the challenge."

The entire Western world, UK, France, Germany, etc all developed economically because they resolved their own internal problems. They went through the enlightenment, decided collectively to stop killing each other with axes and began to value innovation, ideas and rationality.

Asia, despite a colonial history similar to Africa, has gone on to economically dwarf Africa. Was this without pain? No it wasn't. There is not a single example of economic growth that I know of in which there was growth without some degree of suffering. But, that said, suffering is relative: the reason there were so many available workers during the industrial revolution was that the alternative (no work) was worse. Singapore and Malawi had the same GPD per capita in 1950. Today Singapore has a GDP per capita of $37,293 and Malawi has one of $328.

What you are suggesting, without a shred of historical evidence at your fingertips, is that Southern Africa would be able to miraculously industrialise, resolve its internal conflicts, root out its corruption and build its workforce, if only the West would invest in its people. And you assert this despite the overwhelming evidence that the governments of these countries will not allow this to happen if it challenges their power base (it almost always does).

Take Zimbabwe during the "land reform". 6 million people needed food aid and USAID (among others) agreed to step in. In the end, the government would only allow distribution of that food to places that were known to be loyal to the party, with the result that there was terrible famine and starvation for millions (particularly in areas that voted against the party). Moreover, many politicians got fat on stealing food aid and reselling it for private gain. I could go on with more examples: solar projects being scrapped because government wanted huge bribes to allow foreigners to help their own people, HIV money being looted, toxic chemicals being dumped into rivers. The list goes on.

I don't know why you keep bringing up Stalin and Mao. They have nothing to do with anything I have suggested.

OGT,

For your information I used to be a textbook Marxist after my time in British Universities. When I returned to Southern Africa it took about two years for those ideas kicked to be kicked out of me. I realised that all my ideas were either total nonsense or, at best, half-truths. I realised that the only reason I had been leftwing was because I was wealthy, and I could afford to see the world in such a detached way. The moment I immersed myself in the reality of what was happening around me, I saw the world differently.

"Your ideas are right or mainstream if you do not see that the only viable cure for under-development & poverty is substantial infusions of capital from outside."

It is pointless to throw money at places if the governments who run the places don't care a damn. You have no idea how much money I have seen stolen from causes like HIV treatment so that politicians can go on shopping trips to Dubai. Your assumption seems to be that these governments love their people, and that, if they don't it's only because the West has put someone bad there. As though Africans are not capable of evil.

That people are starving, dying and burning is of no concern to these cleptocrats. It is very eurocentric to presume that they should have any interest in developing their nations. Africa has evolved with very low populations under extreme selection pressures from disease, uncertain rainfall and wild animals. In such situations people form very small and closed social structures in which kinship dominates. The tribe or village down your road is not your friend but your enemy. When times are hard they will raid you for cattle and grain, kill your men, and rape your women. These social structures still predominate, which is why corruption is not a sin, but a cultural and moral duty. All that has happened to Africa since the fall of colonialism is that it has reverted to its pre-existing structures. Colonialism was superficial, it brought technology but not a change in cultural mindset.

This idea that politicians "owe" their people a service is a naive Western assumption born out of our history of nationalism; it bears no reality to much of Southern Africa. You can give those countries as much as you like and it will not make the slightest bit of difference because governments there do not want their people empowered. THat is why they mostly still use repressive colonial legislation. THat is why they refuse to allow people to own their land (so that chiefs beholden to the ruling party allocate or deny land accordingly) and why they quite often sabotage education (after all, educated people quite often vote against barbaric governments and see through populist nonsense).

My observation is that Africans, like Europeans, will have to fight for democracy and go through the growing pains of developing a sense of nationality that is more than paper-thin. When Africans believe they owe their country something, and when politicians are expected to serve it (and are punished for not doing so), then we will see investment that stays in the country, people who run businesses rather than asset stripping them and people who pay taxes for the betterment of their neighbour. Until that moment happens, and it will be a long time in the future, all you will be doing by sending investment to Africa is fattening the GDP of Switzerland.

Like I said, I agree that there have been unhelpful policies by the IMF and WB, but believe those of us who live here when we say, there are a lot of other factors that are more important in explaining the observed lack of development.

Also, I can't believe how naive Europeans are about their own history. When the Romans pulled out in the 5th century, it was not until 1200 years later that there was again a sewage system. The British were given so much by the Romans and yet, after their departure, reverted to textbook barbarism for one thousand years. So many Europeans forget about the ideas and values on whcih the civilisation that they take for granted rests. When Africa has its enlightenment it will develop itself. It has the resources to do so and it can attract the talent to make use of them. That it does not is more to do with its internal than its external battles.

I think one thing we have to keep in mind is that though many of the Western nations operate under a "democracy" the reality is far from it. In the US, and many European countries, corruption has taken root. On the face of it, democracy represents the people's will. In reality, a small group of elite control all the most important decisions. The only representation of democracy is when the masses go and vote for the predetermined winner (the left/right paradigm is a joke, same motives for both parties).

Both communism and capitalism have failed because they have both been imposed on millions of people (by force) as statist solutions rather than as voluntary systems of order. If anyone wants to be a communist then that's fine, go VOLUNTARILY live on a commune with like minded people. If you want to VOLUNTARILY exchange goods and services in a competing marketplace, then you can go the capitalist route. But the key is that we stop FORCING what we want onto other people that don't want it. This is why government does not work (yes, even democracy). No small group of people can ever know what is best for each individual within the geographic area they supposedly control.

Oldgittom Where in my post did I blame communism for ?all the world?s ills?? I was simply making the point that its very sad that, after all the terror and genocide it caused, we still have people shouting its old jargons and blaming capitalism and the west for everything. Am I a ?cold war schmuck? and ?dumbo? for that? And I didn?t even bring the topic of global warming or the environment in my post, so this talk about ?they prefer collective death rather than the brain pain of coming up with a new ideas for survival? seems a little off my point, but if you want to pray on Al Gore?s church be my guest.

Pelago Its absolutely amazing that one can read this article and not challenge his class warfare mentality and still say that capitalism works for the ?rich? and socialism for the ?poor?. I mean, really, after the 45 million peasants slaughtered by Mao, the +7 million people starved to death in Ukraine, and the overall +100 million (all rubber barons, naturally) murdered by the ?real socialism?, after all the human misery and degradation it caused, you can STILL say that socialism is all about improving the life of the poor and less fortunate, amazing. You can still say with a straight face that someone has to be in the ?upper class? to be against Fidel, FARC, Chavez, Morales, Lula, and the sort. To repeat my previous post, its really sad for us in these countries, who know that Fidel, FARC, and Chavez are nothing but tyrants, to see liberal cooks (like Penn and Glover) come here, hug Chavez, and say that they just want a better life for the poor. (oh yeah, and then blame Bush for doing 1/100000000000 of what their heroes do)

That is what happens with any kind of political collectivism IE communism/socialism/fascism/national socialism. Starvation, oppression, and mass death. That is the what elitist, central planning, utopians ignore time and time again. Its all in the name of "the public good". Individual rights are "selfish" but their lust for power and control over the masses is not...

"Your challenge was to front up with egs. of self-levitation that lacked that kind of misery." What a pointless challenge. If you concede there is no path to development that is free of misery, what makes you so sure your utopian fantasy will deliver this? Despite, as I mention again, that almost all the intervention you suggest has historically produced the misery and suffering that you claim to be so against. Please provide the road map to how you will convince Jacob Zuma, Robert Mugabe, Obiang and the boys, to let the benevolent west in their to help their people vote against them...

I agree fully with you and FreeThinker

As mises said:
"The socialist movement takes great pains to circulate frequently new labels for its ideally constructed state. Each worn-out label is replaced by another which raises hopes of an ultimate solution of the insoluble basic problem of Socialism?until it becomes obvious that nothing has been changed but the name. The most recent slogan is "State Capitalism."[Fascism] It is not commonly realized that this covers nothing more than what used to be called Planned Economy and State Socialism, and that State Capitalism, Planned Economy, and State Socialism diverge only in non-essentials from the "classic" ideal of egalitarian Socialism.?

Corportism is "third way". Not pure free market, not pure socialism. Many call it "progressive" but it always ends the same way so actually there is really no "third way".

Corporatism is cooperation of business, unions, special interests organized and unified by government. Its keynesian economics.

Fascist Mussolini himself praised the New Deal as following his own corporate state, as quoted in a July 1933 article in the New York Times, "Your plan for coordination of industry follows precisely our lines of cooperation." Source

?Fascism is likewise opposed to trade-unionism as a class weapon. But when brought within the orbit of the State, Fascism recognises the real needs which gave rise to socialism and trade--unionism, giving them due weight in the guild or corporative system in which divergent interests are coordinated and harmonised in the unity of the State.? ?Mussolini (P.15)

Corporatism is everywhere today.

The American writer, John T. Flynn, in his penetrating examination of the "creeping revolution" in the U.S.A., The Road Ahead, states ". . . the line between Fascism and Fabian Socialism is very thin. Fabian Socialism is the dream. Fascism is Fabian Socialism plus the inevitable dictator." Keynesianism is corporatism.

Well then corporatism is exactly what we have now, we most certainly don't have free-market capitalism (capitalism that is actually free for everyone), our government is most certainly not limited, our individual rights are slowly being eroded, and the State works closely with big business to create new laws that give corporations more power. You're right True Freethinker, we're in a certain type of socialism, called corporatism.

Fascism is part of the leftist collectivist/socialist/axis. Mussolini was a leading socialist on good terms with Lenin who simply rejected orders from Moscow and struck out on his own while retaining 99% of his socialist principles.

Communism = International Socialism
Fascism/Nazism = National Socialism

Corporatism is a powerful State/ big business alliance which has more in common with socialism than with free-market capitalism, limited government, individual rights and traditional values.

Collapse? Most, in the world, has had to do with intervention, mercantilism, and horrible monetary policy. Statism of any stripe is the by far the worst part of the "golden past" of human history and still pushed and retried today. That is conservative. Sparta and Napoleon are actually some of the earlier fascists before "fascism" existed as a word but they were very much the early pioneers. Communism/Fascism is hardly "new" thought with Marx and others. It was just furthered much more intellectually at that period. People still wish to conserve that thought and process of societal organization today. I certainly know, 1913, the banking cartel finally got its monopoly by a progressive government in the US. Inflation, malinvestment and manipulation of the structure of production were just some of the the consequences in the US. BTW- Most of the world was still mercantilistic and feudalistic in that time, NOT economically liberal.

Pelago

First thing, how can you take from my post that Bush is ?my kind of man?? I was simply pointing out the ridiculous hypocrisy of the Penn/Glover crowd, that bash Bush for the patriot act and other government intrusions in our lives, and at the SAME time praise Chavez while he?s doing things a thousand times worse in Venezuela. Is the ridiculous asymmetry that I mentioned in my first post.
I do blame Bush for the government expansions, but I have to dislike Chavez even more, its called sense of proportions.

Second: ?Not you or others who are constantly quick to malign a country that was eternally hungry? Ok, I?m pretty sure I malign the man (Mao) in my post, not the people or the country. China is a beautiful country with a rich culture, and its incredibly sad that such a place is kept in chains by communists and tyrants.

Third: ?then Latin America would not have had badly-treated "peasant" or "indio" rebels here and there inciting equally long-suffering peasants to stand up for their right to a more decent life.?

I?m gonna have to repeat myself here, you need to check your premises. Fidel, Chavez, Farc, and Morales are NOT good hearted rebels who just want a better life for the poor. I mean, really, after all the blood, misery, and degradation communism caused you have to be pretty blind not to see that all these people want is POWER and CONTROL over their nations.

Yes, they ascend to total power using the class warfare rhetoric, claiming to be ?for the poor? and against the ?oligarchy?, but rhetoric is all that is. If history taught us anything is that these people PRAY on the poor and their bad conditions, USE them to achieve total power, and once in power make their lives even more miserable.
They end up leaving the frying pan (your so called ?oligarchy?) to jump right in the fire.

Best to concentrate on your driving, the roads of history can be dangerous when minds are roadblocked.

Dear pelago, As you know very well, the text I wrote was "(although Mussolini was gentle COMPARED to the others)", without the capitals. No reasonable person could disagree with that statement. Mussolini was far from being a gentle person, but was not a monster in the same league as Stalin, Mao, or Hitler. He refused Hitler's demand to transport Italian Jews to the gas chambers until the Germans invaded Italy and there was little he could do to prevent it. My main point was that Italian and German fascisms were socialist, and in that regard, I'm not sure if you're aware that Mussolini was working on a new constitution for post-war Italy when he was captured and executed. One of his senior advisors on this constitution was a Marxist who had been a mistress of Lenin. She too was killed by the partisans. Mussolini had also been a member of the Socialist International before he broke with communism, and he wrote many pieces for socialist journals. Anyone who disagrees that Hitler was a populist socialist has only to read Mein Kampf. It does your cause no good for you to take a few words out of their context because you may disagree with the main agrument. Arbroath Smokie

Justified, it is interesting to note the foreword in the book "The downfall of Lobengula" by a one Frederick Courtney Selous, in which Lobengula, the then Matabele king, was hunted down and killed in 1894. It is interesting to note how his views reflected the prevailing belief of that time: that virtue was with the coloniser, that the savage must be civilized, that it is for his own benefit. Such views required a faith and a belief system that rested not on observation and reason, but on emotion and blind subservience to groupthink. What is equally interesting, at least to me, is that - in our own time - the assumptions of the last century have been reversed. Now it is the coloniser who is evil and those colonised who are presumed to be noble and virtuous, unable to do evil. Both belief systems are characterised by supreme arrogance; the belief that the new set of ideas is overwhelmingly better than the last set, and without the need for observation or reason to back them up, as if belief in itself is self validating. It seems that you are reflecting the prevailing belief of your own time; the idea of the "noble savage" being brutally plucked from the Garden of Eden. The question at the tip of my tongue is this: One hundred years ago, would you have reflected the prevailing belief of that time with the same passion that you have done so in your own time? The population of Southern Africa is some 90 million plus. When colonists arrived it was in the region of about 5 million. The 20-fold increase observed during the last 100 years has only been possible because of the ideas and technology that colonialism brought: roads, dams, schools, hospitals, power stations, roads, telecommunications, farms and factories. Life expectancy for many people doubled once food security and the rule of law were imposed. I do not dispute that colonialism was violent, degrading and exploitative, and I think that is something worth discussing and criticizing. At the same time, I find emotional beliefs about colonialism founded not on observation and reason, but on an emotional reaction to a previous historical period, profoundly unhelpful.

Justified, it is interesting to note the foreword in the book "The downfall of Lobengula" by a one Frederick Courtney Selous, in which Lobengula, the then Matabele king, was hunted down and killed in 1894. It is interesting to note how his views reflected the prevailing belief of that time: that virtue was with the coloniser, that the savage must be civilized, that it is for his own benefit. Such views required a faith and a belief system that rested not on observation and reason, but on emotion and blind subservience to groupthink. What is equally interesting, at least to me, is that - in our own time - the assumptions of the last century have been reversed. Now it is the coloniser who is evil and those colonised who are presumed to be noble and virtuous, unable to do evil. Both belief systems are characterised by supreme arrogance; the belief that the new set of ideas is overwhelmingly better than the last set, and without the need for observation or reason to back them up, as if belief in itself is self validating. It seems that you are reflecting the prevailing belief of your own time; the idea of the "noble savage" being brutally plucked from the Garden of Eden. The question at the tip of my tongue is this: One hundred years ago, would you have reflected the prevailing belief of that time with the same passion that you have done so in your own time? The population of Southern Africa is some 90 million plus. When colonists arrived it was in the region of about 5 million. The 20-fold increase observed during the last 100 years has only been possible because of the ideas and technology that colonialism brought: roads, dams, schools, hospitals, power stations, roads, telecommunications, farms and factories. Life expectancy for many people doubled once food security and the rule of law were imposed. I do not dispute that colonialism was violent, degrading and exploitative, and I think that is something worth discussing and criticizing. At the same time, I find emotional beliefs about colonialism founded not on observation and reason, but on an emotional reaction to a previous historical period, profoundly unhelpful.

Justified, it is interesting to note the foreword in the book "The downfall of Lobengula" by a one Frederick Courtney Selous, in which Lobengula, the then Matabele king, was hunted down and killed in 1894. It is interesting to note how his views reflected the prevailing belief of that time: that virtue was with the coloniser, that the savage must be civilized, that it is for his own benefit. Such views required a faith and a belief system that rested not on observation and reason, but on emotion and blind subservience to groupthink. What is equally interesting, at least to me, is that - in our own time - the assumptions of the last century have been reversed. Now it is the coloniser who is evil and those colonised who are presumed to be noble and virtuous, unable to do evil. Both belief systems are characterised by supreme arrogance; the belief that the new set of ideas is overwhelmingly better than the last set, and without the need for observation or reason to back them up, as if belief in itself is self validating. It seems that you are reflecting the prevailing belief of your own time; the idea of the "noble savage" being brutally plucked from the Garden of Eden. The question at the tip of my tongue is this: One hundred years ago, would you have reflected the prevailing belief of that time with the same passion that you have done so in your own time? The population of Southern Africa is some 90 million plus. When colonists arrived it was in the region of about 5 million. The 20-fold increase observed during the last 100 years has only been possible because of the ideas and technology that colonialism brought: roads, dams, schools, hospitals, power stations, roads, telecommunications, farms and factories. Life expectancy for many people doubled once food security and the rule of law were imposed. I do not dispute that colonialism was violent, degrading and exploitative, and I think that is something worth discussing and criticizing. At the same time, I find emotional beliefs about colonialism founded, not on observation and reason, but on an emotional reaction to a previous historical period, profoundly unhelpful.

Justified, it is interesting to note the foreword in the book "The downfall of Lobengula" by a one Frederick Courtney Selous, in which Lobengula, the then Matabele king, was hunted down and killed in 1894. It is interesting to note how his views reflected the prevailing belief of that time: that virtue was with the coloniser, that the savage must be civilized, that it is for his own benefit. Such views required a faith and a belief system that rested not on observation and reason, but on emotion and blind subservience to groupthink. What is equally interesting, at least to me, is that - in our own time - the assumptions of the last century have been reversed. Now it is the coloniser who is evil and those colonised who are presumed to be noble and virtuous, unable to do evil. Both belief systems are characterised by supreme arrogance; the belief that the new set of ideas is overwhelmingly better than the last set, and without the need for observation or reason to back them up, as if belief in itself is self validating. It seems that you are reflecting the prevailing belief of your own time; the idea of the "noble savage" being brutally plucked from the Garden of Eden. The question at the tip of my tongue is this: One hundred years ago, would you have reflected the prevailing belief of that time with the same passion that you have done so in your own time? The population of Southern Africa is some 90 million plus. When colonists arrived it was in the region of about 5 million. The 20-fold increase observed during the last 100 years has only been possible because of the ideas and technology that colonialism brought: roads, dams, schools, hospitals, power stations, roads, telecommunications, farms and factories. Life expectancy for many people doubled once food security and the rule of law were imposed. I do not dispute that colonialism was violent, degrading and exploitative, and I think that is something worth discussing and criticizing. At the same time, I find emotional beliefs about colonialism founded not on observation and reason, but on an emotional reaction to a previous historical period, profoundly unhelpful.

Excellent point. And don't forget National Socialism.

It amazes me how people try to label Nazism and Fascism as "right wing". Mussolini was a leading Socialist well respected by figures such as Lenin. Fascism was founded by Mussolini after WWI as a development of Socialism which embraced a more nationalist philosophy and allowed big business to survive albeit in a forced marriage with an all powerful state.

Nazism (the National SOCIALIST German WORKERS PARTY) was really Socialism mixed with the radical Green movement and occult Neo-Paganism.

Communism = International Socialism
Fascism/Nazism = National Socialism So that's another 55 million deaths or so added to 100 million = 155 million people killed in the name of leftist utopian collectivist/socialist/communist movements.

Yet another left wing hero bites the dust. Why do they always end up being mass murderers like Stalin and Hitler.

Not "possibly" coming to America, communism has been running the US government since the early 1900s. All of Marx's 10 "planks" of establishing communism are in place here, including income tax, the federal reserve, enforced public education, blurring of borders, federal control over states, corporate monopolies, and so on.

Oldgittom. yours is a ridiculous argument. Mao doesn't suddenly become a saint because someone else killed more, or because mid C19th Britain was reprehensible in selling opium. It's like the post last week suggesting that 'only' 1 million were gassed at Auchwitz. Does that suddenly make it right? It's still mass murder. Yes, the League of Nations stood by while Japan took Manchuria in the 1930's but please tell me how that justifies Mao killing 45million of his own people 20 years, a whole generation later? Please do enlighten me because nowhere in the little red book - and yes I did once have a copy - did I find a little piece enthusing about how we must slaughter the peasants to avenge the failure of the British Foreign minister to intervene. And what do you seriously think the League could have done in the context of the time? It was not a military pact, the US refused to join and the attention of Europe was on the threat closer to home. Do you think the British fleet should have sailed round the world to attack Japan? Please be sensible.
Mao, like Stalin, was ruthless in his treatment of those he perceived as enemies, real or imagined. Mao, like Stalin before him, killed millions either deliberately or as a consequence of agricultural reforms forced through against the opposition of the peasants. They were both monsters but we are still waiting for the Chinese equivalent of Khrushchev who will stand up and denounce his tyranny or a Gorbachev who will call an end

If someone is intentionally starved to death it's called murder.

I would recommend reading the book "Mao" by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, who know whereof they speak. The vulnerablity of the Chinese people to a malignant narcissist can be understood. And the shame they experience, to this day, can also be understood. It really is true that a charismatic leader of desperate people can induce a collective psychosis. It happened in China. It happened in Germany. It happened in Japan. It can happen again.

So I just finished reading this article and decided to take a quick look at the comment board. I have to say that its really depressing to see people still clinging to the old communist ideas of blaming capitalism for all the world?s woes. Pictures and statues of the biggest mass-murderer in human history are still shown everywhere in ?modern? China, yet some people of this board think its more important to fill it with the same ideas he treasured. The asymmetry here is staggering, the amount of hatred, outrage, and time these people spend on any crime (real or imaginary) of capitalism contrasts pathetically with indifference, excuses, and lack of outrage shown for the very real crimes of the ?blame the west? crowd. As a Latin American, I have to sit helplessly watching the rampant march of communism in my continent, and worst yet, watch you liberal left-pots in the US/Europe blame the West, capitalism (and maybe Bush?) for the problems we have. Btw, im pretty sure my feeling is shared by africans living under islam and statism.

If Fascism is socialist how do you explain Franco? The fact of the matter is that collectivism wasn't at all incompatible with the right-wing from the 19th Century until the mid-20th Century, and the Second World War put paid to that. Modern right-wing ideology is conservatism, which seeks to conserve the political ideas that have proved to work. Perhaps ironically these are mostly classical liberal ideas. It has very little to do with Hitler and fascism. The thing is, Hitler hasn't been moved, the right has moved away from him. Also, I'm not entirely sure that modern left-wing ideology is particularly collectivist anymore either, at least not in the 20th Century sense anyway.

A Confucian classic!

You sound like an uptight, repressed individual, with young girls on your mind, but pointing your finger on others as the depraved ones. Thoughts can be very revealing.

Londondave, How did socialism cause the problems in developing couuntries? I was told that it was capitalist Europeans who went to Africa and stole human beings to use as beast of burden so they could make a profit for Queen and country. As you are from Liverpool, am sure you should know about the historic docks and shipowners of that period. Subsequently, the land was shared between the capitalist colonial masters who divided them with a ruler, not caring about ethnic or cultural background. Imagine a situation where there are 200 diff ethnic groups within a country and most of them have a shared culture and language with citizens of other countries e.g spanish,french and english in 1 country...english,italian german,dutch split in another country and u realize what kind of mess was left. Today, Africa is trying to move on but there are multinationals who will bribe anybody just to make a profit...capitalism is not a magic pill that cures people's problems but neither is socialism. My people just want European banks to help repartriate stolen wealth...if the bobbies arrest a thief, they also arrest the fence, so how come the banks who keep this stolen wealth are not sanctioned by their fellow capitalists?

Your insightfulness is astounding indeed. Theoretical rhetoric great for debate, hopeless at doing or finding a solution. Yes let them at it as long as it doesn't happen to me. And what makes you think that by spending time there will enlighten me to the big picture? This is not about "Me sir, I went there so I know all about it........." Far too polical for that to happen. I suppose it's easier to turn a blind eye and say it's not happening.

He did not say that. You are just putting words into his mouth. He said China was broke from Japan's looting and had to start from scratch. Presumably, Mao's Great Leap failed and contributed to some of the figures but I seriously doubt that much.

True, after Mao's days were over, some of his once-faithful followers, to be acceptable in the new order, suddenly found the need to write "all about it"- dirty linens and all. It's the same reflex the world over.

Obert, there is only so much human stupidity & beer a good ol? gal can take before becoming impolite. Like, your egs. of self-generated economic elevation ? ?The entire Western world, UK, France, Germany, etc all developed economically because they resolved their own internal problems.? You obviously have trouble keeping more than one idea in focus. I already said repeatedly that such examples entailed vast human suffering for an exploited, destroyed, rural underclass. Your challenge was to front up with egs. of self-levitation that lacked that kind of misery. We both deplored it, remember, as done by Mao & Stalin? You do remember the topic, don?t you? Of course you bloody don?t! So if you can?t keep to topic, & ignore what I put in my posts, that?s your right; but then it is pointless debating with you. I refuse to keep repeating, & going round in idiot circles, tho many native peoples love that kind of dancing. As a prophet of the future, my job is not to make friends, but to influence people. It?s a hard life. Most people don?t want to listen. They prefer their thousand & one fantasies. Prophets from the wilderness they jeer & stone in the marketplace. They pay lip-service to truth, but what they actually prefer is psychic massage parlors, where compliant slaves rub their ignorant prejudices up the right way ? redtops, Fox News anyone? I?m late for a stoning. I?m orf, leaving you to your cargo cult dreams in Ongo-Bongoland. OGT

Thank you for the enlightening. A Taiwanese couldn't have put it better.

One had no idea you and your friends liked those three "ISMS". Thanks for the outing!

Ku Klax Klan, but you're not racist, right?

I know the 'right' are rewriting history but they seem to struggle in rewriting the present. Astonishing to see that the 'Independent' is now a Socialist newspaper and that Che Guevara has morphed into a Marxist murderer of Bolivians. Some bloggers recommend I read dubious books by such as Jonah Goldberg and Jung Chan to buttress their opinions. Live in Africa as I did and see the current results of centuries of colonial rule - how many million Africans have died over the years? Read about the Spanish conquests in the Americas, are the victims numbers even quantifiable? The legacies of US imperialism still run nearly every country south of their border - at what human cost? I'd suggest a good dose of George Orwell may purge many of these political fantasies.... increasingly to me he assumes greater and greater significance - he describes what is around you right now and what is very likely in our future - and with no agenda in mind. An unappreciated soothsayer maybe but we undoubtedly all live in an Orwellian world.

Frank Dikötter also wrote a book called "Age of Openness" about how wonderful life was in China when it was under republican rule. He doesn't seem bothered by the regular famines (usually one a decade) with countless millions dead that were a staple of life in China for more then a century before the 40's, in fact he lowers the body count for the post-empire era to fit his narrative. See, mass murder created by primitive accumulation of capital and class society is "natural" under liberalism and only becomes a problem, and a cause for moral outrage, when it occurs as a result of primitive accumulation under illiberal Stalinist or Bolshevik regimes. That fact remains true today when tens of millions die every year from hunger and malnutrition despite the fact that theres more then enough food to go around. Its just "nature" doing its thing then not "genocide" by big bro.

Hitler was not left wing you imbecile. And Germany's 'right wing property owning citizens block' surely didnt have a problem with Nazi rule, as they prospered under it and leading members of their class funded and installed the Nazis into power. Karl Marx didnt write about "wip[ing] out" "inferior classes" or races. You have never read Karl Marx and probably anything else in your entire life besides some stupid blogs somewhere. The only reason why you even mention Stauffenberg is because they made that crappy movie about him recently and you think that mentioning him will demonstrate your extensive knowledge.

Mao thus puts himself alongside the likes of Winston Churchill and the Viceroys of India like Lytton and Elgin in terms of such genocide through artificial famines and starvation. See late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis and the new book Churchill's Secret War exposing racist Churchill's complicity in the Bengal Holocaust. Alfred Russell Wallace wrote that the true Legacy of the British Raj would be the unnecessary deaths of millions of Indians. In 1877 the Journal of Statistics showed that in 120 years of expanding British rule there were over 30 serious famines in British India compared to just 17 in the previous 2,000 years of Indian history due to British let-them-starve policies. In 1901 the Lancet estimated conservatively that 19 million died in Western India during the 1890s from drought and British policies. In 1876 when finally forced to act on famine, Lord Lytton's forced labour camps for famine victims killed 94% of inmates giving less nutrition than the Nazis gave inmates in Buchenwald Death Camp. In 1908 US journalist J.T. Sutherland wrote about how the British Rule kept 90% of Indians on the edge of starvation. In 1877 whilst 100,000 starved to death in the same week, the Brits held the biggest feast in human history, the Delhi Durbar to celebrate Vicky becoming Empress. About 7 million died in the Deccan and South India. It all started in 1770 with the great Bengal Famine created by British greed and parasitism (see Nick Robins' The Company that Changed the World - on the crimes of the East India Co) and ended with the 1942-3 Bengal Holocaust. As Buckminster-Fuller said, the Brits were the most successful pirates in world history!

Yes, Mussolini was so gentle, his own people pulled him and his girlfriend out of his car while trying to escape over the border, and hung both upside down.

Mao was not known for kindness or humanity - you knew him THAT well? Do tell us more!

Good heavens, can't you all stay on topic... This story is certainly true. I am personally acquainted with people who had to flee from these murderous communists. Power comes from the point of a rifle, said Mao. My advice is, you better have one of your own to point back.

Pelago....if you had any hair it couldn't stand on end....anyone who can read the above article and not worry that a demagogue who is responsible for the deaths of up to 70 million people...yes 70 million...can defend and write the kind of responses you have served up is a screw loose, off the menu and a very sad individual indeed.....what if the statistics are wrong and Mao killed 30 million or 20 million (70 million is the accepted figure) the fact is he was a tyrant. You're an idiot and for your information I worked in China for 4 years and Hong Kong for 7. I know the subject. Mao was a thoroughly despicable individual.

Yes and our great British Icon Tony Benn refused to condemn Mao. The history is there and the dirty old man Mao was interested in 2 things....fomenting discord to keep the party in power...and young girls....many young girls. Right Tony Benn...he certainly was a Titan.

If the 45 million is just from the 1958-1962 period, then Mao has many more millions of deaths to his credit, since the Cultural Revolution killed tens of millions more. Mao was a classic malignant narcissist, who killed anyone who opposed him. During the revolution, he frequently attacks his allies instead of the nationalists, because he wanted all the power when he won. Denying Mao's crimes is as silly and almost as craven as Holocaust denial. The only reason the whole word doesn't know all about this is because China is unwilling to admit its history, for fear it will tarnish the "legitimacy" of its current rulers. It is about time that more people became aware of the crimes committed in the name of (and with the assistance of) ideology, but actually in the furtherance of the personal ambition of this terribly evil man. Mao is of the same character as many modern butchers, such as Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein.

Pelago.......you demand the truth but it's facts you have a struggle with. Anti-China sentiment....oh I see...we must turn a blind eye to Chinese crimes in Tibet and against their own people...the human rights abuses....executions. How about T. Square in 1989...washed from the pages of Chinese history. There are over 1,000 missles pointed at Taiwan and the Chinese Govt. has passed a law that any moves toward total independence from China would be grounds for an all out attack and war........Pelago....get a life....better yet....join the library...they are free.

canadaeh, Your idea has no merit. Who voted to put Hitler into power? Not the Jews! Who stayed silent as the Jews were discriminated against with heavier and heavier government policy? Their German neighbors did, that's who. They were still under the spell of the promise of a thousand years of prosperity ahead of them in their renewed Deuchland to bother getting themselves into trouble by raising their voices against the inhuman treatment that was beginning to happen to their Jewish friends and neighbors. So Hitler was enabled in his overt acts of Hot Evil by the complacent pacifism of the German people. This made them guilty of Cold Evil. Whether Hitler was a Jew or not does not extripate the German people of that generation from the part they played. And the idea that Hilter could not kill people of his own blood? Please! Did you not just read what Mao did to millions of people of his own blood!

Which is why the Chinese keep finding leaky boats full of Americans being smuggled into their country. Oh, wait...

It?s very striking that as the evening progresses, both the level of intelligence and the standard of politeness in this debate drop sharply. I really don?t know what to make of some recent posts. Either they are written by people in Britain late in the evening and nastily drunk; or they are written by people in the States coming on as the time-zones shift round to their afternoon. If it is the latter, it is especially dismaying, because this is not the voice of the America I know and love. I made many American friends, and not among your east-coast intellectual types, either. Most were USAF boys over here in the days when Suffolk was little America. They were great people, all of them. And none of them would ever have come out with this sort of aggressive unpleasant twaddle. What is happening to America?

All you people defending Mao and/or Stalin either overtly, or covertly by attacking capitalism, are disgusting hypocritical left-fascists. Especially those of you writing from China, from Chinese government networks. If you think we don't know that progressive = socialist/communist, just wait...

To all those cool celebs who like to wear those Moa T-shirts...

I think everyone in America understands this is EXACTLY what Obama has planned before the North American Caliphate is established.

Care to define that? I remember reading that the Nazi's admired FDR. Some "right-winger."

"Left" and "Right" are both (in their extreme forms) about defining "us" and "them". It is essentially about the heart of out evolved propensity to form groups in the face of perceived threats to our status or resources. The "right" form their group on the basis of perceived ethnicity (ie being "arian" in the case of Germany) and the left make this grouping on the basis of class. They are essentially collectivist belief systems that differ only on their fine print of defining the outside "threat". Both ideological frameworks are indifferent to dictators and believe in an all-powerful state. The greatest opposition to this status quo comes from libertarians, who for reasons unknown to me are considered as "centre-right", and who believe in individual freedoms and a mistrust of concentrated power.

Hitler himself called his idea "national socialism" and, indeed, its collectivist, top-down nature was very similar to a communist state. It is very convenient that Hitler has been labelled rightwing, becuase, had he defined the "other" in terms of class rather than ethnicity, he would almost certainly have been remembered as leftwing. The left, believing that they are too moral, too intelligent and to virtuous to commit genocide, believe that all genocide, by this binary logic, must be the work of their own perceived "other", the "right".

It means that the Germans wanted control of their socialism rather than the communists from the Soviet Union. *Yes, the Nazis sent the trade union leaders to labor camps ... and so did the Soviets. The reason is simple, in their view, independent labor unions were no longer necessary in a "worker's paradise". *The Nazis opposed the communists because the communists were controlled from Moscow and they believed by Jews. *The Nazis promised "confiscation without compensation"... later it was "if only soically necessary". *Nazis believed in free health care and guaranteed jobs. They confiscated inherited wealth and spent vast sums on public education. They purged the church from public policy, promoted a new form of pagan spirituality, and inserted the authority of the state into every nook and cranny of daily life. *They believed communism was controlled by Jews ... thus they're hatred for it. *A Nazi slogan was, "Common wealth before private wealth!" The revision of Hitler and Mussolini was done by the left during and after WWII.

Nationalism is SO left wing. It means what it says. Complete fusion between the state and the means of production. The state in WW2 Germany allowed the leaders of enterprise to stay if they did what they were told, the way they were told to, and by the way make money in the process. You sir are ignorant. It was socialism all the way.

Nazi=National Socialist. Socialist is left wing.

The left has been faking history for decades. Look at the myth that Hitler was right wing. And since you bring up Che... Fact is that Che was a commander of a prison on Cuba. He enjoyed his executions. That's a proven fact. Look it up. The left also likes to paint him as a doctor, yet there is no evidence that he ever got his MD. Where is the right rewriting history? History has been under fire from the left and from certain radicals for decades. Historians today don't look for facts anymore. They judge over what happened 100 years ago. The Spanish conquests? They were when? Hmm? Hundreds of years ago. The numbers aren't even remotely similar.The Spanish didn't kill dozens of millions. Most of the "reports" that radical American Indian "activists" spew are based on BS. They pull those out of their asses so that they can move on with their own racist agenda. Some even claim that "evil whitey" used germ warfare against the poor innocent "first people", for which no factual evidence even exists. And "first people"? Wrong. They're the second people, at best. US imperialism? Now what would that be, other than the typical anti-American rhethoric? No, I really wonder. What about Soviet imperialism? Oh that was fine, right? Africa under colonial rule... right... Colonies were so bad, yes, classic white guilt mantra. Let's see. Africa today. Let's take Zimbabwe. The former breadbasket of Africa. Hmmm... it's a hellhole now. All those countries are hellholes. In South Africa white farmers are driven off the land and the land is then split up and handed over to black people who know nothing about farming. The farms die. The land goes to hell. Same has been done in Zimbabwe and now their food production is insignificant. But of course, it's all "evil whitey" who is at fault, right? You're a racist.

Prove it. They named their party themselves. National SOCIALIST. Case closed despite your blather, because words mean things.

I say again, the name of Hitler's party was the National Socialist party. Hitler was not a conservative in any sense of the word. He did not want to conserve anything. He wanted to make radical changes in Germany.

Hitler was a socialist as well. According to a speech by Goebbels in December 1933 the NSDAP was the new German left wing, and there was nothing they hated more than a right wing property owning citizens' block. In early 1945 Hitler lamented in a Gauleiter conference, that, while the Nazis had managed to destroy the "class warriors" (the communists, Hitler's direct competition), they had failed to destroy the German right wing. Hitler called that their biggest sin. The German right wing, that was people like Stauffenberg. Hitler was a left winger. Clearly. His socialism was somewhat different though. It was national, based on race rather than class. But he had strong class warfare elements too. All of this goes back to what Karl Marx himself wrote once: inferior classes and races must be wiped out.

Not where capitalism is allowed to flourish we don't. It is not a zero sum game sir. Ignorance.

So capitalism is at fault for, let's say, Burma not advancing because there's a crazy dictator there who oppresses the people? Are you drunk? 600 million own everything there is? Yeah, you're drunk with the typical anti-capitalistic nonsense, the classic communist idiocy, the old white guilt mantra, the worn out "the West is at fault" blabla. Show me some actual evidence not propaganda. But oh wait, you don't have any. Got anything to say about China's one child policy, which is not working (the population continues to increase), and which has butchered more than 15 million girls, simply because they were girls (aborted or left to die), since it was introduced?

and you are the authority on Chinese history? How do you know how many died building the great wall and the how many died during the cultural revolution? Heresay or books written by people who thought of a number. I am sure there wasn't a census taken for a head count afterwards. So AK, offload your sh*t somewhere else and open your mind to see the bigger picture.

You should go talk to the people who lived in China under communism and stop your fantasy. It had nothing to do with "sharing" or "equality" -- it's all about getting and using absolute power. The benefits accrued only to the top cadres. In spite of the appearance of economic boom, that's still pretty much the case today.

Before the Great Leap Forward, there were more than eighty people in my maternal grandfather's production team, but after the Great Leap Forward, less than thirty people remained alive. My maternal grandfather lived at Hewan Prodution Team, Huanshan Production Brigade, Sigudun Commune, Shangcheng County, Henan Province(Present-day Hewan Villagers' Group, Hutai Village, Jingangtai Township, Sahngcheng County, Henan Province). Gu Zhun also kept a record about mass starvation in Shangcheng during the Great Leap Forward Years in his diaries. When I was a little child, I often heard about mass starvation during the Geat Leap Forward Years. The old people told me a few even cooked their dead babies' bodies and ate . Gu Zhun also mentioned such cases in his diary kept in Shangcheng County. My uncle also mentioned one such case in his unpublished memoir. One of my mother relative did cook her dead baby's body and ate it. My maternal grandfather's family survived only because my eldest aunt went many miles away every day to the mountains to dig wild plants and brought them home.

So bringing "equality" to the masses worked by butchering them. That's true. In the end they were all equally dead. Great concept. Not. Communism doesn't work. History has proven it. You can't make all people equal because people are not equal. We are equal in front of the law (or should be), we are equal when we start with our lives. But once that is running, we are NOT equal. Some people are smarter than others. That's a fact. Some people have a gift for math while others have one for music and other for technology. Some don't have any gifts at all. This equality crap violates human nature, no, I say it violates what we humans are. We are not equal.

What a dishonest apologia for genocide. Mao killed these people like Stalin killed the Kulaks: because they were opposed to him and inconvenient. It was political violence, mass murder, not "mismanagement." China has survived despite Mao and the Chinese Communist Party, a gang of thugs to match any of history's great mafias. As for there being "no right way or wrong way to go about things," that's pure sociopathy. I'm sure Mao or Pol Pot would hire you in an instant as a mouthpiece.

Good thinking. The current Chinese regime murders prisoners to steal their internal organs for transplant and has tortured to death tens of thousands of Falun Gong members because their meditative practices "threaten" the Communist Party. From the frying pan into the fire...

Did you read the article? It seems that you didn't because, if you had, you might not have been so fulsome in your regard for recent Chinese history, at least.

Which no doubt your 'dear leader' BHO adopted and continues as we speak. If it was so bad and so horribly wrong what are YOU sir doing to stop BHO who is doing it NOW! Don't wanna hear who started it. Want to hear what your highly specific sensitivities are doing RIGHT NOW to stop him Hmmm?

Don't you mean Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Che, Pol Pot, Kim Jong Il, Hirohito, Tojo? Blair and Bush haven't oppressed anyone. They haven't sent millions to death camps.

It's worth bearing in mind that many liberals argue in favour of decriminalising the trade in hard drugs today. Also, that this trade, along with that of less contentious commodities, was permitted under international law. Maybe the Imperial Chinese authorities were right to try to ban it, and they certainly had a longer, closer acquaintance with the drug than Westerners, but as we've seen in the century and more since, that policy has very mixed results.

Let's ponder this, refusing to "countenance condoms" is now equivalent to a dictatorial decree, enforced by a multi-million man army that included such atrocities as ?stealing a potato, even by a child, would include being tied up and thrown into a pond; parents were forced to bury their children alive or were doused in excrement and urine, others were set alight, or had a nose or ear cut off.? With reasoning like this, you can just discard all the heavy lifting of discerning relevant facts and instead equate everything with the any other thing, so long as your worldview remains nice and cozy.

The problem with the condom argument above is that only works if the promotion of condom use has little effect on behavior. If promotion of condoms increases promiscuous sex, then condom promotion could actually increase the spread of AIDS. It is an empirical question. Some researchers, such as Edward Green of Harvard University, have concluded that the Pope is right and that the condom-promotion programs are not decreasing AIDs but increasing it. (This type of argument, by the way, is basic in economics--whenever you change costs or benefits, you change behavior because people respond to incentives.)

Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot are examples of psychopaths reaching the very top. Sadly there are plenty more in the world today eager to take their place. Just think what would have happened if these monsters had had access to nuclear weapons.

In fact, to Chinese, Mao is much worse than Stalin and Hitler because he only kills Chinese.

Please read my reply to "hoinarylup", six posts down, where the almost identical nature of Communist and Fascist regimes is presented.

There's quite a push to rebrand Hitler as a leftist these days. The fact is that he embraced policies from both the radical left and the radical right of the time while at the same time attacking both. The hypocritical and contradictory nature of National Socialism as an ideology was probably a large factor in its increasing reliance on race mythology and Aryan supremacy as its audience, and power base, grew.

And are you telling me all those "respected" historians of leftist academia DON'T try to make history fit their narrative? LOL "Liberal Fascism" analyses a lot of facts. Lots of pedestrian primary sources. But like any other work of history it arranges them in a pattern to, yes, promote a narrative. None of the facts here are in dispute. But it's history that is now considered unsavory. People don't want to remember that their liberal heroes of the 30s admired Mussolini or promoted eugenics.

The political differences between Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini should be considered a family, or schismatic, dispute, rather like the difference between the Anglican and Catholic branches of the Christian church, or the Sunni-Shia rift in Islam. All were totalitarian, all were militaristic, all were viciously opposed to the freedom of the individual and considered the individual to be entirely at the disposal of the state, all provided huge economic subsidies to their populations, all crushed every disenting voice. Stalin had his extermination camps, just as Hitler did. All ruled through extensive secret police apparatus. All took complete control of their economies, although they used different methods to achieve this. All took personal control of the military. All took control of education and used it to brainwash the young. All rigorously controlled the press. All waged war on other countries. I could go on but the question is not finding how they were similar, but finding any ways in which these ideologies and regimes differed, and it seems to me they differred only on the criteria they used to classify their enemies and then destroy them. In the case of Lennin and Stalin, they used class as the basis for extermination. In the case of Hitler, race was his criterion. For Mussolini, although he never engaged in genocidal killing, his political rationale was patriotism, and that is why love of country and culture has become excoriated among the modern left who are desperate to proclaim that Fascism wasn't a branch of socialism. In all other respects, these psychopathic regimes were pretty much identical. If you want to explore this further, I urge you to read "Liberal Fascism" by Jonah Goldberg, published by Penguin in 2009.

While it is good to see a socialist newspaper in this country actually print an article that tells the truth about communism, will we ever get an apology for the eulogising of monsters like Mao we saw in the 1960s-70s? Another marxist murderer, Ernesto Che Geuvara, who slaughtered Bolivian peasants who didn't care much for socialism, is still considered a sublime figure among socialists, particularly those in the BBC who never pass up an opportunity to tell us what a nice person he was, a hero who suffered for the common man! When we add all the innocents who were massacred by Marxist socialists during the 20th century, and then add in all those slaughtered by the Fascist socialists such as Hitler and Mussolini (although Mussolini was gentle compared to the others) the figure must approach 120 millions! For what????? This is the question every socialist should be compelled to answer.

True Freethinker, yeah, sure; the mass burning of heretics & witches; the utter failure of the Pope to condemn the mindless slaughter of WWI; the Nazi-Vatican pact that freed Catholic soldiers to go forth & kill Russians in the name of Christ (Prince of Peace, if you remember?). Sure, them's the kind of non-totalitarian values we should emulate. OGT

National Socialism was devised as a right-wing, not left-wing, ideology in 19th Century France.

Where as the US is under a different type of leftist influence (from your earlier post Freethinker), that of corporatism. The way our capitalist system has been manipulated for the past decade (well ever since 1913 but that's a different discussion) no thinking person would attribute that to the free market. The same people who make the laws are the ones who benefit exclusively from them. I agree that we shouldn't be praising socialism. We should also be ripping the way the West does things, through corporate control.

Isn't Socialism wonderful? I wonder how long it will take the apologists to come out and defend this murderer, and well known paedophile, and laud his great "achievements"?

Communism never HAD the characteristics of religion and its not a deeply held belief, it was embedded and brainwashed in from birth covering absolutely every aspect of life. Its always a deep belly laugh to talk with western Commie fans about how great they think Communism (the flag of hardcore socialism) is.... they've no idea what it means and what it does within families.

I wonder what Mao apologists like Ken Livinstone would make of this? I know! this mass murder was justified because it ended the practice of female 'foot binding'...crazy!

and just remember, mao was on the far-left. these slimeballs and their hypocritical bullsh#t about social justice. such nonsense.

The whole ghastly history of Mao Tze Tung's life is brilliantly told in "Mao: The Unknown Story" by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. It is no surprise that this book didn't receive the acclaim it was due, but that will be corrected with the passage of time, and as the Chinese people start to discuss their recent history. Anyone interested in China must read this book! How many people are aware that in addition to being a sadistic psychopathic killer, Mao was also a paedophile who liked nothing more than having sex with groups of schoolgirls in his many palaces? The details contained in this book are truly staggering, and sickening.

Desperate to change the subject, huh? One more cruel mass-murdering totalitarian communist icon is exposed....... oh look! There's a Jew!

Yeah, and why not butcher millions of little girls simply because they are girls? Why not invade souvereign nations and oppress them for decades? Why not kill every dissenter? China's "incredible history" is another point. China has lost pretty much every war against foreign powers, from the Mongols to the Japanese. China was so backwards in the early 1900s that every Western power (and even Japan) wanted a piece of her.

"Historically, building the Great Wall cost more lives." I hope you can prove that, because from my lessons in Chinese history that is a load of crap.

My point is that the difference between right and left is arbitrary. They are both collectivist and succumb to the same evils. When people complain of the "right", what they mean is that there is collectivism based on ethnicity and when they complain of the "left" they refer to collectivism on the basis of class war ideology. In this context, I find the whole notion of "right" versus "left" entirely redundant.

"Left" and "Right" are both (in their extreme forms) about defining "us" and "them". It is essentially about the heart of out evolved propensity to form groups in the face of perceived threats to our status or resources. The "right" form their group on the basis of perceived ethnicity (ie being "arian" in the case of Germany) and the left make this grouping on the basis of class. They are essentially collectivist belief systems that differ only on their fine print of defining the outside "threat". Both ideological frameworks are indifferent to dictators and believe in an all-powerful state. The greatest opposition to this status quo comes from libertarians, who for reasons unknown to me are considered as "centre-right", and who believe in individual freedoms and a mistrust of concentrated power.

Hitler himself called his idea "national socialism" and, indeed, its collectivist, top-down nature was very similar to a communist state. It is very convenient that Hitler has been labelled rightwing, becuase, had he defined the "other" in terms of class rather than ethnicity, he would almost certainly have been remembered as leftwing.

Presuming your question about what is happening to the U.S. is not rhetorical, the notion that the US military is a representative sample of the citizenry is only superficially valid. They may mirror the ethnicities and religions of the general population, but they also see the principles that define us as worthy of personal sacrifice. I suspect that a lot of the vicious rot you see on the internet is perpetrated by undisciplined adolescents trying to break things for the hell of it. It's a pity they can't all be snatched up and sent to boot camp.

OGT

For a start I do not identify or have allegiance to being "rightwing". This is a name given to devalue ideas. ie those which are "right" are deemed to be "immoral" and therefore in themselves without merit.

I do not ignore historical wrongs committed by anyone. Living in the third world and seeing poverty on a daily basis, I do see a need for genuine programs to uplift the poor. What enrages me is that so much of the left stick doggedly to their beliefs on how best to achieve this, despite all evidence that they are wrong.

I have not argued that Africa, for example, is none of your concern. What I am simply trying to point out is that holding yourselves accountable for things which are not your fault serves no purpose whatsoever. When I criticise Africa I do so on the points that it needs criticism, and likewise for the West. The lefties should not be trying to convince Africans that their salvation lies in the benevolence of outside factors, but in their own efforts to purge their self made demons.

The West, I believe, has an important role to play in not banking the money that African elites steal. And it has an important role in making trade fairer. However, to take this to an extreme and argue that the West is the most significant or only force holding Africa back just doesn't stand up to scrutiny, which is why those of us who actually live in these countries become pretty flustered with the champagne drinking intellectuals who think they understand everything on the strength of a couple of books by John Pilger.

And talking of "others" it appears to me that it is you who sees those who disagree with you as "the other" (there is another post in which you call everyone who disagrees with you a "psychopath", for example). Personally, I find the assumption that only you and your belief system could possibly be moral and intelligent enough to help people improve their lives, rather narcissistic.

The Russian population increased in the 1920s & 1930s because most people were still (secretly) Christian and had something worth living (and reproducing) for. The Russian population has dropped in recent years because of the delayed affects of 70 years of enforced Atheist Fundamentalist indoctrination which gave the Russian people (and their neighbours) no reason to live or reproduce for, except the "glory of the state". The rot had set in long before perestroika. In fact it was probably the main reason for glasnost, perestroika and ultimate collapse. Now that more and more Russians are returning to the Russian Orthodox Church, things are beginning to stabilise.

Because if $150 million was diverted by corrupt leaders who killed off their citizens, we must give them MORE!

OGT, "If we truly wish to end world poverty, we of the lovely, liberal West have the abundant riches & technology to do it." This is demonstrably untrue. This was tried and failed. during Live Aid, Bob Geldof raised 150 million dollars for Ethiopia. Did this stop poverty there? On the contrary. The government used the food imports to feed its army while it simultaneously engaged in a scorched earth policy to starve the peasantry. To add insult to injury the aid aeroplanes were often used to bring arms in with shipments. In many cases, the food was sold on the blackmarket to further fund the regime. Some critics argue that this aid, rather than alleviate poverty, helped to entrench and prolong it. This is an example of how throwing money at the problem fails. I have seen the same thing happen elsewhere, where wet-behind-the-ears Westerners think they will "save" Africa and have a crucial lack of humility in accepting what they can and cannot change.

JUSTIFIED -- name says it all. A sanctimonious, supercilious leftoid creep. Leftists always find reason to JUSTIFY their evil ideology, and the death of millions.

You're the fascist neo-Colonialist with the God complex, pal. You come here and tell us it's OUR job to eradicate "famine" in some corrupt 3rd world craphole. A problem caused by socialism.

We've poured BILLIONS into these failed states. Our tax money pays for luxury yachts, villas in the south of France, swiss bank accounts, And you want to pour more into this rat hole. Well NOT ME.he

I am telling you EXACTLY why there is "famine" in Africa. It's called socialism, neo-comms, Marxists and every assorted corrupt crazy left wing thievery one can imagine.

CAPITALISM is the most efficient, most humane and most fair way of creating the goods and services people want, need and desire.

That then creates jobs. Real jobs. Not statist cronyism.

I repeat you're the fascist statist in this equation. You arrogant douche. And I'll tell you something else. "MY" people were not so-called "siphoning" off anything. "MY" people were living in a Liverpool friggin' hovel during colonial times, working for crap, and with a life expectancy of 50. My grandparents didn't even have an inside toilet till 1975. The bog being in the back yard So don't try that guilt crap on me. I bet you had a really really nice middle-class existence by the sound of your guilt trip.

Don't worry, Mao, "it's the thought that counts", isn't it?

so what you're saying is that it's OK to murder millions of your own countrymen because what? You have nothing left to give them because other nations stole your stuff. Your argument makes ABSOLUTELY no sense.

Sounds like the worst holocaust in history.

"China's poulation at the time was around 400 million, not its present day 1.3 billion. Therefore the %ge murdered was far higher." Take off say 100 million for the aged and infants, which leaves 300 million say man and woman of equal amount which makes 150 million couples reproducing 1 each (some more). Can the population jump from 400 to 1300 million in 50-60 years with an average generation of 20 years? Very incredulous figures indeed.

We're almost there. God help us.

Read carefully.. TEN PLANKS OF THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO 1. Abolition of property in land and the application of all rents of land to public purposes. 2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. 3. Abolition of ail right of inheritance. 4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. 5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly. 6. Centralization of the means of communications and transport in the hands of the State. 7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State, the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan. 8. Equal liability of all to labor Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. 9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution of population over the country. 10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc., etc.

The frothies on the far-right in America want to brand everyone who slightly disagrees with them with some "evil" tag or other - ideally as many "evil" tags as possible. Hence Obama, to them, is simultaneously a Nazi, a Muslim and a Communist. The facts are unimportant; the narrative is everything. If you shout something - anything - loud enough and often enough, stupid people like anglosaxon start to believe it and chime in.

With respect, if you consider Hitler to be a "left-wing hero", you must have some rather odd ideas.

Also, pre-revolutionary China and Russia were both brutally repressive cultures where the lives of most of their people were regarded as valueless. This doesn't excuse Mao or Stalin, but it does provide a context. We often forget that neither of these countries were particularly new to massacres and enforced famines before the violence of the communist years- and that both of these monsters came out of that culture.

It will be interesting to see whether other scholars corroborate Herr Dikötters claims as primary sources become available to them also. His mathematics are highly questionable however if he is including famine victims as murder victims. It would also be interesting to know who he received his $1.5 million in grant money from, which is not disclosed on his website. Anyone whose favorite book is Road to Serfdom has a very large axe to grind.

Sizakaya,

Had China the hard currency to purchase grain and food during the famine, they would have, and millions would have been saved. And as these people were dying, what did the world do? What did Japan do? What did the U.S. do?

These people died of starvation. They were not ?murdered? like innocent Chinese at Nanjing. There was no gambling if a pregnant Chinese woman was carrying a boy or a girl, and then cutting her open on the spot to find out. There were no contests to see how many heads could be cut off in a given time span. There were no biological units going around making people sick and doing live vivisections or using poisons on the masses. There were no live burials. There were no mass rapes. Fathers were not forced to rape their daughters.

These people died of starvation.

The Japs murdered 35 million Chinese. It's rare to find a Chinese that does not hate the Japs today. Had Mao murdered as many as the west claims, I think the reaction of hate to Mao would be similar.

Mao is still revered by the peasant class. Taxi drivers dangle his photo from the rear view mirror. People in the country put flowers in front of Mao's portrait; a common thing to a Chinese home in the country. Mao got rid of the landlords, or the 1% that owned 99% of the wealth. He fought for science. He fought for the little guy. He gave women equal rights.

Mao was demonized by the West because they didn't want to give back the stolen booty.

I must admit most of my fellow Americans don't have a clue about Asia. Christmas, they don't have a clue about most things. They also are broke, busted and almost totally disgusted. 43 million are on food stamps, and using the 1986 formula for unemployment, 25% are out of work.

The Americans have been brain washed by the COINTEL mass media/press.

The CIA which ended up with a large proportion of the war booty, established slush funds with the gold, silver, and gems to fix elections and murder communist/socialist politicians in Asia. They demonized Mao to protect their slush funds. It is a lot easier to rationalize not giving something that does not belong to you back when it belongs to the devil.

But yeah, you are right. Americans are very dumb, blind, and for the most part broke. Their stupidity is the reason why the oligarchs are getting rich off of illegal wars, fixed elections, a sock puppet Congress and a kangaroo Supreme Court...

The way the oligarchs who own the military, industrial, prison, drug running complex feel is "it's not their fault the general public is so stupid." No matter how serious the crime, and even if they are caught, these thugs never pay.

Yes, the Americans are pretty stupid and because they do nothing their ranks are growing and can be counted as the poor, the have not?s, or as the oligarchs say the ?worthless eaters.?

What is it about Americans that their grasp of Asian history reads like some bad wartime comic book/conspiracy script exuding transparent racism?

They really believe all their propaganda and have such a simplistic "good guy-bad guy" view of history.

Add in either Japan or anything labeled socialist or communist and their brains just overload.

Well let's look at it this way. The Japanese stole everything. The standing Japanese soldiers? orders were to "Steal all, burn all, and kill all." The looting of China was at the hands of the Emperor's family. And they did a good job stealing five thousand years of Chinese tradition of saving money. The estimate of what the Japanese stole from the Chinese is anywhere from $70 trillion to $100 trillion. Naturally, when MacArthur came to Japan to sign the unconditional surrender his orders were to arrest, prosecute and hang Hirohito for war crimes. When you see the video of him signing the surrender, you will notice a Japanese dignitary in a tuxedo, long tails holding a black book. After the surrender this gentleman spoke with MacArthur and showed him the book pleading this could be his if he didn't hang his beloved Emperor. Well, MacArthur looked at the inventory of gold, silver, gems, art, and various bits of other priceless booty and struck a deal. A few months later, an inventory of the Japanese Emperor's assets was calculated at $30,000 and in essence the Emperor was broke and a victim of the shogun warlords. The Emperor was a mere puppet without any power and was made to play along for fear of his life. It was complete bullsheit. Back to China: Mao inherited a nation broken up because of war. The treasury was looted by the Japs and Nationalists. He had no friends. He had no source of capital. He was forced to make friends with the Russians that also had no capital. Mao had to start from scratch, and alone. I think it would have been a different story when it comes to the millions that starved to death had the U.S. been the Christian nation they profess and returned the stolen booty. These numbers of dead Chinese bantered about come from very unreliable sources. Unlike the Red Cross population figures for Jews in Europe before and after WWII, there are no reliable sources. I spoke to a victim of Mao's Cultural Revolution and this gentleman had no love for Mao. And when asked about this murder of sixty million Chinese, he claimed it was rubbish. Most the dead came during the famine of 1959-1961, and he claimed it was around ten million. The point is no one is sure how many died during the famine. But I will tell you this, had China the resources available to them that were stolen by the Japs and Americans there wouldn't have been such a holocaust. You can hang the murder of millions on the greed of MacArthur and his band of high brow political criminals.

You obviously didn't read Mao's physician's book, and if you DID, you are a moron of the highest order.

Most of Latin American countries were for past decades on end in the hands of oligarchic governments, who during their entire years of ruling their countries in the capitalistic system, with close ties and collaboration with the U.S., did not do very much for the greater part of their people living on little earnings to support themselves and their families. It's no surprise, that some countries in Latin America today, due to newly elected leaders, are going in another direction not at all to the liking of the upper class members of society, who, one may add, still can afford the standard of living they have always been used to. As a close observer who spends much time there, I do not see the country's elite having to sell their villas, or haciendas in order to survive. Their children still go to the best schools available, or are sent abroad to the U.S. and Europe for studies. I think one has to put the perspective in a more objective focus.

Listen_Music2: Nobody is overlooking what happened in China under Mao Zedong. What I find frivolous is the way you, and others here, jump on whatever amateurish version of just anyone who claims to have combed the archives about that period, and then make high-flying remarks as if the bible truth. There are many truths, and before writing a book and triumphantly tooting one's horn about it based on that, but apparently not investigating the reasons why the revolution took place, is being misleading writeups on China. After centuries of being under the yoke of some depraved monarch, and corrupt feudal warlords, the Chinese people were abused, forced to labour as quasi-slaves all throughout their history, and that, long before Mao Zedong. Only when one has thoroughly gone through all this history of that country - or any country for that matter - can one objectively write about it , and not just cherry-pick the parts that dwell on tragic events under its more recent leaders. A remarkable man, who became the first elected President of the Republic of China was Sun Yat Sen, who was also the father-in-law of Nationalist leader Chiang-Kai-Shek. Sun Yat Sen (you can visit his museum in Beijing), with a coalition with other political parties in China, including the Communist Party, overthrew the last Manchu dynasty, to form a republic successfully, only to suffer a setback with the feudal lords ruling the different Chinese regions. One can also add that even today, the ruling Communist Party continues to have difficulties with corrupt officials (today's warlords) in provinces, who are responsible for confiscating land from farmers for private gains, even resorting to murder through hired gangs. During Mao's Long March, which approximately covered the distance between Berlin and South Africa, he was fighting a war with the Nationalists under the leadership of General Chiang-Kai-Shek, while the Japanese forces were already occupying China, so war was going on, on two fronts. Mao won the war, as is known, and General Chiang-Kai-Shek and his wife, along with his imperious wife who reportedly treated the U.S. Airforce staff like her domestic servants, were flown out by the U.S. Airforce to Taiwan - taking with them the Imperial Treasures some of which can be seen in the National Museum, in Taipeh. China's people had all throughout their turbulent, but glorious history, endured deep poverty, and inhuman abuses by its rulers and overlords, to suffer even more under colonial occupation by western powers, who in turn, did not care about the people's conditions, but rather, to get whatever they could get their hands on. A small example would be the smuggling of silk worms out of China to the West. So unless you happen to be an expert on China as a Sinologist, and speak Mandarin thoroughly, which is the official language, and ideally have lived in that country for years on end during which you have met with people from the Communist Party, down to the most humble peasant, can you, or Mr. Dikoetter, claim to be "experts" on events that took place there.

so you're saying then, that it's OK to murder millions of your own country men because what? You have nothing left to give them... your argument makes absolutely no sense.

I wonder if Mao's slogan was change! I mean, he did bring change for some people. Not too sure about the hope part though.

Robhardy The facts are in the county and village level archives of the Communist Party. Just as they were there and used by another writer , Jasper Becker, to back up the figure of (he estimated) 35 million deaths during the GLF. These are not in dispute. What makes matters even worse is that Mao knew of the immense number of deaths and starvation but continued to provide grain to the Soviet Union which , in turn, assisted China in developing atomic weapons. this was a deliberate policy of starving his own people, not an accidental byproduct of some noble cause. Read Becker's book and you will be appalled at the widespread cannibalism which led, as another poster has said, to people actually eating their babies. It also was unsafe to bury the dead until they had started to decompose-otherwise they would likely be dug up to provide food. The GLF was the greatest single deliberatel murderous campain ever unleashed in the history of the world. As for another poster trying to be smart and comparing this to Britain's industrialisation. China's poulation at the time was around 400 million, not its present day 1.3 billion. Therefore the %ge murdered was far higher.

Great!! And all in the name of communism. Possibly coming soon to America as it heads towards commumism with the democrats.

One thing that people tend to forget is that in 1958 Mao was seeking The Bomb from Russia. He made a deal with the Russians to provide them grain in return for atomic weapons. And that is the reason why Mao and his henchmen confiscated all the food and drove the Chinese people into starvation.

Crazy? Not if you were a woman during those foot-binding days.

Fairer to leave the "paedophile sex" predilections of Mao out of the picture, when more and more "respected" members of society in every country these days, like . . . . judges, doctors, teachers, politicians, lawyers, Indian chiefs (did I forget anyone else?, sorry for that), are being outed on a daily basis.

Mao & his maniacal social engineering were certainly great destroyers of human beings. But has anyone done any calcs on the number of Chinese victims of foreign imperialism? Britain forced opium & factory exports on China at gunpoint. How many victims? Opium addiction, social & economic collapse, civil wars, famines, epidemics - how many? In 1938, the Jap military slaughtered about 250 thousand in Nankin alone. Not 'our' fault? Rubbish; the mainly Conservative governments of the UK beavered tirelessly to neutralize the League of Nations, while weak & powerless China begged for international help. B - - - - - - s. OGT

Where did you get your statistics on Mao, while spending four years in China . . . by hanging around pubs and doing your overtime work there?

Power comes from the point of a rifle, said Mao No he did not say that< what he said was All political power comes from a barrel of a gun. That seems very close to the truth , if not the truth

True Freethinker, Russians have been dying out since 1990 becoz of economic & social collapse. State support in healthcare, subsidized food, nursery care, pensions & housing have withered or vanished. Meantime, a brutal form of benighted capitalism (or kleptocism), controlled by ex-communist mafya barons, has pushed up living costs greatly. Result, many of the old & weak simply died. Young people do not have children becoz it is prohibitively expensive. The unemployed, young & old, take to alcohol abuse to escape their daily miseries. In this area, drugs, AIDS, tuberculosis & venereal diseases take a horrible toll. Russia is dying, & I have no information that religion offers anything other than its traditional consolations (pie in the sky when you die), or that the situation is improving. I doubt you know, but one of the reasons Pope Pius XII allied with Adolf Hitler in WWII was the ancient enmity between the Catholic & Russian Orthodox churches. Had Adolf conquered Russia, the deal was a mass conversion to Catholicism. The earliest Holy Roman Emperors were Germans. Memories & favors go back a long way in the Vatican. Pope Pius was well aware that the WWII nazi regime in catholic Croatia was massacring Serbs, Moslems, Jews, & gipsies. Altho some of the death camps were run or manned by Catholic clergy, & unbelievably terrible things were done there, the pious pope did nothing, said nothing. When a figure of such prominence & potential authority is in utter dereliction of his religious duties, he is obviously not part of a cure, but part of the disease. Maybe the present (German) pope can make the world a better place, but I've read too much bloody history to hold out much hope. OGT

No, if 'we' want to end world poverty, we must use directed & planned investment of sufficient volume & velocity. OGT

Obert, $150 million is peanuts. Charity handouts like this will have no profound effect. I'm beginning to doubt you have a clue about what serious investment is. To work, it must be large enuf, & directed into strategic areas of desired development over several years. Eg., for most poor countries, general & technical education must precede building factories of any advanced kind. But education w/out suitable employment is a waste of resources. OGT

I give up Davey, please don't throw any more names at me; I can't bear it any more what with my middle class upbringing guilt trip whatever. Your posts are killing me with hilarity and I really can't keep with your name calling. Set yourself free from hypocracy; it really doesn't matter if you belong to the KKK or such. Just be honest with yourself. It's sunday lunchtime, go and mow your lawn, watch the footie and down a couple at your local. Have a pie, that will make things better. And wish you a good day. A lot of Africans won't. Oops, leftie comment again...........

Justified, no point in responding to Nazi trolls. Leave them to make love to their general Pinochet pin-ups. A large part of their self-hatred stems from the realization that their ideology is filth, & can only attract fellow psychopaths.

London, name says it all.

Your insight to the world's problems is overwhelmingly egocentric and you are too much self absorbed with your own fascist ideology to see what's beyond your own little boundaries.

For years, the west has in one way or another exploited Africa (and the Orient) right from the slave trade to modern day manipulation of lucrative contracts with corrupt heads of state/officials for mining rights. Not pinpointing to any particular country at hand, but most of the European nations were there directly or indirectly, hiding behind commonwealth stature siphoning riches back to the homeland.

You are right, it's neither your job or obligation to eradicate famine in Africa, because you weren't there when the famine came and it's not happening in your backyard and most of all, it doesn't affect you.

My comments were calling at the self appointed righteous commentators that you cannot be hypocritical in detracting at the judgment of one man who caused a famine and then not help countries when famine is rife and at a time when countries are in a position to help.

I seriously hope you don't change one bit. If there were more like you then humanity is in for dire doom.

Another strawman non sequitur, your speciality. Do you think it is possible that one can condemn North Korea and that Islamist hate fest a.k.a. Suadi Arabia? Yes? So what exactly is the childish point of thinking you are slamming a comment against NK by mentioning that medieval Sharia law ruled nutbag country of Saudi Arabia.

Londondave, ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Fuehrer, but with Chas 'n Dave, two cockney lads accompanying on pianos. Knees up Eva Braun? OGT

G.W. Bush's grandpa was also carrying on business, supplying Nazi Germany during WWII, so the Krauts were not that "unloved" after all in America. Money? Non olet, as my old friend, Emperor Vespasian once famously remarked.

As promised, I read up more on our theme. After World War II, it was apparent that war-ravaged Nationalist China would need help getting back on its feet. Major General Claire Chennault and Whiting Willauer, decided to form an airline to support the Chinese Nationalist military under Chiang Kai-Shek during the civil war with the Communists, and haul relief supplies to those in need. Chennault was known for commanding the American Volunteer Group, or the famous "Flying Tigers", which provided air support to the Republic of China during their war against Imperial Japan, before the American entry into WWII. Chennault went on to command the 14th U.S. Army Air Force in China, after the U.S. entered the war. The China National Relief and Rehabilitation Air Transport, was established on October 25, 1946. It served as the air transport arm of Chiang Kai-Shek's forces between 1946 - 1949, and ferried troops all over China. The American pilots were taken from the 14th U.S. Army-Airforce and civilians from the U.S. under contract. They also flew supplies and ammunitions to aid the Nationalists. When the Nationalists (Kuomintang) were defeated in December 10, 1949 by the Chinese People's Army under Mao Zedong, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek and his son Chiang Ching-kuo, were evacuated on the same day on the aircraft "May-ling". Soong Mei-ling (Madame Chiang) followed her husband apparently on another plane. I will follow your contention that it's doubtful that she was imperious with the crew during the flight, although this was written in a newspaper article, if I remember rightly, the New York Times years before, but like you, I'll just ignore that. She was a strong personality, and highly intelligent. Her Methodist father who was also a successful businessman, sent her and her two older sisters, one of whom was married to Sun Yat Sen, to the U.S. for studies. Madame Chiang also acted as her husband's translator as he didn't speak English, and General Chennault, with whom they had to do with all throughout the war, because of supplies aid flown in from the U.S. over the Burma Road, didn't speak Chinese. She was very outspoken, and did not hesitate to take both the U.S. and Britain to task, when she felt compelled to. But that would take too long to quote her, by now, famous remarks. As for Chennault's China National Relief & Rehabilitation Air Transport, the CIA bought it in 1950, changing its name to CAT, which was used later in the other wars in Asia for dropping supplies, for instance, to the French forces in Vietnam, who were cornered by the Vietminh, later called Viet Cong, in Dien Bien Phu, in northeastern Vietnam.

Doesn't suprise me the least bit. However there were a majority of voters out there who still supported him after the invasion. And I bet there are lots who have changed sides now because it became unfashionably vile to be associated with this despicable man.

Obert, please read 'Confessions of an Economic Hit Man' by John Perkins, then you will probably conclude that your experiences in Africa were local, limited, & perceived thru ideologically limited spectacles. So-called 'aid' is often no more than a bribe to gain western looters access to Third World assets. Come back when you know WTF you are talking about. OGT

Famines and natural disasters kill people did you know that Mr. Dikotter? It's unfair to blame Mr. Mao for knowingly and willfully causing the death of these unfortunate millions. If a famine comes, not even the Pharoah of Egypt can save his people, not even Moises for that matter. Famines are acts of God, don't give Mr. Mao the credit. You owe Mr. Mao an apology for slandering his reputation. It's easy to commit libel especially when the libeled person is not around to defend himself. Chairman Mao is a great Chinese leader responsible for China's great rise to power. Without Chairman Mao, China will not have today. He is loved and respected by millions of Chinese. He is not a sly, cowardly assasin of dead heroes.

Who cares? If the people of China even today still find respect for the Old Man and give him credit for the positive things he did do, that's all that counts for them. As the French would say to you: Allez, hop, paf!

Listen_music2 6 hours ago in reply to pelago Pelago.....you are an apologist.....and a very sad little man. __________________________________________________________ An 'Apologist'???? I Don't think religious beliefs have a place on this post! G. Peasemould.

The great thing is that China is almost certain to be the next global superpower in the next 20 or so years. It's about time we had a different superpower than the US and it's so called western allies. The Chinese have an incredible history, culture and work ethic that's so different to ours. We could all do with a little shake-up.

Was there an Irish Mao who might have caused the tragic "Potato Famine" in Ireland?

If there were mass butcherings as you say, they would have uncovered mass graves.

I am not advocating communism, how can I when I live in a capitalist society. What I am saying is that communism works in certain given circumstances like China post WW2. Have you been to China recently? Officially communist, in reality it's a capitalist -though not fully fleadged- society. Lives have improved yes and there's a growing middle class. The country's economy is booming and soon the wealth of the country will filter down to the poor to improve their lives. Now if you disagree to that being bad, then it says a lot about you as a person.

Equality is trying to make the world a less selfish and fairer place. It doesn't violate humanity; in fact even animals share, so I guess that really says a lot about your take on humanity.

Yes, and after the wretched breakdown of the financial sectors in the U.S., and its predictable repurcussions worldwide . . . companies, banks, savings, more lay-offs due to more breakdowns, all gone up in smoke, and everyone still singing the praises of capitalism. Now we are informed, in the Motherland of Capitalism, every 7th American is as poor as a church mouse...that's 43 per cent of the population. This is the question every capitalist should be compelled to answer.

Better read ALL history books, earlier ones, too, on China and not only Dikotter's. It's always interesting and necessary to read up on different versions, because what one historian writes about a subject, or a person, may be quite different from what others have to say. Even on the same biography of anybody, opinions differ, and one or the other historian may put emphasis on a different aspect about the person being writtten about. It's always a temptation for an historian not to be partisan, when his or her predisposition leans towards the opposite of what the "subject" - whether person or historical event - was all about.

Obert,

most political content can be sorted as right, left, mainstream, or radical. I?m sure we are both unique individuals whose fine-tuned notions are insulted by such crude labels. But it?s just shorthand that cuts a lot of guff.

Your ideas are right or mainstream if you do not see that the only viable cure for under-development & poverty is substantial infusions of capital from outside. That?s all, since the alternatives are either Mao/Stalin frightfulness, or zilch.

The magic of economic self-levitation does not exist. The ?Chinese miracle? was wrought with massive foreign investment. Stalin?s industrialization was fueled by Wall Street loans & US technology. His slave workers were fed on grain stolen from starving peasants.

Certainly plenty of problems generated from within Africa, like Zimbabwe ? from bread-basket to basket case. But no internal cure. This is not lefty prejudice. It?s what all the experience shows. If you can quote one example of a self-generated industrialization, w/out exploitive horror, I will eat my words.

We likely both share impatience with the left?s knee-jerk crudities, & intellectual laziness. Yet it is a typically right-wing fault to pontificate about the evils of communism w/out understanding the economic imperatives that pushed Mao & Stalin; & quite typical to take a dig at John Pilger, my journo hero from Vietnam days.

I?m old, & I?ve seen many caravans of IMF, WTO, & banking worthies trek to Africa, & spout about development. Rather, they go there to screw it better, not save it. Dodgy characters like Tiny Rowlands fed bribe money to corrupt pols there for decades. Much ?aid? money is thinly disguised bribery. If bribery does not work, the West uses extreme violence, as in the Congo, Nigeria, or Ghana. The Rockefellers keep what they have that way - the same in South America. Read Perkins? book more carefully for details of the sophisticated way it is done.

I use ?psychopaths? in a specific way, not as abuse of ?everyone?. If you think I have mis-used the word, please give the quote, to prove you do not misquote me. And of course I think I am right. Would you expect me to promote ideas I thought were wrong? A radical always has to shout louder, becoz the status quo is conserved by inertia, & a conservative can serve with modest silence. OGT

Devil King, I get depressed hearing dumbos still blaming all the world's ills on 'communism'. These schmucks' brains closed down in the Cold War. As world civilization sinks into environmental decay, they seem incapable of facing the fact that both communism & capitalism have failed, big-time. It seems they prefer collective death rather than the brain pain of coming up with a new ideas for survival. If you prefer eating yesterday's cold dog's vomit before all the lights go out, bon appetit. OGT

lambofthegreen, as you can read, I blamed the Tory rats of the governments between WWI & WWII for failing to help China, not the Nankin atrocity. They destroyed the League of Nations, & pretty much undermined or betrayed every ally the UK needed later in WWII. By all means expose the ghastly crimes of Mao, but let us not forget the criminals in the West who made him possible. Like, the USA backed Chiang Kai-shek. In WWII, he & his wife toured the US collecting funds for China aid. 'Cash My Check' & his wife put the huge funds into their personal kitty. OGT

The Communist Manifesto looks super to me, but then so does the American Declaration of Independence & Constitution. Trouble with all of them is, they are old, clapped out, & don't work. America is sinking slowly towards oblivion. But if significant numbers believe it is becoz it is going communist, you can understand why. If a people is so sunk in ignorance & stupidity it is incapable of distinguishing shit from sugar, what can one expect? OGT

"It is not the responsibility of the West to bail Africa out of its subsistence agriculture" You don't understand things like drought and cycle of poverty. Did you miss that geography lesson at school? I am sure that when they decide to make something to be self supportive and independent, then it's people like you who will worry about your redundancy.

There is famine across many of Africa's countries as we dabte. What is the west doing constructively to eradicate this once and for all? There was famine in East Africa in the 1980's when Europe had mountains of surplus grain, what was done then? Anything to reduce Africa's burgeoning debt crisis, or just keep them there so they will always be in poverty.

It says quite a bit about the typical readership of the Inde that the Nanking massacre is blamed on the Tories; and this gets a high approval rating.

Maybe Mao's holocaust could happen here with you people to stand up to it.

You might also like to look into the Taiping Rebellion to put the period you're writing about into context. The British Empire was, in the end, the greatest civilising influence in world history; nothing in this world is perfect.

Let's see. If Mao orders farmers to melt down their hoes to make modern plows, and all that really gets accomplished is that the hoes are destroyed, and the new plows are worthless, any ensuing famine is simply the result of "bad luck", in the words of Robert Heinlein.

Funny you should mention that. I have in fact read it. Apart from the fact that it is poorly written, it is also largely implausible and lacks a sense of proportion. I do not dispute that there are unhelpful Western influences (the likes of which Perkins describes). What I dispute is the weighting that so many people give to them. These naive people talk as though, were it not for the West, Africa would have developed of its own accord. Homosapiens have been in Africa in their modern anatomical form for 200 000 years. Colonialism has happened for 200 years. If it is responsible for the last 200 years of Africa's non-development, what is responsible for the remaining 198 000 years? And for that matter, should we also conclude that Britain in 55BC was about to build aquaducts, colosseums and Roman Roads before the Romans invaded them and prevented them from doing so? My point is that there are internal and external factors that go into development, and too many people look only at external.

Yes, I do. Those of us who actually live in African countries do understand the problems facing them. Why do you think droughts are so devastating in Africa? Funny, the commercial farmers in Zimbabwe were still exporting food during the entire 4 year drought between 1986 - 1990.

Farming is about managing inputs and outputs. Inputs require money from banks. If you don't have banks you can't get inputs. If you have banks but no land title (as is the case with most subsistence agricultural nations) then you can't buy inputs either.

Outputs are about logistics: getting food to the market. A little difficult when you are on a 3 acre plot with no access to lorries, aeroplanes or roads.

That governments in Africa purposefully maintain this status quo is not something Western lefties have any interest in challenging. Most believe, presumably, that we should all be "farming" like this, despite the fact that such such practices are known to cause terrible soil erosion, unprecedented deforestation and minimal food production at inflated costs.

The cycle of poverty is one that would be broken if people had access to land title, access to loans, access to infrastructure and access to education. That governments do not provide these services has nothing to do with the West. It has to do with local power dynamics.

Africa has received 1 trillion dollars of Aid with nothing to show for it. Most of it has been shipped out of Africa by the leaders rather than invested in infrastructure, education and health.

Fair trade, admittedly, is something that could be improved. However, to argue that subsistence farmers would, in a fair trade environment, be able to export surplus that they do not (and cannot) generate, is simply breathtakingly naive. Indeed, the FAO last year published a paper saying that African farmers are net consumers of food.

Instead of regurgitating prevailing political beliefs as though they are both original and inciteful, how about spending some time in a third world country and observing the reality on the ground.

It is not the responsibility of the West to bail Africa out of its subsistence agriculture. It is for Africans to decide that they will produce something rather than nothing. It's called being independent and sovereign.

Good grief.

Famines and natural disasters are known to have killed thousands, even millions of people in one sweep did you know that Mr. Dikkotter? Not even the Pharoah of Egypt, nor Moises for that matter, can stop acts of God. If God decides to do something, nothing can stop him from doing it, not even a mere mortal like Mr. Mao. So please don't give him all the credit, especially when he is not around to either confirm or deny your charges. It's easy to slander a dead person because he's not there to defend himself. Mr. Mao is a great Chinese leader. He is well loved and respected by many, including westerners. Mr. Mao is one of the fouders of modern China. The is a saying in Chinese, "without Chairman Mao, the Chinese people will not have today".

I never mentioned the 1 child policy; I just took it as 1 per couple in my analogy with perhaps more. It was you who made the assumption; you really should read it again, SLOWLY. The World Bank and other China related sites put the population at well over 600 million at 1960, time of the GLF. Where did you draw those figures again? What you thought them up did you. You, like the last Labour government show a total disregard for the truth and massage the reality to suit your own ends. Shame on you.

You are kidding, right? Where do you get this garbage. Oh, right... some tinpot Marxist know-nothing college lecturer who could not organize a screw up in a brothel. It's our "job" to "eradicate" famine in Africa? Get outta here. No it isn't. African "poverty" has NOTHING to do with the "west" -- except in the sense of the corrupt Fabian socialism the institutional leftists brainwashed a whole generation of "leaders" into throughout the 20th Century. Wherever the benighted socialist "ideology" goes, so goes the country into poverty, penury, death and destruction. Zimbabwe: from bread basket to basket case in 30 years thanks to socialism. Leftist never met a crazy murdering commie dictator they didn't wet-dream over. Mao -- case proved. Che Guevera - case proved. Stalin -- case proved.

Hey, well you can't make an omlet without murdering 100 million or so. What's the big deal? Just keep wearing that Che T-Shirt leftists. It's nice to know who the haters are.

Oh wow. The Douche Bagger really goes of the deep end. If you don't want to be called names, don't do it yourself. Douche. That's right, anyone who doesn't agree with you is a member of the KKK. It's all so simple. I met your type at college all the time. Leftist totalitarians who wrap themselves in a rag of "tolerance"; when in fact, they cannot stand anyone even expressing a point of view that differs from their neo-commie garbage. That's why we can all see you're the National Socialist in this equation. What is about leftists that they cannot argue a point. Defend your neo-colonialism, why doncha? Defend your "intervening" in Africa to impose your solution. why doncha. Nah, you think you "feel" therefore you're right. Pathetic.

Mao's biggest mistake was to forego the ideals of communism and to instead imagine himself as a kind of reincarnated emperor. Not that communism didn't encourage him to take this step, being a move from a more humane socialism to a systems imperative top down rule through brutal force and decree. Like Stalin. Mao certainly did this in an even more disgusting way than Stalin did. But World War II is a disgusting war on all sides, with no one able to take the torch of righteousness (except perhaps all the innocent victims which if you include Stalin, Hilter and Mao as well as Churchill and Roosevelt seem to number more like in the range of a hundred million if not more. What was the point of this great sacrifice of life? Not much it seems. Political ends only or feeble ideas about economic policy in the framework of competing nation states who all seemed to thirst for a great leader, but then couldn't get rid of this leader until many calamities had arrived (or the leader just died of old age or medical complications from a debauched life as in Mao's case or whatever). The Chinese are rather pathetic I admit. They have been so slow to dethrone Mao as the figure of a great leader They now are thinking of replacing the image of Mao on their hundred Renbi bills with of all people Confucius. A communist state playing with the image of Confucius. But how appropriate in ways because Confucius always accepted the power of the state as a totalitarian institution. Mao was just aping his past masters, and so liked to imagine himself as an emperor like in the Chin (Qin) dynasty. That is why he killed so many people and lived his life as the great leader while he debauched many women for fun everyday although he was infected with venereal diseases. Power is its own answer and call. The revisionists in China now are willing to forgive Mao because it was just for the power of the state just like the Qin emperor or in Japanese history Tokugawa Iyesu or the other shoguns. Society needs a strong man to push forward unpopular decisions. It is for the benefit of us all. But I think not. How can these people kill hundreds of millions of people through their collective actions and not have an ounce of remorse in their bodies? We have to be strong right. But it is only to reject this interpretation of life or let it to rule us. I am disgusted with present day society because we have not learned the lessons of society at all.?This is not freedom but more slavery and mass killing.?Why do we think that if the technology changes things will get any better? They seem to get worse in fact.?

Let's look at this in a more positive light. Had Hitler gone to Dr. Sigmund Freud for psychoanalysis, there might not have been a Third Reich.

Obert,

You write as if your subjective & personal impressions carry some counter-weight to expert opinion & historical experience. Like the classic middle-to-upper class conservative, you've had your teenage radical sabbatical, now settled into running the family business, & shut your mind down to new ideas. Which is not so much sad, as irrelevant to the world's problems.

I wearily repeat, neither Africa nor any other poor country can generate enuf capital internally to transform an economy w/out inflicting terrible exploitation & suffering on its own peasant farmers. You seem to deplore such attempts made by Mao & Stalin. Jolly good; so what's your solution? I challenged you to give one example, just one, of any poor economy which has performed this miracle of economic levitation. You fail the challenge.

You seem to favor muddling along with a smile & a song until the poor local blacks rise up, eventually, to your standards of efficiency & honesty. This, presumably, will happen at some distant point in the far, blue-skyed future. Of course, meantime, they are struggling & dying of deprivation, & you & yours are making a tolerable living, despite lashings of local opposition. Well, good or bad, that again is a not unfamiliar feature of the conservative outlook.

But to return to the central topic, by all means beat your gums bloody about communism's past crimes (I'd agree), but its a waste of facial musculature unless it serves to guide as on the path to eradicating present human suffering & want. What's your solution, if not massive investment from the West? To boringly repeat, if you want to do next to nothing, you are at one with Joe Stalin & Mao Tse-tung. They believed that doing nothing as the corpses piled up was a viable idea too.

I don't want to cause a neural storm in your brain, but Stalin was a conservative. He applied the traditional philosophy & methodology of Tsarism - mainly brute force & ignorance. He murdered most of his Bolshevik comrades, & returned maimed Russia to capitalism. Of course, he did not know he was doing this. But the conservative rarely knows WTF he is doing. He needs a radical to tell him. OGT

As for today's western paedophiles, they seem to like heading towards southeast Asia for their holidays. One wonders why?

Bing,

contemporary America is ruled by communism? It is a capitalist economy, sliding into corporatism - another name for fascism. You can't see it? Well Bing, if you are so benighted you can't tell grit from sugar, enjoy your beverage. I'll pass, thanks. OGT

classicliberal, tho that leaves you with the problem of explaining why classic, liberal, pluralist societies in 1914-1919 collapsed into the most savage & murderous war the world had known that far. Out of it came fascism & communism. Classic conservatives are always trying to persuade us of a past golden age that has been perverted by nasty, 'modern' ideas & developments. What these muttonheads can never face is that history has no reverse gear. By another metaphor, that is why we are always finding ourselves up grit creek without a paddle. The classic conservatives cry, "See. I said we should never have come this way". Possibly true, but hardly helpful, so throw the irritating scrote overboard. OGT

Um, fascism is ultra right you bunk-tark, not ultra left. It's the government conspiring with big business to take away all worker rights and force them to work at corporate factories for shit wages. Nazism and Facism are alike in brutality but different in their socio-political arrangements. But please, do keep speaking with such convincing authority.

Jeremy Clemans, bless you! A glimmering of understanding! If but only a glimmering. Indeed, what on the surface appear as problems of ownership of material things, are rather issues of democratic control - why all the economics-inspired 'isms', based solely on schema for material redistribution failed, & why the US Declaration, etc., succeeded so well for so long. Of course, now it's dying, but that's another issue. Historically, most societies have run as top-down authority systems. Over the centuries, they have given way to democratic pressures. They have evolved to accommodate what the mass of people wanted. This process is continuous, so now in an age of IT, we face the possibility of a much more democratic system, where power is in the hands of the grassroots. Hard lesson: we must seize the revolutionary opportunity, or the whole shebang we call civilization collapses from environmental & economic decay. Having constructed its own complex environment, the human animal must adapt to new conditions, or go extinct. OGT

Well bravo! A free-thinking Nazi couldn't have said it better!

Yes Jon, I know about the physician's book. He wrote it twice having burned the first copy out of fear for his life. No statute of limitations for war crimes, and China did not sign the Treaty of San Francisco. Thanks for the thoughts. The next time you Limeys get into trouble, I think the Americans will let you learn how to speak German.

If you like ex-President Bush's Jr. way of having run America for eight years, then that's fine if he's your kind of man. What took place in China under Mao, only the Chinese who went through it can tell us. Not you or others who are constantly quick to malign a country that was eternally hungry under its emperor-Gods. You as a spokesman of the capitalist system would love China today. China is now two hundred percent capitalist. . . . no more hunger, and its people are better fed now than countries in Latiin America under the oligarchs. If Latin America's Mandarin-oligarchs had treated their peasants better in the past, instead of herding them into a stadium like Augusto Pinochet and massacreing them, or causing Argentinian mothers of Plaza de Mayo to cry their eyes out because their children had been taken away from them by the local caudillos, while the rest of the oligarchs and their families enjoyed their lives more than ever, then Latin America would not have had badly-treated "peasant" or "indio" rebels here and there inciting equally long-suffering peasants to stand up for their right to a more decent life. So the moral of the story is that, had the politicians and their compadres busied themselves improving the system and making necessary reforms - especially land reforms, instead of filling up their pockets and making themselves even richer, their people would have loved them, and there would have been no Fidels, Hugos, and others today. No need for such "heroes" as you sarcastically pointed out, because let's be honest, if one has three meals a day, a modest salary to be able to feed one's family, and enjoy life however modest, most people in Latin America would have been very content with that. Besides, who likes the idea of spending one's life for years hiding in jungles with all those mosquitoes - and not only paramilitaries to put up with?

What a truly dumb post. A non sequitur wrapped around a fallacious argument topped by nonsense. You really really need to get some perspective into that tiny head. The "mass" burning of "witches." By "mass" you mean what? Let's be generous and say less than 100. If I am wrong I would like to see the evidence of millions of "witches" killed in England. You claim a long-dead Pope did not "condemn" something, and that is the equivalent to murdering 20 million people. Try to understand this: our whole liberal western philosophy is based on Judeo-Christian principles of rule of law. And you sound like a 10 year old who just found out something and think you were the first.

I wonder how things are doing in North Korea? The beastliness of mankind to each other in our own lifespan is shameful.

Mao's crimes are the ultimate result of the kind of the dehumanising, aggressive Atheism which Pope Benedict XVI warned us about in his recent speech. It has nothing to do with whether people are Chinese or European or anything else. Totalitarian ideologies such as Fascism or Communism can be adopted by people of any nationality.

You asked "Who is Justifying?". Well I answered you with a specific example of somebody justifying it. There are a still a hell of a lot people out there that feel exactly that way. It's not unusual and it's not rare. There are still people in many universities and in positions of power in the USA and other western countries that consider Mao a great philosopher and often even idolize him. "In 1927, general 'Cash My Check'" Well he sucked too. One example of the British being huge dicks is not going to diminish Mao being a dick. One does not justify the other, one does not choose between one or the other either. They both suck. Yeah pretty much the entire history of China is just as series of rape-pillage-murder and state sponsored genocide and whatnot. How far do you want to go back, exactly? Qing? Ming? The Mongol invasions? The problem I am pointing out is that there are not a significant number of teaching and speaking about how wonderful the Mongols were and how we should follow their philosophical teachings or about how the British Imperialism was a such a superior ethical and moral model of how we should be running the world. It's about how people are blatantly ignoring the lessons history has taught us and still think that socialist/communist thought has significant merit. They still think that the class struggle that Marx thought existed is not utter bullshit. It's amazing to me. And then they try to draw equivalences between the Gulags in Russia, the killing fields of Cambodia, and the mass (and likely purposeful) starvations and oppression that went on in Communist China with people dying of aids in Africa and blaming that on capitalism. They go around wearing t-shirts with the face of a political assassin on the front and ignore everything that has happened in pretty much every single time that communism has been tried. It's sickening.

Apparently you don't read 'Reddit'. A comment from a typical Pro-Communist young westerner (in this case 'kellyeddy'): """You're insulting REAL genocide victims, by calling an accidental (and predictable) famine a genocide. .. Really, when changing farm/land ownership, from the landlord "farmers" to smaller farmers, plus a mix of communes, it's expected to have a break in farming. .. It was mismanaged, but what big thing isn't? More importantly, it was the MORALLY correct thing to do.""" Have fun with that attitude. Yeah sure 45 million people were brutally murdered and starved to death, but at least it was a moral genocide.

Some supporting anecdotal facts about slavery largely forgotten by the talking point crowd. Of all the millions and millions of slaves sold by African tribal kings and Arab traders the smallest amount went to what would become the US--less than 650,000 of nearly 12 million or more. Virtually every island and country in South America that had slaves got more. Cuba and Brazil come to mind. Why? Because they worked them to death and needed to continually import. In the US they were treated as an economic asset. Indentured servants and later the Irish built most of the country, canals, railroads, settling the frontier, Indian wars etc and they died accordingly. (Thomas Sowell, a black historian among other things has written extensively about this) Why? Because they were deemed to have less value than Black slaves. The armies of the Civil War that also ended slavery among other things, was made up of primarily Celts--Scot-Irish and Irish Catholics. Just some trivia. For the video crowd Scorsese touches on this in the Gangs of New York.

Some anecdotal facts about slavery largely forgotten by the talking point crowd. Of all the millions and millions of slaves sold by African tribal kings and Arab traders the smallest amount went to what would become the US--less than 650,000 of nearly 12 million or more. Virtually every island and country in South America that had slaves got more. Why? Because they worked them to death and needed to continually import. In the US they were treated as an economic asset. Indentured servants and later the Irish built most of the country, canals, railroads, settling the frontier, Indian wars etc and they died accordingly. (Thomas Sowell, a black historian among other things has written extensively about this) Why? Because they were deemed to have less value than Black slaves. The armies of the Civil War that also ended slavery, was made up of primarily Celts--Scot-Irish and Irish Catholics. Just some trivia. Scorsese touches on this in the Gangs of New York.

"Oh but you do; they are often called conservatives." Yes, that's right, the only reason people could possibly disagree with your nutty utopian pursuits are if they are horrible people. Nice logic. "You should maybe seek to understand why the bloody, brutal praxis fell so short of ideology" Maybe the people who support it should, instead, ask why it is that it failed and try to actually change their belief systems to accomodate reality, rather than thinking the next time round it will actually work. "Madness is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting the outcome of the next time to be different." Albert Einstein.

The point is that you don't get many people idolising the 18th and 19th Century British aristocracy and factory owners, and wanting to repeat the same crimes. The crimes of Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot & others are only the logical conclusion of following communist ideology, which by it's very nature, places the entire population at the hands of an all powerful state.

You say this information was "hidden." I've been hearing about Mao's atrocities for decades, along with those of the USSR and the Vietcong and Pol Pot. Maybe all this information is new to this latest generation of Leftists, or maybe just to the Independent audience. Whatever. I'm glad it's being shoved in the Left's face AGAIN. This is what Communism looks like, folks.

Having read all the comments I think T-shirt sales will be fine. Apparently it takes a whole lot more than 45 million dead. It leads one to have a little sympathy for Adolph. Left out of the murderers row of shirt sales. Mao, Stalin, Che and the soon to be enshrined FIDEL! Now if "I'madinnerjacket" would drop the big one I think we could hit a million on the first run. Organic cotton, what do you think?

Ironically most Chinese regard us as barbarians. People I know who have been there regard them as racist.

D_Equalizer Famines and natural disasters are known to have killed thousands, even millions of people in one sweep did you know that Mr. Dikkotter? Not even the Pharoah of Egypt, nor Moises for that matter, can stop acts of God. If God decides to do something, nothing can stop him from doing it, not even a mere mortal like Mr. Mao. So please don't give him all the credit, especially when he is not around to either confirm or deny your charges. It's easy to slander a dead person because he's not there to defend himself. Mr. Mao is a great Chinese leader. He is well loved and respected by many, including westerners. Mr. Mao is one of the fouders of modern China. The is a saying in Chinese, "without Chairman Mao, the Chinese people will not have today". ____________________________________________________________ "Without Chairman Mao, the Chinese people will not have today"! Yup!!.........There is about 45 Million whom do not 'Have Today', thanks to Chairman Mao! G. Peasemould.

You a really sick puppy. Perhaps you would have served beautifully as an official propagandist to the worst slaughterer of humans in history. The most efficient killer of people. That is what you love. You are a monster.

Whats that? a press release from the Embassy of the People's Republic of China

Deliberate starvation of people is not a natural disaster, did you know that? MOSES, not sure who moises is, was a war general who fought his way out of Egypt. God had nothing to do with it. Also, I'm quite sure the Chinese populace would be okay, perhaps even better, without Mao. Either way, Mao doesn't have the respect of this westerner and neither do you.

So how much is the Chinese Government paying you?

You might be the biggest idiot I have ever seen make a post, and I read alot. Hopefully, your cruel indifference, denial, and stupidity will haunt you.

Your statement of Chiang Ki Shek being flown to Taiwan by US Air Force is highly doubtful. As to the treatment of the crew by the wife is also doubtful. A company called China National Airline Corporation provided his air transportation for many years and a member of my extended family was his personal pilot during those years. As far as how they were treated by both, we know of only good things resulting from the flying. The crews were Americans, flying American planes, with loose affiliation to Pan American Airways. starlifter71@yahoo.com

Pelago.....you are an apologist.....and a very sad little man.

You're citing myth. There was no genocide of the indigenous populations in North America. There was warfare, and what we would consider atrocities were committed by both Europeans and Amerindians, but there was never a government policy of extermination and there are still millions of people in N.A. who claim indigenous ancestry. The leading "scholar" of this bogus genocide is Ward Churchill, but he has been debunked as a fraud and fired from his university position. Some of his anecdotal stories, such as the "smallpox blankets" story, are simply fabrications. Others are exaggerations distorted to provoke outrage.

Additionally, there's a weird sort of anti-Americanism that seems to hold that slavery only existed in the U.S. There has been slavery almost everywhere, from the beginning of time. It was not an American invention. There was certainly slavery in China, and what Dikötter depicts is the cruelest form of slavery imaginable: in which a person has no ownership or control of any aspect of his life.

Which is why we had the New Deal and the endless string of Progressive Intervention coupled with Keynesianism since then.

And which right-wingers would that be? On the other hand, Roosevelt and many other "progressives" were great admirers of Mussolini ... you know, that other facist. "'I don't mind telling you in confidence,' FDR remarked to a White House correspondent, 'that I am keeping in fairly close touch with that admirable Italian gentleman.'" Rexford Tugwell, a leading adviser to the president, had difficulty containing his enthusiasm for Mussolini's program to modernize Italy, "It's the cleanest. . .most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I've ever seen. It makes me envious."

Wow, there are still people today defending Mao. I guess that's why repeated exposes are needed. This information started coming out in the 1960s, Indy Girl. Just as Stalin's atrocities got some exposure in the 30s but a lot more after WWII. Dikötter isn't working in virgin territory, he's doing a mopping up operation. So what's your favorite book?

True Freethinker, Russians have been dying out since 1990 becoz of economic & social collapse. A crude & brutal form of capitalism operates under ex-communist mafya oligarchs. State support for housing, healthcare, basic foods, education, pensions & nursery schools have withered away or vanished. Result, many of the older & weaker die prematurely, & young people avoid having children, simply becoz they cannot afford the expense. The old & young who are either unemployed or on inadequate wages, alleviate their daily miseries with vodka or drugs. This group is ravaged by AIDS, venereal diseases & tuberculosis. The Russian armed forces cannot get enuf physically sound recruits. The countryside is becoming as empty as it was after Stalin?s massacres. If Russia were still communist, the whores of the western press would be hooting & hollering about this Russian tragedy. But since a few bloated capitalist crooks (east & west) are making fortunes from its miseries, they vote it a success. They have politically sensitive moral antennae (writing the way you eat). I have no information that religion is having any significant remedial effect in Russia, other than offering the traditional consolation of ?pie in the sky when you die?. Maybe you know, but before WWII, Pope Pius XII allied with Adolf Hitler, motivated by the ancient rivalry between Catholic & Russian Orthodox churches. The deal was, if/when Adolf conquered Russia (Operation Barbarossa), there would be a mass coversion of the Russian population to Catholicism. Many Holy Roman Emeperors were German. One was the crusader, Frederick I, dubbed ?Barbarossa?. Coincidence? Doubtful; memories go back a long way in the Vatican. In WWII, the pious pope did nothing to stop the massacre of Serbs, Moslems, Jews & Gipsies by the nazi regime in Catholic Croatia. Given this degree of dereliction of religious duty, by one so potently influential, it is obvious the pope was never any kind of a cure, but part of the disease. I know some individual Christians & Catholics do great work, but the Vatican is a sort of CIA/KGB in drag. OGT

True Freethinker, Russians have been dying out since 1990 becoz of economic & social collapse. A crude & brutal form of capitalism operates under ex-communist mafya oligarchs. State support for housing, healthcare, basic foods, education, pensions & nursery schools have withered away or vanished. Result, many of the older & weaker die prematurely, & young people avoid having children, simply becoz they cannot afford the expense. The old & young who are either unemployed or on inadequate wages, alleviate their daily miseries with vodka or drugs. This group is ravaged by AIDS, venereal diseases & tuberculosis. The Russian armed forces cannot get enuf physically sound recruits. The countryside is becoming as empty as it was after Stalin's massacres of peasants. If Russia were still communist, the whores of the western press would be hooting & hollering about this Russian tragedy. But since a few bloated capitalist crooks (east & west) are making fortunes from its miseries, they vote it a success. They have politically sensitive moral antennae (writing the way you eat). I have no information that religion is having any significant remedial effect in Russia, other than offering the traditional consolation of ?pie in the sky when you die?. Maybe you know, but before WWII, Pope Pius XII allied with Adolf Hitler, motivated by the ancient rivalry between Catholic & Russian Orthodox churches. The deal was, if/when Adolf conquered Russia (Operation Barbarossa), there would be a mass conversion of the Russian population to Catholicism. Most Holy Roman Emperors were German. One was the crusader, Frederick I, dubbed ?Barbarossa?. Coincidence? Doubtful; memories go back a long way in the Vatican. In WWII, the pious pope did nothing to stop the massacre of Serbs, Moslems, Jews & Gipsies by the nazi regime in Catholic Croatia. Unbelievably terrible things were done, even by Catholic priests/monks. Given this degree of dereliction of religious duty, by one so potently influential, it is obvious the pope was never any kind of a cure, but part of the disease. I know some individual Christians & Catholics do great work, but the Vatican is a sort of CIA/KGB in drag. OGT

This is probably why there was a rise and fall in civilizations throughout time, the sky falling in- and beliefs crumbling?

brainwashing from birth sounds like most religions to me. The cadres are the ones who believed in the religion (or at least believed it was in their interest to follow the chants). The people might not hold the belief deeply but the majority of religions were spread through conquest and cohersion. Christianity didnt spread through latin america through leaflet drops and coffee mornings. But all at their roots are a cadre of believers in the cause who believe they know better how others should lead their lives, and as said are willing to kill them to prove it. This is the psychopathy at the root of communism in china and russia in its time, and historically of a number of well subscribed global religions I dont need to mention by name

Oh wow. The Douche Bagger really goes of the deep end. Id you don't want to be called names, don't do it yourself. Douche. But we can all see your the fascist in this equation,

Fair enough, you do get some of that. Thing is it's all a bit daft, you can't defend any of these dictators because all of them were complete monsters. Nothing political justifies genocide and Hitler, Stalin and all the others are from a different time, the lessons of which we've pretty much learnt. At least in the mainstreams, anyway. Painting Hitler as a leftist, though, is just as absurd. The right have no need to be sensitive about him and they really do themselves no favours when they try and pass him off as a leftist. It just shows a monumental lack of knowledge and understanding of the past.

And covenient to know who the shout & run trolls are. OGT

I see maths is not your strong point. 1 in 7 americans considered poor - that is 43% of the population ???

I would respond to this point if I understood what it was you were saying. I will say that it is interesting to note the foreword in the book "The downfall of Lobengula" by a one Frederick Courtney Selous. The book is about the murder of Lobengula (the then Matabele king) in 1894. Selous' foreword reflects the prevailing belief of that time: that virtue was with the coloniser, that the savage must be civilized, that his defeat is for his own benefit. Such views required a faith and a belief system that rested not on observation and reason, but on emotion and blind subservience to groupthink. What is equally interesting, at least to me, is that - in our own time - the assumptions of the last century have been reversed. Now it is the coloniser who is evil and those colonised who are presumed to be noble, virtuous and unable to do evil. Both belief systems are characterised by supreme arrogance; the belief that the new set of ideas is overwhelmingly better than the last set, and without the need for observation or reason to back them up, as though the new truth is so overwhelmingly obvious and self validating that it requires no question. It seems that you are reflecting the prevailing belief of your own time; the idea of the "noble savage" being brutally plucked from the Garden of Eden. The question at the tip of my tongue is this: One hundred years ago, would you have reflected the prevailing belief of that time with the same passion that you have done so in your own time? The population of Southern Africa is some 90 million plus. When colonists arrived it was in the region of about 5 million. The 20-fold increase observed during the last 100 years has only been possible because of the ideas and technology that colonialism brought: roads, dams, schools, hospitals, power stations, roads, telecommunications, farms and factories. Life expectancy doubled and child mortality declined to an all-time low. I do not dispute that colonialism was violent, degrading and exploitative, and, in many cases, genocidal. I think that is something worth discussing and criticizing. At the same time, I find emotional beliefs about colonialism founded not on observation and reason, but on an emotional reaction to a previous historical period, profoundly unhelpful.

Justified, it is interesting to note the foreword in the book "The downfall of Lobengula" by a one Frederick Courtney Selous, in which Lobengula, the then Matabele king, was hunted down and killed in 1894. It is interesting to note how his views reflected the prevailing belief of that time: that virtue was with the coloniser, that the savage must be civilized, that it is for his own benefit. Such views required a faith and a belief system that rested not on observation and reason, but on emotion and blind subservience to groupthink. What is equally interesting, at least to me, is that - in our own time - the assumptions of the last century have been reversed. Now it is the coloniser who is evil and those colonised who are presumed to be noble and virtuous, unable to do evil. Both belief systems are characterised by supreme arrogance; the belief that the new set of ideas is overwhelmingly better than the last set, and without the need for observation or reason to back them up, as if belief in itself is self validating. It seems that you are reflecting the prevailing belief of your own time; the idea of the "noble savage" being brutally plucked from the Garden of Eden. The question at the tip of my tongue is this: One hundred years ago, would you have reflected the prevailing belief of that time with the same passion that you have done so in your own time? The population of Southern Africa is some 90 million plus. When colonists arrived it was in the region of about 5 million. The 20-fold increase observed during the last 100 years has only been possible because of the ideas and technology that colonialism brought: roads, dams, schools, hospitals, power stations, roads, telecommunications, farms and factories. Life expectancy for many people doubled once food security and the rule of law were imposed. I do not dispute that colonialism was violent, degrading and exploitative, and I think that is something worth discussing and criticizing. At the same time, I find emotional beliefs about colonialism founded not on observation and reason, but on an emotional reaction to a previous historical period, profoundly unhelpful.

Justified, it is interesting to note the foreword in the book "The downfall of Lobengula" by a one Frederick Courtney Selous, in which Lobengula, the then Matabele king, was hunted down and killed in 1894. It is interesting to note how his views reflected the prevailing belief of that time: that virtue was with the coloniser, that the savage must be civilized, that it is for his own benefit. Such views required a faith and a belief system that rested not on observation and reason, but on emotion and blind subservience to groupthink. What is equally interesting, at least to me, is that - in our own time - the assumptions of the last century have been reversed. Now it is the coloniser who is evil and those colonised who are presumed to be noble and virtuous, unable to do evil. Both belief systems are characterised by supreme arrogance; the belief that the new set of ideas is overwhelmingly better than the last set, and without the need for observation or reason to back them up, as if belief in itself is self validating. It seems that you are reflecting the prevailing belief of your own time; the idea of the "noble savage" being brutally plucked from the Garden of Eden. The question at the tip of my tongue is this: One hundred years ago, would you have reflected the prevailing belief of that time with the same passion that you have done so in your own time? The population of Southern Africa is some 90 million plus. When colonists arrived it was in the region of about 5 million. The 20-fold increase observed during the last 100 years has only been possible because of the ideas and technology that colonialism brought: roads, dams, schools, hospitals, power stations, roads, telecommunications, farms and factories. Life expectancy for many people doubled once food security and the rule of law were imposed. I do not dispute that colonialism was violent, degrading and exploitative, and I think that is something worth discussing and criticizing. At the same time, I find emotional beliefs about colonialism founded not on observation and reason, but on an emotional reaction to a previous historical period, profoundly unhelpful.

Maybe you should add to your "isms" also capitalism. Think back a year or two when investment bankers in Wall St. caused a lot of breakdowns in the financial sectors in the U.S. and internationally - and the consequences of which not over yet. Many companies had to lay off employees, firms, shops, people's savings went to the dogs. For those with bank accounts in neutral countries, life is still all right, but not for the majority of people everywhere who lost homes (I have in mind those folks in the United States who now live in tents and broken down trailers). In just tonight's news, every seventh American is considered poor . . . that's approximately 43 percent of the population in the U.S. And that, in the world's richest and most powerful country. Perhaps, if less money would go for military adventures, and more into social and health structures, that would welcomed by the American people who can use some help. This would be the right Christian attitude in a country where evangelical churches followers like to be vocal about their faith.

The one child policy was introduced by Dend Xiao Peng. Under Mao people were encouraged to have large families. The figures are from the Chinese government and UN. you really should read a bit more before you start exposing your ignorance on the issues you choose to comment on.

Well, to put it in context, what I normally find is that such genocide is either: 1. Denied (it never happened - no shortage of examples on this site) 2. It happened but was the fault of someone else (ie, Stalin "had to get tough" to "defend" Russia from "malignant outside influences". Therefore, the genocide was "regrettable" but "unavoidable".

"The left, believing that they are too moral, too intelligent and to virtuous to commit genocide, believe that all genocide, by this binary logic, must be the work of their own perceived "other", the "right"." It's not the left that are trying to distance themselves from genocidal dictators is it? I mean you don't left-wing pundits saying "Actually, Stalin was right-wing, and that Mao, he was a Thatcherite through and through" do you?

In reply to Hardrada below: But it wasnt done in the name of secularism or atheism was it.

Totalitarianism is to ideology what fundamentalism is to religion.

Mao's early life had a lot in common with Hitter; a shunned librarian, who was looked down upon by the bookworm intellectuals all around him, he developed a psychotic inferiority complex which later manifested itself as an outwardly superiority complex (how many times have we seen this happen?). Its therefore no coincidence that his bile was directed at the 'stinking intellectuals' during the cultural revolution; Hitler similarly was given shelter by jews when he was down and out in the streets of Austria, and we al know the result of that.

Ghengis Khan Killed 20 Million people, Stalin killed 20 Million people and now we learn about Chairman Mao - a wholly respected individual - he killed more than Ghengis Khan and Stalin killed put together - it was on teh reputation of these mass murderers that Saddam Hussein modeled himself on.

Obert, if we can focus, the debate is about pinning responsibility for the crimes of the likes of Mao Tse-tung & Joe Stalin. You & fellow rightists want to blame communist theory. I can agree part-way, except as I have exampled, such crimes pre-date communism, & similar ones have been committed by nice, liberal western regimes. This is no attempt to excuse the crimes, simply to identify the root of the problem, in order to possibly avoid such tragedies in future. Right? Good show! In pursuing understanding, you cannot escape the lesson that such crimes against peasants can be entailed in any attempt to build an industrial base, without outside sources of capital. In support, I gave Britain's historical example, which you & fellow right-wingers choose to ignore. Well, your privilege. But (big but), if you are genuinely horrified by such mass murders & brutal exploitations, you would surely recognize the need to fund genuine, rather than fake, programs to end Third World exploitation & poverty? This you & the political right in general fail to do. You argue that it is none of 'our' concern. In this case, I must conclude that you have no real compassion for humanity's agonies, but simply use them to grind your political axe. Your position is one of fake outrage & hypocrisy. For you show actual indifference. You are not your brother's keeper. You deny any responsibility for the subjugation of the poor by the rich West. Maybe you just don't know this stuff, but I suspect those that give a damn, take the trouble to find out. As I keep saying, the point of understanding history is to avoid agonizing repetitions. Like a lot of humanity, the right leading the charge, you seem to positively prefer the wrong end of the stick. Is it so you can then better beat down those alien 'others' with it? OGT

True Freethinker, ?The point is that you don't get many people idolising the 18th and 19th Century British aristocracy and factory owners, and wanting to repeat the same crimes. ? Oh but you do; they are often called conservatives. Mrs Thatcher wanted to roll back the welfare state to the good old Victorian times, & the present UK PM is a member of that aristocratic mafia that (playfully) is returning us to a pre-industrial world of the very rich, & ragged serfs. In this Tory, retro-wonderland, the state will be primitive & weak, the rich all-powerful. As you like? ?The crimes of Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot & others are only the logical conclusion of following communist ideology, which by it's very nature, places the entire population at the hands of an all powerful state.? You should maybe seek to understand why the bloody, brutal praxis fell so short of ideology. But like so many, you want simple slogans, not understanding. That way the human race frees itself to repeat the same old tragic mistakes, if with ascending ingenuity. ?Freethinker?, try to live up to your name, & think. Why did liberal, pluralistic states inflict WWI & WWII on the world? Why did nice, moderate Mr Blair tell porkies about WMDs & help slaughter tens of thousands? Please don?t trot out a sequence of ad hoc justifications, or you?ll be doing exactly what you accuse ?the Lefties? of doing. OGT

If the geezer you quoted annoyed you by justifying mass murder, why not take it up with him? I can't make much sense of the rest of your post, as you seem unable to understand mine. Best we leave it at that. OGT

Nate Moseman, I'm trying to emphasize the importance of understanding history, not using selected hi or lo-lites for the purposes of political axe-grinding. 'Understanding' & explicating are not the same as justifying. I have been moved reading many times about humanity's sufferings. Eg., that lone young man defying a tank in Tienanman Square. But all down to communism? Imagine some 50 years before. A lone figure shouts, "Down with Chiang Kai-shek!" How long do you think he would last? In 1927, general 'Cash My Check' colluded with the British to massacre all the communists & trade unionists in Shanghai. The 'wetwork' was directed by master criminal & drugs lord, a Mr Tu. The Brits rewarded him. He became head banana of the Shanghai Drugs Control Commission! He later moved to Honkers & died peacefully, an honored member of Honkers hi-so. OGT

Who is justifying? The ghastly workings of history's meat grinder cannot be reversed. All we can do is understand, & condemn where necessary - this as a way of trying to prevent such catastrophes happening again. Unless we learn & apply history's lessons, what's the point? OGT

True_Belle, North Korea? Probably things are much the beastly same as in any oriental despotism, tho these differ. Eg., Saudi Arabia has much more money, but gives dissidents the same short shrift. OGT

Not as odd as all that...they called themselves National Socialists with some cause; the Nazis wanted something close to equality ( with exclusions for Jews and others and in the usual, Some are More Equal than Others, kind of way ) within their nation. They were antagonistic to the old aristocracy, as were they aristo's to they. They drew their support from the everyday people and championed them in a way that would go down well with the TUC today.

Your last paragraph: "China has lost pretty much every war against foreign powers, from the Mongols to the Japanese. China was so backwards in the early 1900s that every Western power (and even Japan) wanted a piece of her." And you approve of it? Precisely because China suffered throughout her history through her rulers, and foreign aggressions, is she making up for lost time. Even dabbling in capitalist methods to catch up with the 21st century. And because the Chinese people are - and have always been - a hardworking lot, enduring hardship just to go forward, they have even more than caught up with the West. Reason for western criticism. . . or is it envy?

Yes, agree. The myth that 'aggressive secularism' is what Mao/Polpot/Stalin was promoting, or that it somehow excuses the excesses of religion, is often cited by deists - and of course nothing could be further from the truth. Mao's China was one of the most worshipful states in the world, and indeed possessed all the qualities of a fundamentalist religion, only surpassed today by North Korea.

Communism has all the characteristics of religion. A deeply held belief that they know better how other people should live their lives to the point of killing them to prove it. Religion doesnt have to have a god figure, though in this case Mao was clearly treated as an earthly deity of sorts. Like all religions communism is fine in a voluntary hippy commune but on a nation scale it takes leathal violence to convert the non-believers. Sounds like most religions I know.

Power tends to corrupt -- so although we need it, we always need to monitor and manage it. Absolute power corrupts absolutely -- and so often, horrifyingly. Everyone has heard Lord Acton's aphorism, but too many apply it selectively.

The thing is, historically, collectivist, top-down thinking wasn't incompatible to right-wing thinking in Hitler's time, or even before then.

As I've said in many places on this board, the right has changed beyond all recognition since the first half of the 20th Century. In fact most of what we consider to be right-wing, conservative values today were actually liberal values at the time of Hitler and before.

The small state, supremacy of the individual, low taxation, free movement of labour and capital, the right of private ownership, these were core liberal values and have been since the earliest years of the Enlightenment. Neither the left or the right were interested so much in these values during the age of ideology, they were far more intent on redrawing broken societies from scratch by whatever means necessary. They were both radical and tending toward the totalitarian.

Hitler is remembered as right-wing because he was right-wing. Similarly Mao and Stalin are remembered as left-wing because they were left-wing. The fact that the modern, mainstream right- and left-wings bear very little actual resemblence to their historical forebears is absolutely vital in understanding the history of those times- and in understanding our own times.

Also, "national socialism" wasn't Hitler's idea. It was a right-wing ideological theory that dated back to 19th Century France.

I forgot to mention that a crucial element in the hatred that developed between Bolshevism and Fascism was that being nationalists, both Hitler and Mussolini detested and feared the claims of the Moscow communists to be internationalist, that is, the only legitimate political centre for opposition to capitalism for the whole world. Hitler and Mussolin also detested capitalism but could tolerate that claim.

Thanks to "Tynesider" for this thoughtful analysis: "Probably the gravest charge against the British Empire is that it allowed millions of Indian people to die in a series of famines in the late 19th century, through a combination of over-taxation, globalised agrarian reform and rigid 'laissez-faire' policies which prevented effective famine relief. I'm very keen to hear what Historum regulars feel about such a disturbing yet often forgotten aspect of British rule. Having read Mike Davis's Great Victorian Holocausts, it's impossible to avoid the conclusion that certain British officials (notably Lord Lytton) exacerbated the effects of famine through callous incompetence and parsimony. Davis estimates that famines between 1876 and 1901 killed between 12-29 million. However, in my view, Davis's work is seriously flawed, in that it underestimates famine prior to British rule (for example, totally overlooked are the Chelisa famine of 1783/4 and the Skull famine of 1792/3 which occurred in then non-British states are estimated to have the highest death tolls of all Indian famines of about 11 million each), and he has a tendency to 'big up' famine deaths - notably the 1896/7 famine, where he estimates a death toll of 11 million against contemporary estimates of 1 million, most of whom were victims of post-famine malaria outbreaks (malaria is boosted hugely by the arrival of famine-ending rains). In presenting anecdotal evidence, he zeroes in on where the British famine relief works failed (and clearly it very often did), but fails to mention where it succeeded (for example, the Lt-Governor of famine-ravaged Oudh and Agra in 1896, Anthony MacDonnell, was awarded one of the highest imperial citations for 'saving millions') and how the system of successive famine enquiries, famine codes and relief works did work successfully in minimising famine mortality until 1943, when disastrously, famine codes weren't observed in wartime Bengal. Nor is there any mention of the legacy of the last Famine Enquiry under Curzon - the Imperial College of Agricultural Research, which would pioneer high yielding crops and lead to the Green Revolution of the 1960s. These may be minor consolations to the millions of lives snuffed out, but they don't seem to be the actions of the thoroughly callous and exploitative imperial power that has been presented by Davis and others."

That's the internet for you; with Google and a handful of minutes you can find seemingly reliable evidence for anything you choose to believe. Fact checking and cross-referencing, unfortunately, is on a timescale that's incompatible with the immediacy of the internet. I remember when I first got on the internet back in 1996, there were all kinds of claims made for it, that all human knowledge would be gathered in one, easily accessible place, that information would be free for the first time in human history. Of course that was hopelessly naive. All it is is a vast, teeming swarm of competing memes swirling around the planet looking for other minds to latch upon in order to propagate themselves. Or to put it another way the internet, as far as information goes, is a load of bollocks.

Davey, did I cause a stir in your little fascist mind? It really is OK to come out and admit you're a facist and secret KKK follower, we're all understanding liberals here. Any other metaphors you've forgotten to call me -I really admire the douche thingy, real class indeed. Have a nice evening.

ashleys,

I'm flattered you think I'm smart. I just make the rather simple point that understanding history is not to justify its bloodlettings. Can you accept this? As in the UK originator country, a peasant economy can only produce the surplusses for industrialization by brutally exploiting the peasantry.

Mao's crimes closely followed Stalin's, in pursuit of the same goals. Stalin's rabid agricultural policies killed probably 20 million. Whole villages died & disappeared, but Stalin got his factories. Mao did not.

The point is this, if 'we' can learn it. This sort of tragedy need happen no longer. If we truly wish to end world poverty, we of the lovely, liberal West have the abundant riches & technology to do it. But it's not being done. The IMF & western economies simply continue torturing & screwing the poor, weak countries. Is this justified? C'mon, never mind past crimes. Are the ongoing ones justified, judging by the standards you apply to Mao & Stalin?

The EU & the Vatican sit on their thumbs. Eg., instead of insisting on investment in Poland, we have the closure of the Gdansk shipyards & the export of prostitutes & plumbers to overcrowded Britain. It'll all come right in the end? Pretty much what Stalin said when the starving & dead lined the roads & railroad tracks of the Ukraine. As to death statistics generally, despite Stalin's mass murders, the population of Russia increased in the 1920s & 1930s. In the capitalist wonderland it is today, the Russia population is dying out, & will die out unless something drastic is done. OGT

Has their regime modernised yet ? They are still as paranoid and murderously badtempered as ever. They will always be barbarians - even though they now wear suits. I expect the figure will be even more thasn 45 million if the truth be known. Is Mr Dikötter leading a charmed existence, I wonder.

starlifter71 As a member of your extended family was the personal pilot of General Chiang-Kai-Shek who had provided his air transportation for many years, I can understand you're being upset about my comment. I'll check up on that and should I be wrong, would apologise, but not until I've confirmed it.

But be sure to read the right history books.

This is a reply to "True Freethinker's" comment.

Perhaps, but I don't swallow anything anyone pressurizes others to believe. You have your opinion and I have mine, just like everybody else. I prefer to think calmly, weigh the facts objectively, without jumping to half-baked conclusions. You on the other hand, think you just have to make sweeping clever-sounding statements, and everyone should just accept your "views". And that, Listen_music2, I find not at all serious, and very simplistic.

If you need or want to industrialize a backward, peasant-based nation without injections of capital, the only way to do it is to exploit the peasantry to extract the necessary funds. There are no other options. The Tory/Right's nonsense portrays Mao & Stalin as cut-out ogres. "Oh I'm an evil communist monster I am. How many people can I kill today? Hoo, hoo, har." The infantile Right hisses the lefty Abanazars - history as panto for immature minds. Incidentally, that is how Britain built its industry. The aristocratic mafia collared the peasants' land by land enclosures. In the cities, the dispossessed were worked to death in factories. Infants as young as five worked in the mines. Luvverly good old days, eh? Britain's 'wealth' is firmly founded on the compacted bones of millions. Go tell it to Robert Conquest. Oh, & 80,000 odd convicts were sent to America as white slaves in the 18C, & more poor kids were sold there as 'indentured labor'. OGT

I think that Hayek's distinction between "Collectivist Societies" vs "Individualist Societies" is a far more reasonable way of wording things, if one wants to start connecting dots between Nazism, and the various forms of Totalitarian Communism that was attempted in nations such as China, Cambodia, and the USSR. And to previous posters: I would consider both Republicans and Democrats to meet the criteria for "Collectivist" within this context.

Any chance to bring the Jews into it, eh? :)

Mao did have nuclear weapons. However, I think he was canny enough not to risk using them. Stalin too had nuclear weapons. These people were ruthless. That doesn't make them stupid. Another good question would be, how many were killed during the so-called Cultural Revolution? I say so-called, because at the time a real cultural revolution was taking place in the West.

And the Americans elected a Socialist, Mao wanna be. Barak ObaMao.

Comparing Maoism to Socialism is like comparing the Tories to Nazis.

Do you speak Chinese, Ni shuo Jungwen ma?......... it very much was in the name of atheism.

Chad Lang in reply to D_Equalizer You might be the biggest idiot I have ever seen make a post, and I read alot. Hopefully, your cruel indifference, denial, and stupidity will haunt you. _____________________________________________________ This 'Alot' you read, I take it that it's an obscure Chinese Book/Newspaper?? G. Peasemould.

jattman77 The biggest irony is that USA is an economic basket case while china economy is well the envy of the west. ________________________________________________________________ in reply to jattman77 Which is why the Chinese keep finding leaky boats full of Americans being smuggled into their country. Oh, wait... ________________________________________________________________ Yuk, yuk, yuk! G. Peasmould.

mocmo in reply to D_Equalizer So how much is the Chinese Government paying you? _____________________________________________________ I don't think the Chinese Government is paying him anything, he/she really believes in their post! But, I can understand you you looking for a chink in his armour to insert your written barbs! G. Peasemould.

Will this hurt T-shirt sales?

One waits impatiently for a real academic historical research on the doings of Mao's adversary, General Chiang-Kai-Shek. That, too, would be equally interesting for the world to know.

I suppose the motivation is that if Hitler can be "re-branded" (good word!) as a leftie, then all lefties can be smeared as closet Hitler-lovers, in much the same way as anyone who voices even the mildest criticisms of a totally unrestrained market economy can be (and often is) attacked as a communist fellow-traveller who secretly approves of Stalin's gulag and all its atrocities. The thought processes of the people who do this sort of thing are really rather strange. I don't know whether to be amused; or dismayed; or intellectually interested in it all as a sort of study of pathology.

To Mark Miller below - I can't reply directly to your post. Actually, nationalism is one of the cornerstones of right-wing thinking. The left-wing is far more concerned with internationalism, which was always one of the great causes of conflict between communism and any right-wing ideology. I think you might be confusing nationalism with nationalisation. Anyway, perhaps you can remind us who was it who, in 1930s Germany * sent trade-union leaders to concentration camps * exterminated all German communists in the same way * absolutely supported private ownership of property * won the admiration of right-wing figures across Europe and the US * believed socialism (yes, socialism) was part of a global Jewish conspiracy * hated the concepts of racial and sexual equality * once wrote that "capitalists had worked their way to the top through their capacity, and on the basis of this selection they have the right to lead" I don't have an axe to grind here, I'm not exactly a leftist and even if I were I'd be considerably less embarrassed about Hitler being a fellow traveller than Stalin and Mao. I just have a low tolerance for bullshit, which includes the recent fashion amongst certain right-wingers to revise Hitler as some kind of left-wing figure, usually based on the most facile, decontextualised and childishly simplistic readings of history imaginable.

I honestly don't understand the right's sensitivity over Hitler. At the time, or at least until the early 1940s, Hitler was widely admired among the European and US right. This is a matter of record. Nazi Germany heavily supported the Franco's fellow fascist regime during the Spanish Civil War, supporting the landowning classes against the left-wing revolution. The thing is that the style of right-wing thought that Hitler, and many others across Europe and the US, embraced in the first half of the 20th Century was completely discredited during the war. It was widely abandoned by the right and right-wing thought has adapted beyond all recognition since then. The modern right has nothing in common with the right of the early 20th Century, in fact most of what the modern right claim as their own now (free movement of labour, free movement of capital, the supremacy of the individual, advocacy for small state) were actually liberal concepts from the 18th Century until the early- to mid-20th Century. Indeed, the American Revolutionaries, nowadays held up as conservative heroes, were actually liberals (note, liberal is not the same as left-wing, despite the on-going conflation of the two in the populist right-wing press), and were actively supported by the liberal Whig party in the British Parliament, while the American conservatives of the time supported the British monarchy. In fairness, I can see why the modern right can't see how Hitler was on the right-wing. In the early part of the 20th Century a strong state, the subserviance of the individual to the nation via the state and a policed society weren't incompatible with right wing ideology, whereas now, obviously, it seems an anathema to it. The mistake is a common one; it's a simple case of assuming that how things are now were always so. They weren't, and and this is why history is such a complex subject. The thing about this whole left-winging of Hitler thing is that the left, so completely soiled by literally dozens of brutal, murdering dictators, have very little reason to disown Hitler even if he were actually a left-winger. Compared to the likes of Stalin and Mao he was a mediocre mass-murderer and there are plenty of other embarrasments in their history. Besides, it's reasonable to assume that during the anti-leftist period of the Cold War, Hitler's "hidden" leftism would've been revealed by the right-wing Cold Warriors of the time, but no they were "man enough" to accept that their own political wing had it's own demons and that no idea, even one related to their own, is incorruptible. The modern right has every reason to distance itself from Hitler and fascism because neither have very much to do with the right-wing, conservative mainstream anymore. What is interesting, though, is the need for some to not only distance themselves from him but to force him onto their opponents even if that means battling against 80 years of very well documented history and living memory itself. It strikes me as a kind of Swift Boating - turning a political vulnerablility into a weapon.

That's more or less where I'm coming from. Historically left and right were both collectivist as you say, and divided loosely along those ethnic and class lines. Today I think both the right and left are completely different to the right and left of the 20th Century. Today's mainstream right is more concerned with conserving the things of the past that have worked, which is to say classic liberalism. Today's mainstream left also has less interest in collectivising than it does in providing a safety net for the vulnerable while ensuring that the strong don't dominate the whole of society. It's a radically different kind of socialism to that of Mao and Stalin.

NewsBusters| Author: 'Great Leap Forward' Death Toll Was 45 Million; Nick Kristof in 2005: Mao 'Not All Bad' http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/maos-great-leap-forward-killed-45-million-in-four-years-2081630.html

The perception of Mao in China has slowly transformed from that of revered deity to (officially) 'someone who made a great contribution, but also made many mistakes'. It will probably take another generation before the truth of his crimes are fully admitted - unless political reform gathers pace, which currently looks unlikely. However, unofficially, many Chinese now perceive the main 'mistake' to be the excesses of the cultural revolution, and will often tell you so. When they finally take down his portrait hanging over the forbidden city at the north end of Tiananmen square - that will be the final, symbolic admission that his status has crossed the line from 'great helmsman' to a national embarrassment. But don't hold your breath waiting for that.

Its the overseas Chinese communities I'd like to see becoming more aware that one of their kind was the world's No.1 butcher. In general, they just confuse totalitarianism with communism. Yes, this is a direct criticism of Singapore. A culture-less, sterile mecca to materialism - c'mon, tell me it isn't?

Your awareness of history is either selective or just does not exist Massacres as recorded http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_massacre Also detailed in the book by Dee Brown (Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee published in 1970's) is the experience of what happened to indigenous people of USA. And what happened was genocide It is rather obscene to imply that slavery in USA had a better quality than elsewhere,( china had the cruellest form of slavery !!! What more cruel than export of Africans to USA?) Slavery may not be an American invention but was certainly perfected in USA in industrial trafficking of human-beings in the most appalling conditions. to say that it existed 'everywhere' does which seems to imply some sort of justification

It's certainly interesting. As far as I can see the modern right has virtually nothing in common with the right of the 1930s/40s so I can understand why they reject Hitler and fascism in the context of their modern-day right-wing ideology. That much makes sense. What interests me is how, for some, it's not enough to reject Hitler, they have to aggressively force him to fit into the ideological firmament of their political opponents, regardless of 80 years of solid historical documentation and actual first-hand, living memory. I think it's a similar phenomenon to the rebranding of anything that isn't right-wing as "liberal/left" as if liberalism and leftism are the same thing. It seems that, for those types of people, a thing is defined by their opposition to it instead of by its actual historical and existential narrative.

For all the naysayers, Communist shills and Maoist propagandists. History proves you wrong. Detailed Death Tolls for the Twentieth Century Hemoclysm http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm http://tinyurl.com/62qpe

You're a kook -- seek help.

stay off the booze and crack... and lose some weight you moron.

45 million in 4 years...they were ALL beaten? germany a 1st world country could only kill 6 million jews in 5 yrs? the numbers aint right...how much was it due to the famine? at the end of the day more that 55 million were killed in world war 1 and another 30 million ww2..ALL STARTED BY THE WEST..if u include russia 20 million likked..again by another western country...and last but not the least...europe went to the new world..native population was 200million + now it just over 25 million...at the end of the day every nation..every civilization have committed massacres...the numbers will are just number...no one knows the real figures

please give verifiable PROOF 45 million were murked.....

What we are looking at here is not only communism, or capitalism, or Mao-ism, but something just as important; the transition from an predominantly agrarian to a predominantly industrial society. Now this transition is never gentle, because a whole way of life, to which people are deeply attached, has to be shattered before a new one takes its place. This transition usually demands brutality to carry it out.

The atrocities of Mao?s and Stalin?s wars on their own peasantries are well known. But the same transition in nineteenth century Britain was not exactly gentle, either; peasant farmers brutally evicted under enclosure acts which may have been legal but certainly were not just; child factory labour, the millions who died worn out before they reached thirty, the epidemics of cholera and typhoid in the huge new cities because putting in proper drains was not immediately profitable, plus of course our very own gulag on the far side of the world, to which dissidents were shipped, and where sentences of several hundred lashes for trivial offences were common. And remember, this misery went on for the best part of a century, whereas Mao and Stalin rammed their respective countries through the transition much faster than that.

Also, while 45 million is a huge number, in China numbers are always huge. The current population is a bit over 1.3 billion. That?s one thousand three hundred million. So, very roughly, Mao?s ?great leap forward? killed one in twenty-nine of his population. I wonder if the British Industrial Revolution killed a greater or a smaller proportion?

In order to condemn communism, you would have to demonstrate that the transition from an agrarian to an industrial society is carried out in a way which is worse, more brutal and more wasteful than the same transition is carried out under market or other systems. It may well be possible to demonstrate that; but the question is rather more complex than simply waving figures of so many millions around.

Meanwhile if I were to condemn Mao, it would be for the Cultural Revolution, a deliberate shattering of Chinese society, loosing millions of fanatics on the populace, killing, terrifying and humiliating innocents for no better reason than to safeguard his own political position against members of his own party who favoured different policies. At least people eventually get something out of the transition to industrial society, even if the cost is high. But I cannot see that China gained anything from the Cultural Revolution.

Whilst there is no doubt that Mao was the architect of great suffering why is everyone so keen to accept these figures as fact? Where is the evidence? Much like the higher figures for Stalin's crimes they are almost entirely unsubstantiated. Often they are enthusiastically presented as indisputable facts by the same people who dismiss out of hand studies such as the Lancet paper on the excess death rates in post invasion Iraq. I have no doubt that the pursuit of dogma at the expense of humanity can have catastrophic effects, we have the Potato Famine in Ireland, the Ukrainian Famine, the "free" market collapse in Russian life expectancy and Mao's "reforms" amongst many examples, but I place little faith in death tolls plucked out of thin air with an eye to a good headline and the reinforcement of the current political dogma of favour.

First off it is not my idea I am talking about a fact. Secondly once Hitler achieved power with his murdering followers you would have to be out of your mind to oppose him. George Bush as an example of what I say is responsible for the Iraq war not me. We are all on this planet together and no race or religion has a monopoly on morality. We are all human. I don?t blind myself to the truth because it affects anyone group. By exposing the truth we can also come together and learn from out mistakes. By the way this topic has been flagged and cut . So talk about dictatorial censorship on a even keeled subject because of some felt bias it makes me have little respect for this person. Is this person the new Nazi extremist? Peace .out.

Before anyone believes an unknown historian like Mr. Dikoetter, let other historians delve through the archives and see what they have to say. Mr. Dikoetter seems to be too eager to mark his place in the pantheon of historians - or was financed to do so, what with all this anti- China sentiment being whipped up lately.

This piece of gaudy "tidbits" about Mao's being attracted to "young girls" is quite telling about your knowledgeable expertise on China. Tell me something new in this depraved world, Listen_music2. That's what I meant about not being serious.

Hitler didn't invent national socialism. National socialism was a right-wing philosophy that dates back to 19th Century France.

I hate it when people weight up evil against evil to justify whatever shit happened.

A reasoned reply/statement sir. Thank you. I disagree with you totally, but still reasonable. Refreshing.

It may surprise you to know that many of the people in the UK despise our corrupt leadership, and the Lies they peddle. Bush & Blair are war criminals in my mind, and no, I didn't vote for any of them.

Surely the catholic church has killed many more people in Africa alone with thier refusal to countanance condoms. The previous pope was around for 25 years if you want an individual and not an organisation. That is enough time to reach the 50 million mark.

u clowns can all the comment u want but USA is china bitch..they own u clowns...if they start killing americans i hope ure the first one

We all have to do what we have to do for self preservation. In part the capitalist west was partly to blame. I know before you all start ranting and decrying obscenities at me, let?s look at China before it became PRC. The last dynastic rulers were weak and corruption was rife amongst the courtiers and government, the west bought their armaments to slice up China's wealth and when the imperialistic Japs invaded, they left. So you can see, it was a country already in disarray when Mao came along. The majority of the population was poor and starving because the westerners had shared it with the corrupt elite. Cheng Kai Shek partizaned with the invaders and Mao fought them off which became Taiwan. Mao's vision was to make China the great country which it had been and that meant a lot of hard work and sacrifices. What a lot of posters have failed to see is that without the commitment and drive that was required, China would be nowhere where it is today. Historically, building the Great Wall cost more lives. I can see that Moa had caused deaths through famine rather than genocide like Cambodia or Rwanda. His mistake was mismanaging the most populous country in the world. You complain when taxes go up because the goverment mismanaged the budget. You cannot tar the legacy of a man who had a vision of making his country great. Communism at the time for China worked and was the only way to bring in equality to the masses. George, your comments are philosophical and leaves no doubt that there is no right way or wrong way to go about things. Communism is and will always be the scourge to Capitalism and those in a capitalist society will always scorn communism because they, in truth, have the luxury to do so and fear that one day everything that they have will be reduced to equal amongst all. What they miss is the fact that the capitalism ideology is in itself a selfish notion, even within its own sociological environment. Probably do not have to wait 40 years; 15-20 is a more realistic figure. Let?s wait and see; in all likelihood a large chunk of that 5.5 billion may have withered away.

Germany did not kill the Jews . Hitler was Jewish as proved by DNA testing two weeks ago. The Jewish Hitler took over Germany and killed his own people. Lets get the facts straight people. The Jews killed the Jews in Germany after they took over Germany. I think the Jews owe and apology to the German people now that the truth is know about Hilter being Jewish . Makes sense to me and I am not anti Jewish I love the Jews they are good people but sometimes there are bad Jews like Hitler.

Of course Mao kill millions of people and we all agree with this author. China's Mao was a paradise for the chinese people before the revolution. everything was soooo great to the point where people wanted to move to china. then the communists came over and they destroy that paradise....of course this article will get the sponsorship of all of those who have deals with the rich and powerful, this article will be broadcasted in all of those media outlets that sell the american wars based on lies. go to a bookstore and pick up a book about communism and you will see who is sponsoring it, Wall street journal, new york times, forbes, the economist, and so on and so forth. Yes Mao kill millions of people and we live in the land of freedom and the world is better off without communism.

'Yeah!!................Wot's goin on'? G. Peasemould. It's another 'Indy' Cluster f*** is 'wot' G. Peasemould.

Good point. Very good point. Thank you.

the biggest irony is that USA is an economic basket case while china economy is well the envy of the west.

Actually, Hitler was no more 'Jewish' than (probably) millions of others. He had a smigeon of Eastern DNA, is all. Given enuf folly & money, I could probably trace my line back to a bowl of amino acids, via Abraham & King Tut. OGT

Unlike Stalin, though, Mao had the ability to motivate millions to implement his schemes beyond the coercion of the state security apparatus. In a way, that makes him more disturbing, because he could actually persuade a lot of people to take action voluntarily. Even worse, to induce people to enthusiastically force others to conform. It will be interesting to see if Diktotter reaches the subject of the willing mass participation of many outside the government, or evades this critical subject that some in China have already identified.

It must be the Indy robot working on night duty, Finsburyparker!

This information has been in the public domain for about twenty years in the form of the excellent book, 'White Swans' written by the female author Jung Chang who lived through the horrors of this and more. Her Father was a high official in the party who fell from grace as he had the courage to challenge what was haapening to the people through Moa's edicts. A thought provoking and disturbing book which I commend to all and if you want facts 'robhardy' read it! British book of the year and more it has been banned in China since it's publication.

Sorry, too much of a rush, to correct my posting - This information has been in the public domain for about twenty years in the form of the excellent book, 'Wild Swans' written by the female author Jung Chang who lived through the horrors of this and more. Her Father was a high official in the party who fell from grace as he had the courage to challenge what was happening to the people through Moa's edicts. A thought provoking and disturbing book which I commend to all and if you want facts 'robhardy' read it! British book of the year and more it has been banned in China since it's publication.

Err, because of this bit: "His book, Mao's Great Famine; The Story of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, reveals that while this is a part of history that has been "quite forgotten" in the official memory of the People's Republic of China, there was a "staggering degree of violence" that was, remarkably, carefully catalogued in Public Security Bureau reports, which featured among the provincial archives he studied. In them, he found that the members of the rural farming communities were seen by the Party merely as "digits", or a faceless workforce. For those who committed any acts of disobedience, however minor, the punishments were huge." Right now I am believing that the author is properly translating the official records, and that the officials would not lie that they led to the death of 45million. Like the SS guards they probably believed the records would never be held to account in the public domain. What reason do you have to think that it didnt happen?

There are a lot of good comments on here today. Frank Dikotter is a highly respected China specialist who is fluent in Chinese and thereby able to research in Chinese archives in the PRC. The evidence he seems to have uncovered suggests crimes against humanity on a vast scale, and I for one am certainly going to read this book. It's very interesting because, as Joseph Esherick and Yen Wa have pointed out, Chinese archives are notoriously difficult places to work in. I was under the impression that there is/was a great deal of control which lead to restrictions of access. I also thought that such archives were full of gaping holes because so much was destroyed by the Cultural Revolution. Dikotter maybe flew under the radar here, but it is amazing that documentary evidence of the scale of this mass murder still exists, and that a 'foreigner' has full access to it, and has been able to extract it. We're talking about Party Security Bureau records here, which will surely be the most closely guarded. It's a remarkable achievement for a foreign historian. Perhaps therefore it's in the interest of the leading factions in today's PRC that Mao is discredited. For context, without wanting to gainsay the momentous tragedy of this history, I must also point out that China is a vast country. In the '50s, there were maybe half a billion people living there, so the scale of atrocity must be measured against the scale of the population. I would like to hear this debated by Chinese, as well as Western, academics.

pelago Dear Indy moderator, the replys to comments are set in the wrong places so that the matching context loses its sense. Yeah!!................Wot's goin on? G. Peasemould.

Are you refering to Barack Hussein Obama? Are you smoking some illegal substance as you write, I really do not know where you got the idea that I'm from the US.

To "Listen_Music2 Read my replies and marvel at your profound ignorance.

The main cause of the famines as I have read in several books on Chinese history is that in order to make steel people melted down everything made of iron & steel including the ploughs needed for farming & all cooking pots as well . It was as if all the people when Mao said jump all shouted 'how high' . Nobody worked the land they all tried to make as much steel as they could . In the end there were piles of scrap out of the furnaces that could not be used for anything , it was just a huge waste . Mao bragged that China would make more steel than the UK in 5 years, that didn't happen did it. By the way 21 million died during the Taiping Rebellion & our own Gordon of Khartoum put an end to that . I think he was only a Captain then though. Loads more died during the time Chang Kai Shek was in charge as well so the poor Chinese have not had it easy at all . Read their history it is full of tales of woe I can assure you, this one just happened to have occurred in our living memory that's all.

Another reply to "Listen_Music 2

Dear Indy moderator, the replys to comments are set in the wrong places so that the matching context loses its sense.

See my reply above - and marvel at your own ignorance.

I wouldn't worry about Taiwan's "safety" with Uncle Sam's protective hand over it, or haven't you heard about that one? Some people seem to blurb out sound bytes they pick up here and there, and pass them on as "facts". Thank you for the advice on libraries, but I'm quite convinced I really do know much more than you'll ever know on the subject.

Yours is a good example of the tendency of Third Reich revisionists writing here, adding their two-cents worth of their very own warped propagandas passing for "historical knowledge". It's enough to make one's hair stand on ends.

Right, everyone who aren't classical liberals who adhere to the Chicago or Austrian school of economics are left wing and are progressive/socialist/communist/left-fascist/nazi, which are entirely indistinguishable form one another.That includes people who existed before these economic theories were developed/popularized, like Hitler. FREEDOM!!!!!

And how many have died because of the continuation of his 'policies' since Mao died? And how many are dying currently in"developing" countries because of the policies of "Western" nations ............. and those of "China'?

Oh please. Don't let's start pretending Indians are any more saintly. We all saw what happen at partition. Plenty more atrocities have happened since then do doubt. I'm pretty sure any Dalit can vouch for that.

Yes, true - and when Chiang Kai Shek lost the war with Mao, he and his wife, taking all the imperial treasures collection with them, were flown out to Taiwan by no less than the U.S. Airforce itself. It later was known that Madame Chiang arrogantly treated the airforce staff like her own domestic servants.

Reading your comments, I believe, you should read up history books on China, especially those written by competent historians, or else you'll end up terribly embarassed.

China would not have survived without Mao -it would have simply be given away by Cheng Kai Shek or the wests would have carved it up after the war. No excuses for the deaths, but genocide no. It's always easy to read western literture about the bogeyman that is communism, something abhorent to the west's capitalist thinking. China's this and that, himan rights etc.. Yes there are problems that she has to iron out, but no country is perfect.
Let me ask you whats the difference between what the gestapo did and what the US did with the Guantanamo Bay prisoners. Around 60 or so years.

Your commentary says masses about you. Very misguided all shouting and no trousers. Go follow the your heroes Bush and Blair, the mass murderers of the 21st century.

Err, because of this bit: "His book, Mao's Great Famine; The Story of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, reveals that while this is a part of history that has been "quite forgotten" in the official memory of the People's Republic of China, there was a "staggering degree of violence" that was, remarkably, carefully catalogued in Public Security Bureau reports, which featured among the provincial archives he studied. In them, he found that the members of the rural farming communities were seen by the Party merely as "digits", or a faceless workforce. For those who committed any acts of disobedience, however minor, the punishments were huge." Right now I am believing that the author is properly translating the official records, and that the officials would not lie that they led to the death of 45million. Like the SS guards they probably believed the records would never be held to account in the public domain. What reason do you have to think that it didnt happen?

"The left has been faking history for decades. Look at the myth that Hitler was right wing." If Hitler was left-wing how come all of the people in Europe and the US who admired him in the 1930s were right-wingers?

Hitler was right wing. Just because sixty years later some idiots from the Republican Party USA decided to start calling him otherwise because of some crap they read on the internets doesnt make it different.

I agree. Rohm could be considered a kind of socialist, which was one of the reasons why Hitler massacred the SA forces during the Night of the Long Knives. It was one of the conditions which the powers that be placed on the Nazis before they were allowed to take power. Otherwise, they just wouldn't have let Hitler near the reins of power.

Believe it or not the spectrum of right-wing ideologies doesn't begin or end at conservatism.

Surely communism is to blame. But under capitalism we now have 1 billion that are underfed and dying. And about 600 million of us own almost everything there is. That leaves 5,5 billion who have next to nothing. China was to blame then, who's to blame now? Let's discuss that in about 40 years.

About a fifth as many that were murdered due to western imperialism and capitalism, since you're lurching off topic.

And yet Nationalism isn't. What could it mean?

And you sir are a pathetic example of the spoiled left, enjoy the boon of those who provided the blood, sweat, and tears of those that quite literally provided for your right to spew your horsefeathers. No debate. You aren't worth the time because you don't understand the basics. Communism, socialism, and by any other name the various lefty soft tyrannies DO NOT WORK because they are antithetic to HUMAN NATURE. Period. Facts are stubborn things. Show us one ONE that has! But don't worry, those of us on the wall with weapons will continue to protect your sorry self because you are not aware of the real world and how it works and not likely to last long when the shit hits the fan. And its coming..

There's a problem here; or rather two problems. Firstly there is a very large number of competing defintions of "socialism", many of which contradict each other. Secondly Hitler said and promised a very large number of things, and most of those contradicted each other too. He was, among other things, a practical politician, and understood the importance of trying to be all things to all people. Also he lied a lot. So very simplistic face-value defintions aren't going to take us very far in this area. My own view is that stretching the defintion of "socialism" to include naziism stretches it so far as to rob it of any meaningful precision. Naziism has always been considered an extreme right-wing movement, and certainly was a movement which imprisoned and killed many of Germany's socialists. Now if you are going to talk about totalitarian systems, that's different, and makes sense. There are totalitarianisms of both left and right. They have their similarities, and they also have their differences.

And I urge you to start reading books by respected historians who analyse facts rather than agenda-driven far-right Europhobes who care only about making history fit their own narrative.

you fit the definition of a sociopath... do you have any friends besides Tories and your pet cats?

I agree with your last comment. I think the picture of the Industrial revolution is one sided. There were great abuses but the population continued to grow as the death rate fell throughout this period and people-on the whole-started to live longer.
The enclosures enabled people to be better fed and foreign writers about 1850 thought the plight of their own working class was worse.
The big difference is that the British not Government was deliberately killing large numbers of their own population.
As for Australia alongside the brutality of some camps there were those who said that on release they could live a better life than back home. It was one of the reasons that transportation ended in the 1860s.

And those of you in the UK and US are just as guilty as they for re-electing them back into office after the bloody and totally illegitimate invasion. No death camps, just mass bombings, use of outlawed weapons, rendition flights, torture, all done for the displacement and killing of innocent civilians. Yes, good ol'capitalist way of thinking -getting to the oil that is. didn't want you to feel left out!

Of course none of these tyrants personally killed anyone but had their henchmen do the dirty work. I wonder who?s the greatest individual killer of all time? My own contender is Solomon Morel commandant of the Swietochlowice camp where thousands of ethnic Germans were held. By the testimony of the Jewish prison guards and survivors, Morel personally killed over 1,000 prisoners normally by beating their brains out with a big wooded club. Indeed, one of the characters in the sick movie ?Inglorious bastards? is clearly based upon Morel. When American-Jewish author John Sack published his book ?An Eye for an Eye? about the Jewish run death camps of Poland, Morel fled to Israel where the regime refused to acknowledge Poland?s extradition requests for Morel for his war crimes citing, among other excuses, ?anti-Semitism?.

since capitalism and communism are economic models, not political models, hitler was essentially in the middle on economics. The state was a totalitarian political system. Also, much of the early nazi propaganda was designed to be coop popular revolutionary propaganda from other parties. Hence the whole "worker's party". National Socialist just means strong centralized government and extreme nationalism. The political spectrum is not exactly left right (money) , but also totalitarian to anarchist( govt authority). Check out this is test to see where you fit on the compass and who you compare to others. http://www.politicalcompass.org/

Death by 'Death Camp' or death by bombing, chemical weapons, radiation poisoning, or bullets....you choose...its all bad.

Also let's not forget that Mao was a powerhungry bastard. When his paranoia set in, he started his second revolution, during which hyped and brainwashed students cracked down on everyone who might have been a possible reactionist. The zeal with which those kids did that overshadows even the Nazis and other socialist stormtroopers in other countries.

So now what? Is a writer's revelation going to usher in a new period of worker's rights , so wages can rise in China, civil rights be respected, undoing the crushing damage to working class families in the West? I think not. Capitalism is nothing if not adaptable - but a scholarly debate about Historic truths is well and good.

When one looks at "Evil" as done by Mao ,which at the end of the day has made China what it is now Should one forget the "Evil" acts committed to make USA what it is now? After all it is a nation formed in genocide of a people and built on backs of slaves. Consequences of those acts still resonate but people choose not to hear Tyrants mentioned were all at one time supported or created by USA, including Sadam Hussein, and countless south American Fascists . Would it be useful to look at Mao in some greater perspective? If we look at numbers 45 million murdered by Mao ?? millions murdered in making of America? More than 45 million if only the genocide of Red Indians & slavery is taken in to account And what have Americans learnt from that ? Probably nothing when one looks at recent events

Lazy, mindless equivocation

"We stand for the maintenance of private property... We shall protect free enterprise as the most expedient, or rather the sole possible economic order."- Adolf Hitler. "I absolutely insist on protecting private property... we must encourage private initiative." Adolf Hitler To deny that Hitler did not support capitalism shows poor understanding that many of his backers where the industrialists in Germany and also the small to medium sized businesses. Of course he did not support free market capitalism, as this would go against his ideas of nationalism, but the idea that that is the only form of capitalism is incorrect. To simplify the meaning of capitalism, it is where means of production and distribution are privately owned and operated for a private profit, this can be seen throughout Germany 1933-45 where during the beginning of Hitler's control much of the public sector was privatized to German capitalists and Hitler's idea of socialism was based on the idea that people had enough food to live on, not that the means of the production be owned under common ownership.

you're funny.

He's right up there with Blair & Bush then.

If you are going to broaden the issue from communism to a general study of totalitarianisms of both the right and left, you may have a point. This is a legitimate field of political study. I remember reading Hannah Arendt on it many years ago. She is rather good and worth reading. But behind this, there is a more basic question. To what extent is it legitimate to try to deliberately design a society? Because of course, if you are setting out in a process of deliberate design, the question inevitably arises of what do you do about the people who disagree with or even oppose your design? We know where that one goes. However, if you do not attempt to design deliberately, and instead leave it up to the ?impersonal actions of the market?, with ?free economic agents maximising their own welfare?, the situation isn?t much better. Adam Smith?s idea of the ?invisible hand? is that if everyone pursues their own individual interests, by some mysterious mechanism ideal social and collective outcomes also emerge. The problem with the ?invisible hand? is that it doesn?t work. You get things like very large cholera epidemics because putting in proper drains is not short-term profitable. However, it does become more difficult to identify the culprits. In a totalitarian system, there is an identifiable dictator to blame. In a market system, it is more difficult to know who to blame. In this sense, a market system is a wonderful device for enabling the rich and the powerful to avoid individual responsibilities for their actions. That is one of the reasons why they like it so much. Plus, of course, the military are always ready to act as ?company cop?. They have done this in defence of the rich beneficiaries of the market system, in every conflict from Peterloo to Iraq. On the whole, and as I have said, I don?t think we are a very nice species. Whether we are talking about right-wing totalitarianisms, left-wing totalitarianisms, market systems, or indeed any other sort of system, there will always be some author, no doubt living in considerable comfort, who is prepared to produce justifications for shortened lives, disease, slaughter and death.

The problem with claiming Hitler as a left-winger is that the type of right-wing thinking that Hitler embraced was completely discredited and (mostly) abandoned during the Second World War. It's very much worth remembering that Hitler was widely lauded among right-wing, not left-wing, luminaries across Europe and in the US, and even vice versa. Hitler cited Henry Ford (as opposed to Karl Marx) as an inspiration, just as Henry Ford admired Hitler's ideology. Thanks to Hitler, fascism is now a political museum piece.

Sorry to disagree with you 'Steve Wilds', the Web has been a goldmine for me in respect of Electronic circuits & good technical advice to enable me to make them 'Ackle'! But, when it comes to Politics, History, et-al, it's not so hot, but then again, you could say the same about 'Books'! G. Peasemould.

finsburyparker 0 minutes ago Sorry to disagree with you 'Steve Wilds', the Web has been a goldmine for me in respect of Electronic circuits & good technical advice to enable me to make them 'Ackle'! Plus other practical advice etc, etc. But, when it comes to Politics, History, et-al, it's not so hot, but then again, you could say the same about 'Books'! ......Yes?? G. Peasemould.

'a teeming swarm of competing memes swirling around the planet looking for other minds to latch upon...' mmm...I like that writing...good stuff!

"For what?????"

Well in Stalin and Mao's case, for the sake of a forced high-speed transition from an predominantly agrarian to a predominantly industrial society; a transition which, as I have already pointed out, is never gentle, no matter what type of system it is carried out under.

Hitler and Mussolini are different cases. Both came to power in countries which had already industrialised. Many would not consider them socialist, at least not without broadening the meaning of the term so far as to rob it of any useful precision. But that opens up a series of very large debates.

The sad fact is that just about every social and political system that exists or ever has existed is founded on blood and atrocity. I often feel we are not a very nice species. In fact, the older I get, the more people remind me of a troupe of baboons, hysterical, cruel and vicious. However, baboons do have some redeeming features.

'Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the world has stood up and stopped the b******d's, the bitch that bore them is in heat again. --Bertold Brecht, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui G. Peasemould.

'Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastards, the bitch that bore them is in heat again'. --Bertold Brecht, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. (Slightly modified). G. Peasemould.

Not just lefties smeared as Hitler lovers, atheists too now. See the Pope's latest pontifications. Anyone for the dem tomorrow, 13:30 Hyde Park Corner http://www.protest-the-pope.org.uk/

And those of you in the UK and US are just as guilty as they for re-electing them back into office after the bloody and totally illegitimate invasion. No death camps, just mass bombings, use of outlawed weapons, rendition flights, torture, all done for the displacement and killing of innocent civilians. Yes, good ol'capitalist way of thinking -getting to the oil that is.

therefore it is ok hmmn???

The Manchu's did not go along with footbinding either , Qing Dynasty.

I don't agree with you ,Mao just want to help the people who lived in China,if he would not stand up ,people in China would killed by Stalin and Hitler

The history of China is something I really should read more about.

I don't agree with you, Mao was helping the people who lived in China,wherever the war happened the people would killed,he just want to help more people in China,if he would not stand up, people in China would killed by Stalin and Hitler.

Well, I can't disgree with that.

There is no doubt that serious human rights excesses have occurred in China since 1945. Nevertheless, in terms of rising Asian giants and the respect accorded by the rest of the world, particularly the West, it is interesting to note how others bend over backwards to do business with China as opposed to, say, with India, despite the latter being the world's largest open and free democracy. Does this mean that the ruthless approach of Chinese leaders to nation building, in comparison to the strategy adopted by India, is precisely what has contributed to China today being able to compete with the likes of the USA and Japan on the world stage?

/Facepalm

And, like Saddam, Useful Idiots shouted the cause of these vermin You can read about the Saddam.Iraq oil lie you have been promoting ignorantly in yesterdays FT, An Economic Giant Awakes. These people are just people. Stalin, Mao, Saddam, all killed ijn the name of a story, a stupid ignorant story. When you look at the Iraq story of oil theft/control and US im perialism it is clear that nothing has changed. Human minds are as dysfunctional as ever, because it is our evolution that means we are simply unable to think rationally. Read Nasim Taleb's Black Swan to see why everything you think you believe is just a lie originating from ape like instincts that we are not even concious of. Well done everyone!

????????????Chris???..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao:_The_Unknown_Story

Why aren't you working for the Independent.

No it was political ideology not religious or anti religious doctrine

Luckily he was only 30% bad otherwise there would be no Chinese alive.

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Wild Swans isnt it?

How about that for "aggresive secularism"? all those deaths - and yet, not a religious figure in sight. Isn't that odd?

Mao came from a wealthy family of landowners. Hitler was the son of a partly-Jewish minor customs official. Recent DNA research on 39 of his relatives confirm it: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/2010/08/24/2010-08-24_nazi_leader_adolf_hitler_had_jewish_and_african_relatives_dna_test_suggests.html They have little in common.

Mao was not known for kindness or humanity. these statistics put him up there with Stalin, who like Mao is still regarded as a hero by many