Posted On: Friday - May 29th 2026 2:59PM MST
In Topics: Commies History China
Somewhat of a series has started here at Peak Stupidity, call it The Evils of Hard-Core Communism. The first was a somewhat random history post with documentary video, The Communist Khmer Rouge takeover, the Intellectuals, and evil Pol Pot. For a prequel with a non-Oriental version - same continent, though - the reader may want to read our book review of Alex Solzhenitsyn's A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. There are a few more biggies, but I don't know how far we'll got with this - there's lots of smaller but more urgent stupidity to cover.
For pure number of his countrymen killed by Communist ideology in all of history (so far), Chairman Mao would get highest honors. Proportionally, Pol Pot killed more, 1/3 of his countryment. Mao only killed 6-9% of the over 600 million Chinese people that were alive before his "Great Leap Forward".*
China had had famines before, but this was caused by deliberate policy come down from on high, the absolute authority of Chairman Mao Zedong. To fulfil Communist idealogy, he decreed that hundreds of millions of peasant farmers should leave their own fields, farm cooperatively, and some would build mini blast furnaces to churn out junk metal for industrial production goals. Hand farm implements themselves (all they had was hand implements) were melted down too to INCREASE PRODUCTION! Yeah, Mao's goal, to go in line with some USSR production goals, was to have China producing more steel than the UK did.** It was just numbers, though, to make one man feel like a real Communist.
Farming was destroyed by the collective economy The local cadres found they had come up with big lies on food production numbers to compete with others that lied to please the Mao Regime and save their butts. This meant that when the Central Gov't came for its 1/3 or 1/4 portion of a district's production, that portion might very well be all there was. The people were left to starve. From the video, it sounds like Mao really didn't have much of a problem with that either.
The video is very well done. I tried to detect AI - the word "dynasty" was pronounced "din-esty" a couple of times. That was the only thing that made me wonder, for just a bit. I really DO NOT WANT to listen to AI, ever, but I think it's human narrator.
People ate mud, clay, bark off trees. Parents buried their little ones. Cannibalism happened. Other famines before in China had been very bad. This one, causing the death of 35 - 55 million*** Chinese people, was directly CAUSED by one man, the Chairman of the Communist Party, Dear Leader of the country, who had absolute power along with being massivly stupid. This is not a good formula:
I know someone whose Grandfather died of starvation due to Chairman Mao's Great Leap Forward. We should all appreciate each and every meal. "Oh, America could NEVER get like this!" I agree something like this IS very hard to imagine happening in America, but just watch for the guys like the Mayor Mamdamis. We can stand a few as examples here and there, and who cares about New York City, really? We just better not let the lot of them get into real power. I have a friend who owes me a few more guns. I'm gonna take him up on this soon.
* The huge Civil War known as the Taiping Rebellion a century earlier resulted in 20 million men being killed in the fighting and perhaps another 30 million more due to the ravages of war, disease and starvation. Is this any better? it wasn't due to the evil and stupidity of one man alone, so I dunno...
** Ironically, right at a half century after the death of this evil Communist, due to the end of hard-core Communism, China produces 400 times - you read that right - as much steel as the UK does. (~ 1.6 billion tons vs. 4 million tops.)
*** The video has details on the numbers.
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