Originally posted by
[email protected] 23, 2007 03:57 am
I'll say it again; prove it. :lol:
I can't prove that output was decreased, but I can surely give sites showing that it was a monstrous and stupid thing for mao to do.
http://www.catallarchy.net/blog/archives/2...st-cannibalism/ (http://www.catallarchy.net/blog/archives/2005/05/01/communist-cannibalism/)
While these stories are horrific, they pale in comparison to the history given by Wei Jingsheng about China’s Great Leap Forward.1
As soon as I arrived here, I often heard peasants talking about the Great Leap Forward as though it was some sort of apocalypse that they had by some miracle escaped. Quite fascinated, I questioned them in detail about the subject so that soon I too was convinced that the “three years of natural catastrophes” had not been as natural as all that, and had rather been the result of a series of political blunders. The peasants said, for example, that in I959-60, during the “Communist Wind” [one of the official names for the Great Leap Forward] their hunger had been so great that they had not even been strong enough to harvest the rice crop when it was ready, and that it would otherwise have been a relatively good year for them. Many of them died of hunger watching the grains of rice fall into the fields, blown off by the wind. In some villages there was literally no one left to take in the harvest. One time I was with a relative who lived a small distance away from our village. On the way to his home, we went past a deserted village. All the houses had lost their roofs. Only the mud walls remained.
Thinking it was a village that had been abandoned during the Great Leap Forward, when all the villages were being reorganized and relocated, I asked why the walls hadn’t been knocked down to make room for more fields. My relative replied: “But these houses all belong to people, and you can’t knock them down without their permission.” I stared at the walls and couldn’t believe that they were actually inhabited. “Of course they were inhabited! But everyone here died during the `Communist Wind,’ and no one has ever come back. The land was then shared out among the neighboring villages. But because it seemed possi*ble that some of them might come back, the living quarters were never shared out. Still, that was so long ago, I don’t think anyone will come back now.”
We walked along beside the village. The rays of the sun shone on the jade-green weeds that had sprung up between the earth walls, accen*tuating the contrast with the rice fields all around, and adding to the desolation of the landscape. Before my eves, among the weeds, rose up one of the scenes I had been told about, one of the banquets at which the families had swapped children in order to eat them. I could see the worried faces of the families as they chewed the flesh of other people’s children. The children who were chasing butterflies in a nearby field seemed to be the reincarnation of the children devoured by their par*ents. I felt sorry for the children, but not as sorry as I felt for their parents. What had made them swallow that human flesh, amidst the tears and grief of other parents-flesh that they would never have imag*ined tasting, even in their worst nightmares? In that moment I under*stood what a butcher he had been, the man “whose like humanity has not seen in several centuries, and China not in several thousand years":” Mao Zedong. Mao Zedong and his henchmen, with their criminal political system, had driven parents mad with hunger and led them to hand their own children over to others, and to receive the flesh of others to appease their own hunger. Mao Zedong to wash away the crime that he had committed in assassinating democracy (an allusion to the Hundred Flowers trap], had launched the Great Leap Forward, and obliged thou*sands and thousands of peasants dazed by hunger to kill one another with hoes, and to save their own lives thanks to the flesh and blood of their childhood companions. They were not the real killers; the real killers were Mao Zedong and his companions. At last I understood where Peng Dehuai had found the strength to attack the Central Com*mittee of the Party led by Mao, and at last I understood why the peas*ants loathed Communism so much, and why they had never allowed anyone to attack the policies of Liu Shaoqi, “three freedoms and one guarantee.” For the good and simple reason that they had no intention of ever having to eat their own flesh and blood again, or of killing their companions to eat them in a moment of instinctual madness. That reason was far more important than any ideological consideration.