| RED TERROR IN ASIA
One of the millions of victims of Mao's guerilla
war. |
 Though
born in Europe, Communism's first revolution took place farther east,
in Russia. In the first half of the 20th century, it moved
even farther to eastward until 1949, when China-the world's populous country-fell
to guerillas led by Mao Tse-tung. For ten years, Mao's militants engaged
in attacks against government forces across China to bring about the world's
second largest Communist revolution. The results of this second revolution
were the same as in the original Bolshevik revolution: criminal assaults,
mass murders, torture, famine, impoverishment, degeneration, resulting
in an introverted, depressed society of fear.
After Lenin, Mao brought the second important change to Communist theory,
bringing innovations to Marxism in three important areas:
1) Marx and the Communist ideologues following him laid great importance
on the idea of the "working class" proletariat.
But Mao believed that the peasant class was the true leaders of the revolution
and proposed the idea of "peasant socialism."
2) Instead of following Lenin's idea of a Communist party demonstrating
in city centers to prepare the way for revolution, Mao established a "guerilla
war" and organized a Communist party based in the countryside and
in the mountains.
3) In place of the movement toward internationalism, the foundation of
Marxism that Lenin adopted, Mao favored nationalism and developed the
idea of "National Socialism."
Chinese Communism developed and came to power
with Stalin's support. But Red China's brutality was worse than
Stalin's. |
The reason behind these three different approaches was the conditions
in which Mao found himself. In China, where almost the whole population
was composed of peasants with a conservative, nationalist frame of mind,
Mao had no other choice than to establish "nationalist peasant socialism."
Unavoidably, Mao gave priority to the peasants, applied the model of the
"country guerilla," and organized among the peasantry.
This explains not only why Maoism was different from Leninism, but why
it became an even more savage, barbarous and rigid ideology. The advent
of Maoism added to Communism-which was already pitiless and bloodthirsty-a
greater degree of ignorance, fanatic nationalism and hostility to culture
and civilization. Total calamity was the result. Maoism was the worst
kind of Communism; in fact we can say it was the worst of the worst.
Maoism influenced not only China but later passed to Cambodia (in the
time of the Khmer Rouge), North Korea, and even Albania. Maoism gained
power with Stalin's help, and Soviet-Chinese relations were very good
in Stalin's day. But this relationship fell apart in the 1960s, and the
two countries became enemies. Sino-Soviet rivalry divided the Communist
world, separating allies of China from those allied with the Soviet Union.
What Maoism brought upon China, and those Communist countries that followed
China, was as dark and bloody as the Russia of Lenin and Stalin. But as
the "worst of the worst," Maoism created much more terrible regimes.
In the following pages, we'll examine the red savagery that embraced
Asia.
Darwin's Visit to China
Communism is really a European ideology, first proposed by European philosophers
and put into effect for the first time by European activists. It's really
nothing more than the result of the materialist hostility towards religion
that took root in Europe. It is curious that this ideology reached and
took root in an isolated country like China, so distant from Europe in
every way. But if we look at China's recent history, a familiar pattern
emerges: the coming of Communism to China meant the coming of atheism
which took root thanks to Darwinism.
  
Darwin, Huxley and Galton were three influential
evolutionists who led some of the Chinese intellectuals to Fascism
and Communism. |
Until the end of the 18th century, China was an inward- looking
society, isolated from Western culture. The coming of English merchants
in the 19th century, brought many changes to the country. With
them, these merchants brought a substance called opium, unknown in China
before. Consumption of opium spread like an epidemic in Chinese society
and was the cause of two wars between England and China. Finally, England
preponderated over China. Hong Kong and other important Chinese cities
fell under English influence.
In this way, English imperialism entered China and with it, came Darwinism
that gave imperialism scientific support. In the 19th century,
the materialist and Darwinist ideas that had dominated Europe began spreading
quickly among Chinese intellectuals. In The Encyclopedia of Evolution,
Richard Milner writes:
During the 19th century, the West regarded
China as a sleeping giant, isolated and mired in ancient traditions. Few
Europeans realized how avidly Chinese intellectuals
seized on Darwinian evolutionary ideas and saw in them a hopeful
impetus for progress and change. According to the Chinese writer Hu Shih
(Living Philosophies, 1931), when Thomas Huxley's
book Evolution and Ethics
was published in 1898, it was immediately acclaimed
and accepted by Chinese intellectuals. Rich men sponsored cheap
Chinese editions so they could be widely distributed to the masses.57
Darwinism fostered Communism and Fascism in
China. Fascist leader Chiang Kai-Shek was influenced by Darwinism.
|
Just as young Turks were captivated by Western materialist ideas at the
end of the Ottoman period, so in China, ideologues appeared who adopted
materialism and Darwinism. As a result, the Chinese Empire that had lasted
thousands of years was abolished in 1911 and replaced by the Republic
of China. Those who founded the republic, no matter how anti-Western their
rhetoric and policy may have been, adopted the same racist and Social
Darwinist understanding that had justified Western imperialism. In an
article in the American magazine New Republic, senior editor
Jacob Heilbrunn writes:
The idea of using Western ideas and inventions against
the West was at its zenith in those days. In the wake of the famous May
4, 1919, demonstrations in Beijing, calls for modernity and patriotism,
science and democracy, gained currency among intellectuals. ..."Lurking
behind the scenes," as Tu Wei-ming [a professor of Chinese History and
Philosophy] has pointed out in the winter 1996 issue of Daedalus,
"was neither science nor democracy but scientism and populism.... [I]nstrumental
rationality and Jacobin-like collectivism fundamentally restructured the
Chinese intellectual world in the post-May Fourth period." Reformers,
such as Liang Qichao, who edited a clandestine journal, were influenced
by a debased but popular version of Darwin and Spencer. They saw race
war as the key to progress.58
The racist thinker Herbert Spencer, mentioned in the quotation above,
was a contemporary of Darwin, whose theory he adapted to social science.
Among other violent, unjust and cruel ideas, Spencer proposed the superiority
of the European races and the need for continual conflict among races
and nations, suggesting that society should not assist its poor and weak
members.
Among Chinese intellectuals influenced
by Darwin and Spencer were Yen Fu and Ting
Wen-chiang, whose ideas greatly influenced the foundation of modern
China. In Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao, the American historian
Benjamin Schwartz emphasizes Yen Fu and his Darwinist ideas significantly.
According to Schwartz, Yen Fu takes the Western ideologies and theories
he reads such as Spencer, and sees them as prescriptive ways to transform
society and achieve the goal of wealth and power.59
Schwartz states that Darwin's theories do not merely
describe reality. They prescribe values and a course of action.60
Ting Wen-chiang was another important Chinese
ideologue and leader in Communism, whose views were founded on nothing
other than Darwinism. Ding was the most important representative of the
"New Culture" movement that influenced China
in the 1910s and '20s. This movement's most important feature was its
opposition to Confucianism, the religion of the Chinese people, and its
seeking to replace it with a materialist world view. (Ironically, the
New Culture movement was a leading inspiration of both Mao's Communism
and its rival, Chiang Kai-Shek's Fascism.)
In Ting Wen-chiang: Science and China's New
Culture, the American historian Charlotte Furth examines Ting Wen-chiang,
the dean of the New Culture movement, in considerable detail. According
to her, Wen-chiang merely translated the ideas of
evolutionist ideologues such as Darwin, Huxley and Spencer into Chinese.
For this reason, Furth even refers to Ding as the "Huxley
of China."61 (Huxley, Darwin's biggest supporter,
was known in his day as "Darwin's bulldog.")
Ting Wen-chiang studied zoology and geology at Glasgow
University in Scotland. Returning to China in 1911, he exerted great efforts
to spread materialist and Darwinist ideas in the newly-founded Chinese
Republic, even supporting the theory of eugenics
proposed by Francis Galton, Darwin's cousin.62
(Eugenics proposed the disposal of those within a race who were sick or
disabled, thus ensuring so-called universal advancement by the "mating"
of the healthy ones. This theory was applied most widely in Nazi Germany.)
James Reeve Pusey, a Harvard professor of history and an important commentator
on the New Culture movement, says:
The New Culture Movement's cries
were all cries Darwin had backed before, and he now backed them
again in the same old way. He [Darwin] was the patron
saint of the New Culture Movement. . . [H]is theory, so the New
Culture Movement's leaders still insisted, "proved". . . that "the present
surpasses the past, and the future surpasses the present." That was the
faith behind the Anarchists' injunction to tsun chin po ku (respect the
present and belittle the past) and the Communists' later injunction to
hou chin po ku (extol the present and belittle the past). 63
As a result of the spread of Darwinism in China, the emergence of this
kind of Chinese ideologues at the beginning of the 20th century gave birth,
first, to the Chinese nationalist Kuomintang party with its fascist tendencies,
then to Chinese Communism. In an article written in the periodical New
Scientist, Michael Ruse, a Canadian philosopher wrote:
These ideas took root at once
[In China], for China did not have the innate intellectual and
religious barriers to evolution that often existed in the West. Indeed,
in some respects, Darwin seemed almost Chinese! …Taoist and Neo-Confucian
thought had always stressed the "thingness" of humans. Our being at one
with the animals was no great shock…Today, the official philosophy is
Marxist-Leninism (of a kind). But without the secular materialist approach
of Darwinism (meaning now the broad social philosophy), the ground would
not have been tilled for Mao and his revolutionaries to sow their seed
and reap their crop.64
"China And Charles Darwin"
In China and Charles Darwin, Harvard University
historian James Reeve Pusey explained that Darwinism had great influence
in China and prepared the foundation for both Communist and Fascist
ideas. |
Darwinism's influence on 20th century China was so great that the famous
Harvard historian, James Reeve Pusey, devoted a book entitled China
and Charles Darwin to this one subject. In this book he relates how
Darwin's Origin of Species, published in England and translated into Chinese
36 years later in 1895, spread with incredible speed among Chinese intellectuals,
with immense social and political effects. in the preface to his book,
Pusey writes:
"The weaker go down before the stronger" - After 1895,
the Japanese-Chinese translation of the famous Spencerian slogan, "the
survival of the fittest," yu sheng lieh pai (the superior win, the inferior
lose), ...was to force its way into a thousand essays and dominate for
a time the Chinese editorial mind as the argument for almost any course
of action.65
In the same book, Pusey examines the currents of thought developing in
China in the first half of the 20th century and tells how they established
the foundation for Maoism. One of the people he considered was Liang Chi-chao,
was a well-known writer of the time who was captivated by Darwinism and
materialist philosophy.
He [Liang Ch'i-ch'ao] mentioned idealism and materialism
at least as early as the October 16, 1902 issue of the Hsin min ts'ung
pao [a Chinese journal]. Probably he had mentioned them somewhere before,
for he gave no explanation of their meaning, and yet he
did imply that materialism was the better and that it was winning out
over idealism, thanks to Darwin. "How great," he wrote, "is the world
of the last twenty-four years, a world belonging to the theory of evolution.
Materialism has arisen and idealism has cowered in a corner..."66
China and Charles Darwin relates how Darwinism was responsible for establishing
China's disputatious revolutionist culture and its great influence on
bringing Maoism to power:
Darwin helped inspire a true renaissance of Chinese thought by specifically
challenging (or seeming to challenge) certain favorite traditional ideas
and by discrediting all ancient authority...But
it was cut short-by the early imposition of a neo-orthodoxy, the Thought
of Mao Tse-tung.
That "imposition," of course, also owed much to
Darwin. For Darwin had legitimized violent change and revolution. Surely
that was one of the most momentous things Darwin did to China... At any
rate, those Chinese who were convinced that China needed rebellion were
desperately in need of some legitimizing theory, for without the Mandate
of Heaven rebellion for three thousand years had been one of the two cardinal
sins (the other being filial impiety). It was that powerful sense of sin
that Mao Tse-tung, Wu Chih-hui, Sun Yat-sen, and even Liang Chi'i-ch'ao
combated so strenuously in all their Darwinian protestations that revolution
was legitimate. Mao Tse-tung finally claimed that Marxism-Leninism could
all be boiled down to one sentence, tsao fan yu li-"To rebel
is justified" ...[That expression] meant that rebellion was a natural
law, and that lesson had been taught to Mao Tse-tung not by Marx but by
Sun Yat-sen and Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, who had learned it, rightly or wrongly,
from Darwin.
Darwin justified revolution and thereby
helped the cultural revolutions of Liang
Ch'i-ch'ao, Hu Shih and Mao Tse-tung (and,
of course, so many others), and the political revolutions
of Sun Yat-sen, Chiang K'ai-shek, and Mao
Tse-tung....
Marxists I assume, would not like this analysis. They would probably
say that Social Darwinists were not responsible for their victory... There
was indeed "people power" at work at the end of the Communist Revolution,
people power generated by landlord oppression, capitalist exploitation,
and imperialist (at the last, Japanese) aggression. But that people power
could have been tapped by many forces. (The Nationalists could have tapped
it.) It was tapped by Marxists because there were Marxists ready to tap
it. But the Marxists were intellectuals.
...Marxism converted intellectuals-but intellectuals
who were already converted to Darwinism. If the intellectual Marxists
were the "prescient," the hsien chich hsien chueh, who awakened the masses,
China's earlier Social Darwinists, Yen Fu, Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, Sun Yat-sen,
Li Shih-tseng, Wu Chih-hui, were the "prescient" who awakened the Marxists....
The question remains, "In fitting
China for Marxism and the Thought of Mao Tse-tung, what did Darwin do
to China?" This question must be asked.67
His analysis clearly shows how Darwinism became the basis of Chinese
Communism. For thousands of years, China had been an isolated empire.
In a matter of ten years it became Red China, and the motive power behind
this change in thinking was Darwinism.
But what did Darwinism do to prepare China for Maoism?
How did Mao Become a Communist?
A Chinese Communist propaganda poster. |
 
He inherited Darwinist ideology from Sun Yat-sen.
After reading Darwin, Mao became an ardent Communist. |
Up to now, we've examined the change in ideas that prepared China for
Maoism. But a personal dimension of this also needs to be examined: Mao
himself.
Mao Tse-tung was born in 1893 to a family in a southern China village.
From his childhood he always wanted to see Beijing and imagined living
there. At age fifteen, he began to read young people's magazines published
in the capital, and especially liked New Youth, a publication of the New
Culture movement. This magazine was filled with articles by Darwinist
ideologues such as Yen Fu and Ting Wen-chiang.
In 1918, Mao visited the city he always wanted to see. There he made
friends with Yang Changzhi, a teacher from Beijing University who recognized
the young man's talent and got him a job at the university library. Mao
began his job of cataloguing and dusting the books and cleaning the rooms.
He became friends with Li Dazhao, the director of the library, whose articles
in New Youth he had read and liked. Li Dazhao had Communist ideas;
for this reason, the university library became known as the Red Room.
Chinese Communist theoreticians often met there, where Mao heard the names
of Marx, Engels and Lenin for the first time.
But the man who brought the young
Mao to embrace Communism was not from Beijing. After spending a few months
at the Beijing library, Mao went to Shanghai and met Chen
Duxiu, a classical scholar and a friend of Li Dazhao who had made
a special study of Darwin.68 This Communist leader's
most striking feature was that he was an ardent
Darwinist. He can be considered as China's most important advocate of
Darwinism and became Mao's most important tutor. Years later, Mao was
to say, "He had influenced me more than anyone else."69
In her book Mao, Clare Hollingsworth, a historian at
the University of Hong Kong said that Mao was greatly
influenced by the Darwinist views of Chen Duxiu and even in the
1970s he looked back nostalgically to the studies of Darwin he did in
his youth.70
After a bloody revolution, Mao announced the
establishment of the People's Republic of China. |
Chen Duxiu educated Mao in the scientific aspects of Darwinism; on the
political level, he was influenced by Sun Yat-sen, the Chinese leader
of the time. Interestingly, Sun Yat-sen, regarded as the founder of modern
China and of the Kuomintang (the Nationalist Chinese Party), was also
a Darwinist. In an article in The New Republic, the American researcher
Jacob Heilbrunn writes:
...[I]t was the great Chinese revolutionary and
nationalist Sun Yat-sen who decisively influenced Mao. Sun held
that the Chinese had to embrace nationalism in order to defeat the Western
powers, and he preached a doctrine of political
Darwinism: "although natural forces work slowly, yet they can exterminate
great races."
As a young organizer for the communists in Hunan in
the early 1920s, Mao supported Sun, who was the patriarch of the Kuomintang
(KMT). Sun created a temporary alliance between his nationalist party
and the communists, and, in 1926, Mao was even briefly given control of
the KMT's propaganda department.71
Brainwashed by the ideas of Darwin and Marx, Mao became an active, passionate
Communist from 1920 onward. With eleven friends who thought as he did,
he founded the Communist Party in Shanghai in 1921. Afterward, he strengthened
the Communist Party by various alliances, skirmishes, guerilla battles
and propaganda. For a while, the Communists under Mao cooperated with
the Nationalist Party, but in the second half of the 1920s, each side
became hostile to the other. Mao relocated his militants in Jiangxi province
in southern China and there formed a "liberated zone" outside the central
authority.
The struggle between the two sides lasted for years. After World War
II, the Communist "liberated zone" continued to grow, to the point that
it encompassed almost all of China. In 1949, Mao and his Communists entered
Beijing and proclaimed the "People's Republic of China." With this, the
world witnessed the second Communist Revolution after the Bolshevik Revolution
in 1917-a second revolution at least as bloody as the first.
The "Great Leap Forward" and the Great Famine
A Red Chinese propaganda poster: Communist
ideology-begun by Marx and Engels, continued by Lenin and Stalin-was
finally taken over by Mao. What Marx and Engels actually transmitted
to Lenin, Stalin, and Mao was Communism's "well of bloodshed." Lenin
and Stalin murdered 50 million people; Mao, 60 million. |
Until 1949, Mao had conducted a long guerilla war, organizing a campaign
in the countryside and in the mountains against the central administration,
which controlled the large cities. In order to do this, he established
good relations with the villagers, promising them land and freedom and
assuring them that once Communism was established in China, they would
enjoy great prosperity and happiness. The peasants believed him and supported
him and his guerillas.
Mao's "Great Leap Forward" was a senseless,
cruel project that paralyzed the county's agriculture and economy.
Over 30 million died of starvation. In Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret
Famine, Jasper Becker-who was the Beijing bureau chief of the South
China Morning Post-gave a detailed account of the famine. |
But after Mao came to power, everything changed. In the first years after
the revolution, he wanted to take over the whole of China and set up Communist
authorities in every area. In the meantime, thousands were arrested as
"class enemies" and hanged in public. In the mid-fifties, Mao designed
a system similar to Stalin's collectivization and put it into effect in
1958. This was called the "Great Leap Forward,"
but all it succeeded in doing was to bring torture and a great famine
upon the Chinese people.
The Great Leap began with slogans about doubling all of China's agricultural
and industrial production. Working hours were increased, and machines
worked endlessly. Workers weren't permitted to inspect or repair the machines,
and within a short time they began to break down.
Agriculture suffered disaster from lack of intelligent planning. With
the idea that the "abolition of private property would increase production,"
all peasants were forced to surrender their land to cooperatives. The
confiscations of Stalin's Russia were repeated. Moreover, Mao punished
peasants in some parts of China for not accepting collectivization voluntarily.
Their punishment was being starved to death.
Within a short time, the Great Leap disintegrated into a great famine.
Like the famine that Stalin fabricated in the Ukraine, this famine was
also man-made. The Black Book of Communism comments on China
in the period of the Great Leap:
In the years of the Great Leap, many Chinese
who resisted Mao's savagery were brutally executed. Many were killed
by a bullet to the back of the head. |
The fact that the famine was primarily a political
phenomenon is demonstrated by the high death rates in provinces where
the leaders were Maoist radicals, provinces that in previous years had
actually been net exporters of grain… Like Mao himself, Party activists
in Henan were convinced that all the difficulties arose from the peasants'
concealment of private stocks of grain. According to the secretary of
the Xinyang district (10 million inhabitants), where the first people's
commune in the country had been established, "The problem is not that
food is lacking. There are sufficient quantities of grain, but 90 percent
of the inhabitants are suffering from ideological difficulties." In the
autumn of 1959 the class war was momentarily forgotten, and a
military-style offensive was launched against the peasants, using
methods very similar to those used by anti-Japanese guerrilla groups.
At least 10,000 peasants were imprisoned, and many died of hunger behind
bars. The order was given to smash all privately owned cutlery that had
not yet been turned to steel to prevent people from being able to feed
themselves by pilfering the food supply of the commune. Even
fires ware banned, despite the approach of winter. The excesses
of repression were terrifying. Thousands of detainees
were systematically tortured, and children were killed and even boiled
and used as fertilizer-at the very moment when a nationwide campaign
was telling people to "learn the Henan way." In Anhui, where the stated
intention was to keep the red flag flying even if 99 percent of the population
died, cadres returned to the traditional practices
of live burials and torture with red-hot irons.72
Mao began with the slogan of "peasant socialism." Before
coming to power, he'd promised Chinese peasants land, food, and protection.
But his power subjected them to levels of pain and torture never to be
seen in modern history:
This campaign took on the proportions of a veritable
war against the peasantry… Deaths from hunger reached over 50 percent
in certain villages, and in some cases the only survivors ware cadres
who abused their position. In Henan and elsewhere there were many cases
of cannibalism (63 were recorded officially): children were sometimes
eaten in accordance with a communal decision.73
The death rates accross the country reached to incredible
levels:
A Communist Party militant delivering Communist
propaganda in the years of the Great Leap. |
For the entire country, the death rate rose from 11 percent in 1957 to
15 percent in 1959 and 1961, peaking at 29 percent in 1960. Birth rates
fell from 33 percent in 1957 to 18 percent in 1961. Excluding the deficit
in births, which was perhaps as many as 33 million (although some births
were merely delayed), loss of life linked to famine in the years 1959-1961
was somewhere between 20 million and 43 million
people…This was quite possibly the worst famine not just in the history
of China but in the history of the world.74
In the course of the Great Leap, an eighteen-year-old Red Guard, who
was pursued by the authorities and took refuge with his family in a village
in Anhui, described Maoism's cruel face:
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, accentuating the contrast with the rice fields all around, and
adding to the desolation of the landscape. Before my eyes, 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 parents. 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 imagined tasting, even in their worst nightmares? In
that moment I understood 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, had launched the Great Leap Forward,
and obliged thousands 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.75
The Influence of "Evolutionist Science" in Mao's Famine
In the years between 1958 and 1961, as a result of Mao's Great Leap policy,
all of China suffered what's accepted as the greatest, most deadly famine
in history. It is estimated that as a result, as many as 40 million died.
(Such numbers equaled and even surpassed the entire population of many
countries of that time.)
A propaganda poster for the Great Leap depicts
Mao as an agricultural genius in a rich field. However, Mao's reliance
on and implementation of Lysenko's methods resulted in an agricultural
disaster. |
What was the cause of this disaster? As mentioned above, Mao's militants
forced the peasants into collectivization and founded communes of between
100 and 300 families-which greatly reduced agricultural productivity.
In some areas, Maoist administrations punished peasants with deliberate
starvation.
Another important reason for this calamity is that Mao tried to adapt
to Chinese agriculture the "Lysenko model" applied in the Soviet Union
in the 1930s and 40s. When he forced these experiments on the peasants,
the result was huge losses in agricultural production.
We examined Trofim Lysenko before. As a result of the nonsensical "proletarian
science" of the Stalin era, Soviet biology was entrusted to Lysenko,
an ardent evolutionist. Lysenko rejected the science of genetics adopting
instead a theory by Lamarck, a leading Darwinist who believed in the "inheritance
of acquired traits." When Lysenko's myth was applied to Soviet agriculture,
the losses were immense.
But Mao did not learn from this disaster of the Stalinist period-on the
contrary he and his supporters, educated from their youth on a strict
Darwinism, continued to believe in "proletarian science" and to distort
real science, according to the requisites of the theory of evolution.
The Great Leap imitated Lysenko's model, and Chinese peasants were forced
to perform agriculture according to principles of "evolutionist science."
Jasper Becker, Beijing bureau chief of South China Morning Post, in his
book entitled Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine, relates in detail the
Lysenkoist agricultural enterprise put into effect during the Great Leap.
These attempts, each of which resulted in a separate disaster, were:
Close Planting: Lysonko, thinking that seeds
evolve by adopting to their habitat, declared that planting seeds very
close together would create "socialist solidarity" among them. The Maoists
undertook to apply this myth. Until that time, in Southern China, about
1.5 million seeds were sown on any one acre of land. In 1958, the Communists
ordered this amount to be increased to between 6 and 7 million seeds.
In 1959, they again increased the amount, to between 12 and 15 million.
As a result, a very large number of seeds went to waste, and agricultural
production suffered a severe decline.
Deep Plowing: One of Lysenko's assistants,
Teventy Maltsev, claimed that deep plowing would allow plants to establish
better root systems. Chinese Communists adopted and applied this Lamarckist
claim. During the Great Leap, Chinese peasants were ordered to plow their
fields to a depth of 1.5 meters. As a result, tens of millions of peasants
were forced to spend months hoeing. Again, the outcome was great loss
of production, resulting in famine.
The Sparrow Hunt: Mao initiated a campaign
to eliminate various species of animals that damaged agricultural production.
Sparrows became the main target of this campaign. Special methods were
employed to hunt and kill sparrows throughout the whole of China. But
as a result, there was an explosion in the number of insects and other
pests that the sparrows had been eating, and they damaged agricultural
production much more than the sparrows ever had.
Agriculture Without Fertilizer: Following
Lysenko's recommendations, Chinese Communists stopped using chemical fertilizer.
(It was imagined that when seeds were deprived of fertilizer, they would
"evolve" by adapting to this new situation thus ensuring the same yield
without the use of fertilizing additives.) This experiment caused yet
another great loss in agricultural production.
All these initiatives, relying as they did on Lysenko's
myth of evolution, caused the greatest famine in history. But although
millions were dying of starvation, no one dared criticize the regime or
the calamity it caused. One individual, General Peng Dehuai, the defense
minister, wrote Mao a letter in which he tried to describe this disastrous
famine. Later he was accused of being a "rightist" and was eliminated.
During the famine, official reports all falsified
the situation by saying that brilliant results had been achieved in agricultural
production. Moreover, in order to convince the world of this lie, China
exported vast amounts of grain. While people were dying of starvation
in some areas of the country, grain and rice were being kept in warehouses,
later to be exported.76
Later, the same agricultural policy was put into effect in Communist
Cambodia and North Korea, with the same results: a great lack of productivity,
famine and mass death. Blindly and without awareness or intelligence,
Communists applied Lysenko and Stalin's "Communist leap in agriculture,"
because the theory of evolution at the base of their materialist philosophy
demanded it.
Mao's Darwinist Tyranny
The theory of evolution is closely related to all the disasters Mao brought
upon China. As we have seen, the great famine of 1958-61 resulted from
the application of Lysenko's model of "evolutionist science." Meanwhile,
Mao and the Communist establishment ruled China with incredible cruelty
and mercilessness. What kind of horrifying thinking lies behind a policy
that deliberately leaves people to starve and forces them into cannibalism?
No doubt this relates to the whole Communist view of human nature. Earlier,
the idea that human beings are animals lay at the basis of Soviet terror,
and the same applies to China was mentioned. With Darwinist prejudice,
Mao viewed those opposed to Communism as "animals" and so, Maoists were
not at all touched by the anguish of people they regarded as a herd. To
them, this was a logical, normal operation of nature. After revealing
how low harvest levels had fallen in the Great Leap, The Black Book
of Communism gives Mao's view in this regard:
Mao, in the tradition of Chinese leaders, but in contradiction
to the legend that he encouraged to grow up around him, showed here how
little he really cared for what he thought of as the clumsy and primitive
peasants.77
James Reeve Pusey also stresses Mao's Darwinist philosophy:
"The thought of Mao Tse-tung was and remains a
powerful mixture of Darwinian ironies and contradictions."78
Elsewhere, he writes:
Mao Tse-tung in an angry moment (as late as 1964) swore
that "all demons shall be annihilated." He dehumanized
his enemies, partly in traditional hyperbole, partly
in Social Darwinian "realism." Like the Anarchists, he
saw reactionaries as evolutionary throwbacks, who deserved extinction.
The people's enemies were non-people, and they did not deserve to be treated
as people.79
Whoever views humans as animals has no qualms about performing experiments
on them. During the Great Leap, new ways of nutrition were considered
and mercilessly tested on people who were starving:
In 1960, after one year of famine, ...the survivors
were reduced to searching through horse manure for undigested grains of
wheat and eating the worms they found in cowpats. People in the camps
were used as guinea pigs in hunger experiments. In one case flour was
mixed with 30 percent paper paste in bread to study the effects on digestion,
while in another study marsh plankton were mixed with rice water. The
first experiment caused atrocious constipation throughout the camp, which
caused many deaths. The second also caused much illness, and many
who were already weakened ended up dying.80
The "Great Leap" was actually a kind of experiment
in natural selection. Mao forced the Chinese into the most difficult conditions
in order to eliminate the weak and those opposed to Communism. On the
one hand, he tried to brainwash the peasants by starving them so as to
make them dependent on him and the Communist organization. This basis
of this attempt was Darwinism. At the same time as he began the Great
Leap, Mao also initiated a "leap in education." The dialectical materialism
and Darwinism played the main roles in this education campaign. In a speech
from this period, Mao revealed the principles supporting his savagery
when he said, "The foundation of Chinese Socialism
rests on Darwin and the theory of evolution."81
Immediately after the Great Leap, on January 30, 1962, Mao explained
the parallels between the Chinese Communist Party and Darwin in a speech
delivered before members of the Party:
In history doctrines of natural scientists such as
Copernicus, Galileo and Darwin were for a very long period not recognized
by the majority of people, but instead were thought to be incorrect. In
their time they were in the minority. When our Party was founded in 1921
we only had a few dozen members; we were also in the minority, but these
few people represented the truth and represented China's destiny.82
In these words, Mao compared his party's efforts to Darwin's enterprise
and expressed his respect and admiration for him. At first, he stated,
few accepted his Communist Party's ideas, just as few people accepted
the theories of Darwin. But that would not change the validity of either
man's ideas.
But just as in Darwin's case, Mao's ideas were all myths.
In the Great Leap, between 30 and 45 million people died because of the
famine. Many peasants who resisted collectivization died of torture. Tens
of thousands, because they showed the slightest negative attitude towards
Communism, were labeled "class enemies," arrested and tortured. Chinese
prisoners were treated like animals and finally executed.
In these prisons, the savagery of Chinese Communism was especially evident.
Mao's Prisons
Mao's China had totally become a society of fear. The majority of the
millions accused of an offence, even with no concrete evidence of a crime,
were arrested and imprisoned as opponents of Communism. Later they were
executed in huge ceremonies held in the open squares of large towns. An
estimate of between 6 and 10 million people were unjustly killed on Mao's
directives. About 20 million "counter-revolutionaries" spent a great part
of their lives in prison as enemies of the state. But as The Black Book
of Communism says, living in these prisons was often worse than death:
Up to 300 in cells of 100 square meters, and 18,000
in Shanghai's central prison; starvation-level rations and overwork; inhuman
discipline and a constant threat of physical violence (for instance, people
were beaten with rifle butts to make them keep their heads high, which
was obligatory when marching.) The mortality rate, which until 1952 was
certainly in excess of 5 percent per year-the average for 1949-1978 in
the laogai-reached 50 percent during a six-month period in Guangxi, and
was more than 300 per day in one mine in Shanxi.
The most varied and sadistic tortures were quite common, such as hanging
by the wrists or the thumbs. One Chinese priest died afer being
interrogated continuously for 102 hours. The most brutish people were
allowed to operate with impunity. One camp commander assassinated or buried
alive 1,320 people in one year, in addition to carrying out numerous rapes.
Revolts, which were quite numerous at that time (detainees had not yet
been ground into submission, and there were many soldiers among them),
often degenerated into veritable massacres. Several thousand of the 20,000
prisoners who worked in the oilfields in Yanchang were executed. In November
1949, 1,000 of the 5,000 who mutinied in a forest work camp were buried
alive.83
Nien Cheng, a former inmate of a Shanghai prison, describes the the pysical
violence in the Chinese prisons:
To put those special handcuffs tightly on the wrists
of a prisoner was a form of torture commonly used in Maoist China's prison
system. Sometimes additional chains were put around
the ankles of the prisoners. At other times a prisoner might be manacled
and then have his handcuffs tied to a bar on the window so that he could
not move away from the window to eat, drink or go to the toilet.
The purpose was to degrade a man in order to destroy his morale . . .
Since the People's Government claimed to have abolished
all forms of torture, the officials simply called such methods "punishment"
or "persuasion."84
This savagery's main purpose was to instill fear, first in opponents
of the regime and then in society in general. Another goal was to destroy
people's personalities, to dehumanize and "bestialize" them by fear and
torture. By these methods, Mao wanted to turn of China's entire population
into a herd of animals he might control.
The important turning point that gave life to Mao's totalitarian project
was China's "Cultural Revolution."
The Cultural Revolution: China's Communal Folly
The Cultural Revolution was a murderous frenzy
designed to destroy every idea and every person opposed to Communist
ideology. The propaganda poster on the right depicts this feast
of bloodshed: anti-Communists being crushed by the fists of Red
Communists. |
Following the disaster of the Great Leap, Mao announced that he was "high
above daily politics." He decided to withdraw from matters of state to
concentrate on so-called "greater and more important issues." Mao's silence
ended in 1966. He announced that the Chinese revolution had not yet achieved
success because he, the "great helmsman," had not completely instilled
Communism in people's minds; that even in the highest echelons of the
state, there were elements who did not understand Communism. A cultural
revolution was needed to correct this situation.
The shock of the Cultural Revolution was to destroy the whole Chinese
state and society. Mao's suggestions had great influence on the ignorant
youth in the low ranks of the Communist Party. They became known as the
Red Guards and began wreaking terror in all parts of the country. Singing
"The East is Red," they marched through the streets, ready to display
their aggression and arrest everyone they thought was anti-Communist.
Thousands of high-level bureaucrats, university professors, scientists
and intellectuals were arrested, humiliated after undergoing horrible
tortures, and executed.
 
THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION: A MADNESS THAT TERRORIZED
CHINA
The Red Guards recognized Mao's Red Book as their only guide. During
the Cultural Revolution, they overwhelmed the country with blood
and fear. Propaganda posters also depicted the Red Guards' barbarism.
In the poster at top, university professors, arrested and tortured
by the Red Guards, are depicted as parasites that degenerate society.
|
Even Liu Shaoqi, one of Mao's closest friends and a
former chairman of the People's Republic of China, was arrested on Mao's
orders, publicly beaten, subjected to long torture and thrown into a cell
where he received no medical attention and died in agony. Deng Xiaoping
was one of Mao's oldest comrades, among those who were going to take over
the rule of China after Mao. His son Pufong, a brilliant physics major
at Beijing University, was interrogated by the Red Guards. During the
process, he was sodomized, beaten to a pulp, and later thrown out the
window of the interrogation chamber. Although he survived, his back was
broken and he spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair with an impaired
hearing.85
A witness describes the inhuman torture inflicted on a university professor
during the Cultural Revolution:
I ran inside. On the athletic field and farther inside, before a new
four-story classroom building, I saw rows of teachers, about 40 or 50
in all, with black ink poured over their heads and faces so that they
were now in reality a "black gang." Hanging on their necks were placards
with words such as "reactionary academic authority so-and-so," "corrupt
ringleader so-and-so," "class enemy so-and-so," "capitalist roader so-and-so":
all epithets taken from the newspapers. On each placard was a red cross,
making the teachers look like condemned prisoners awaiting execution.
They all wore dunce caps painted with similar epithets and carried dirty
brooms, shoes, and dusters on their backs.
 
Young members of the Red Guards brainwashed
by Mao's Communism. |
Hanging from their necks were pails filled with rocks. I saw the principal:
the pail around his neck was so heavy that the wire had cut deep into
his neck and he was staggering. All were barefoot,
hitting broken gongs or pots as they walked around the field crying out:
"I am black gangster so-and-so." Finally, they all knelt down, burned
incense, and begged Mao Zedong to "pardon their crimes."
I was stunned by this scene and I felt myself go pale. A few girls nearly
fainted.
Beatings and torture followed. I had never seen such
tortures before: eating nightsoil and insects,
being subjected to electric shocks, being forced
to kneel on broken glass, being hanged "like an airplane" by the
arms and legs.86
 
UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS BEING EXECUTED
Throughout the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards tortured tens of
thousands. University professors, statesmen, artists and writers
were arrested, and publicly humiliated with insulting placards hung
around their necks, before being executed. |
The Cultural Revolution also applied the "human
bestialization" policy implemented earlier under Lenin and Stalin.
Opponents identified as "enemies of the people" were forced to imitate
an animal in public. Some professors under arrest had their hands tied
behind them and, after being thrown to the ground, were forced to "graze,"
pulling up grass with their teeth. In August 1967, the Beijing press declared
that anti-Maoists were "rats that ran through the streets" and should
all be killed.87
Another political execution in China: A woman
named Wang Shouxin was arrested as an opponent of the regime, bound
by soldiers, forced to her knees and killed with a single bullet.
As a rule, the money to buy the bullet for executions like these was
taken from the victim's family. |
In Red China, political executions were everyday
occurrences. Many were accused of "not following Mao's way" and
executed in the streets. |
The Cultural Revolution was a mass folly never before seen in the history
of the world. The Red Guards arrested, tortured and executed tens of thousands
for praying, just listening to music, or feeding a domestic animal. People
were sent into a trance in which they supported every manner of savagery;
they would shout their support as they watched people being murdered.
The Black Book of Communism describes this savagery in these words:
The whole people were invited to public trials of "counterrevolutionaries,"
who almost invariably were condemned to death. Everyone participated in
the executions, shouting out ""kill, kill"" to the Red Guards whose task
it was to cut victims into pieces. Sometimes the pieces were cooked and
eaten, or force-fed to members of the victim's family who were still alive
and looking on. Everyone was then invited to a banquet, where the liver
and heart of the former landowner were shared out, and to meetings where
a speaker would address rows of severed heads freshly skewered on stakes.
This fascination for vengeful cannibalism, which later became common under
the Pol Pot regime, echoes a very ancient East Asian archetype that appears
often at cataclysmic moments of Chinese history. 88
Another innocent Chinese executed during the
Cultural Revolution. |
The Red Guards' only source book was the Little Red Book containing the
words of Mao. Every one of them knew this book by heart; moreover, those
who did not know it were denounced as "class enemies" and could be beaten
or even executed on the spot. Even the most normal and legitimate activities
could be declared "anti-Communist" and punished:
The Red Guards, who took themselves extremely seriously,
thought it was a good idea to ban "wastes of revolutionary
energy" such as cats, birds, and flowers. . . In big cities such
as Shanghai, teams shaved the head of anyone caught in the streets with
long or lacquered hair, tore up trousers that were too tight, ripped high
heels off shoes, slit open pointed shoes, and forced shops to change their
names. . . . Red Guards stopped passersby and forced
them to recite their favorite quotation from Mao. Many people were afraid
to leave their houses.89
The Cultural Revolution reached such levels of insanity that finally
the army had to intervene and reestablish order in the country. Throughout
the 1970s China tried to bandage the wounds inflicted by the Cultural
Revolution and repair its damage. Mao died in 1976, joining more than
60 million who were already dead, victims of torture, slaughter and benighted
ideology.
 
Propaganda posters showed Mao as the red sun rising over China.
In reality, Maoism brought famine and torture and made China a Darwinist
arena in which "the weakest" died. Mao murdered 60 million. On the
right, a photograph of him in the last years before his death.
|
China's Savagery in Occupied Countries
 
International sources reported in detail China's
brutality in eastern Turkestan. A special report published by Amnesty
International stated that the goal was to eradicate the Uyghur Muslims
through torture and execution. China has subjected Eastern Turkestan's
Muslim Uyghur population to decades of genocide. As a result of
nuclear tests deliberately conducted in the region, large numbers
of children are born deformed. |
The scourge of Maoism was not limited to the Chinese people. Countries
occupied by China or people forced to live under permanent occupation
were also targets of Red brutality. One of these areas was the "Uyghur
Autonomous Region" in the west of China; in other words, the Uyghur
Turks living in Eastern Turkistan. Because these Turks were both
Moslems and an ethnic minority, the Beijing administration targeted them
and subjected them to systematic genocide from the time Mao came to power
in 1949.
The Uyghurs were not allowed to perform their religious obligations.
Schools and places of prayer were closed. In many areas, religious leaders
were arrested and a large number of them murdered. Without taking any
precautions, China carried out 46 nuclear tests in the Uyghur Autonomous
Region, starting in 1964. As a result, cancer among Uyghurs has risen
by a remarkable degree, with many children born dead or with physical
defects.
To murder the Muslim Uyghur Turks, the Chinese employed various methods:
Between 1949 and 1952, 2,800,000 Uyghurs died; between then and 1957,
3,509,000 died; between 1958 and 1960, the number was 6,700,000 and in
the four years from 1961 to 1965, 13,300,000 Uyghurs were murdered. In
eastern Turkestan, families were forbidden to have more than one child.
Any woman who became pregnant in contravention of this law had her child
aborted.
These measures, begun in Mao's time, are still in effect. As a result
of forced migration, family planning and killings, the Uyghurs in Eastern
Turkestan have become a minority. Due to the policy of assimilation in
effect since 1949, the proportion of Muslims in the Uyghur Autonomous
Region has fallen from 75% to as little as 35%. Today, more than 25 million
Muslims in eastern Turkestan live under Chinese oppression. In an area
where thousands of Muslim are political prisoners, many of those arrested
are not heard from again.
Another country that fell under the Communist regime's brutality is Tibet,
occupied by the Chinese army just one year after the establishment of
a Communist regime. With the acquiescence of its people, Tibet became
an autonomous region bound to China. But Chinese oppression of the Tibetans
has gradually increased. The Chinese administration has obliged Tibetan
peasants to sell their produce at very low prices, put Chinese immigrants
in all of the country's important institutions, and answered the least
resistance with a cruel and bloody response. The Dalai Lama, who for years
has inspired Tibetan resistance to China, describes the brutality committed
by Communist China on his people:
Tibetans not only were shot, but also were beaten to
death, crucified, burned alive, drowned, mutilated, starved, strangled,
hanged, boiled alive, buried alive, drawn and quartered, and beheaded.90
THE SAVAGERY OF RED CHINA
CONTINUES
A state with a Darwinist-Communist way of thinking
oppresses its fellow citizens and kinsmen, lets them starve and
leads them into misery and poverty, and murders them-all for its
own advantage. To Russia and China, two modern examples of this
brutal concept of the State, what is important is not the people's
comfort and well being, but the strengthening of their own rule.
1) COMMUNIST CHINA HAS SLAUGHTERED 210,000
INNOCENT PEOPLE IN NUCLEAR TESTS ALONE.
2) SAVAGERY IN CHINA
Muslims are killed and those who pray punished. Pregnant women
are given injections to kill their babies.
3) As soon as a baby was born in China it was strangled by
officials BIRTH PLANNING BY MURDER
4) ANOTHER MASSACRE OF MUSLIMS IN CHINA
As the slaughter in East Turkestan goes on, the Chinese Army
has now fired on Muslims living in the county of Shandong.
|
Towards the end of the year 2000, a newborn baby was
taken from its family by Chinese officials and strangled while the
family watched. Similar atrocities continue to be committed against
Muslims in Chinese-occupied Eastern Turkestan. The starting point
for this brutality lies in Darwinism's doctrine that human beings
are animals unworthy of respect, that life is a field of struggle.
To be rid of all this horror, and in order for people to live in
peace and well-being, this Darwinist ideology must be wiped out.
|
Cambodia-the Pinnacle of Red Insanity
Communism, already a pitiless, contentious, cruel and bloodthirsty ideology,
reached its worst expression of advanced brutality in Maoism. To understand
more clearly why Maoism's "traditional" Far Eastern brutality was joined
to Communism, we must look at another example from the Far East-the
Cambodian regime of the Khmer Rouge, which came to power with Chinese
support and adopted Maoist methods..
Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge, murdered
three million Cambodians. |
Cambodia, a small and poor country, is located between India and China.
This region is also called Indo-China. For centuries the majority of its
people eked out a living by agriculture, whose principal element is the
rice paddies throughout the country. But between 1975 and 1979, these
rice paddies became "killing fields." About three million people in this
country of nine million were murdered. Some were shot in the head, others
had their skulls crushed by axes, or left to starve. Still others were
smothered with plastic bags put over their heads.
The perpetrators of this unparalleled brutality were the Cambodian Maoists,
or the Khmer Rouge, a Communist party founded and led by a Maoist by the
name of Pol Pot. For years the Khmer Rouge had been organizing in Cambodia's
forests and dreaming of coming to power. Finally in 1975, their dream
came true. They established a regime that was more cruel and totalitarian
than Stalin's Russia or Mao's China-a pinnacle of Communist insanity.
For the good of the country, the party decided that a Communist's sole
duty was to work in the rice paddies as much as possible. Cambodia's entire
population was forced to work in those fields. Tens of thousands living
in the cities-statesmen, bureaucrats, teachers, intellectuals-were driven
to the villages and made to work on collective farms under very severe
conditions. To avoid work, say prayers, or even to eat the smallest piece
of food from what was being collected without permission was regarded
as "rebellion against the state," and under this pretext, people were
killed every minute.
 
The Khmer Rouge came to power after a bloody
civil war. These photos were taken during the bloody civil war as
the Khmer Rouge attacked the capital, Phnom Penh. This was the harbinger
of terrible brutality. |
The Khmer Rouge called their party Angkar, and to the millions of people
working themselves to exhaustion in the fields gave the impression that
"Angkar is always watching you." A Cambodian who managed to escape the
Khmer Rouge brutality describes those who lived in the so-called "democratic"
Cambodia:
In Democratic Kampuchea, there were no
prisons, no courts, no universities, no schools, no money, no jobs, no
books, no sports and no pastimes . . . There was no spare moment
in the twenty-four-hour day. Daily life was divided up as follows: twelve
hours for physical labor, two hours for eating, three hours for rest and
education, and seven hours for sleep. We all lived in an enormous concentration
camp. There was no justice. The Angkar regulated
every moment of our lives . . . The Khmer Rouge often used parables
to justify their contradictory actions. They would
compare people to cattle: "Watch this ox as it pulls the plow. It eats
when it is ordered to eat. If you let it graze in the field it
will eat anything. If you put it into another field where there isn't
enough grass, it will still graze uncomplainingly. It is not free, and
it is constantly being watched. And when you tell it to pull the plow,
it pulls. It never thinks about its wife or children…"91
Obviously, the Khmer Rouge put into effect the "human bestialization"
project that lay at the base of Communism. As the above quote shows, people
were forced to be like oxen ploughing a field. At the same time, much
importance was given to eradicating such concepts as religion and morality.
The Black Book of Communism describes the measures the Khmer
Rouge took to destroy the love between the family institution and its
members:
The regime did all it could to
break family ties, which it saw as a threat to the totalitarian
project of making each individual totally dependent
on the Angkar. Work teams had their own houses, which were often
simply barracks or collections of hammocks or mats for sleeping located
near the village. It was very difficult to get permission to leave these
compounds, and husbands and wives were often separated
for weeks or longer. Children were kept from their extended families,
and adolescents sometimes went six months without seeing their parents.
Mothers were encouraged to spend as little time
as possible with their children. Because the postal service had
stopped altogether, it was sometimes months before people learned of the
death of a relative. Here again the example came from above, as many of
the leaders lived apart from their wives or husbands. 92
These measures are actually nothing more than Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels' interpretation of the origin of the family, put into action. Marx
and Engels viewed human beings as animals evolved from monkeys, for whom
concepts of religion, morality and family were not necessary. These were
"superstructure institutions" that came to be as the result of economic
relations. A Communist society promised to destroy these concepts. So
the Khmer Rouge's project was nothing else than to put life into the nonsense
proposed by Marx and Engels.
The Khmer Rouge wanted to destroy the religion and the family, bestialize
human beings and make them like "oxen that plough the fields". Khmer Rouge
once again applied measures used earlier by Lenin, Stalin, and Mao by
deliberately letting people go hungry, thereby destroying their wills
and personalities. Later, after being fed by Angkar, they would come to
worship the Khmer Rouge as gods:
The hunger that crushed so many
Cambodians over the years was used deliberately by the regime in the service
of its interests. The hungrier people were, the less food their
bodies could store, and the less likely they were to run away.
If people were permanently obsessed with food, all individual thought,
all capacity to argue, even people's sex drive, would disappear. The
games that were played with the food supply made forced evacuations easier,
promoted acceptance of the collective canteens, and also weakened interpersonal
relationships, including those between parents and their children. Everyone,
by contrast, would kiss the hand that fed them, regardless of how bloody
it was. 93
A Cambodian witness stated:
This hunger was deliberately caused. Even while many
died of hunger, only one fifth of the fields suitable for sowing was put
into production!94
 |
 |
 |
After the Khmer Rouge took power, nearly the
whole population of Phnom Penh was forced to leave the city. |
The people were driven into the country to work
the fields. |
In a few days, the capital turned into a ghost
town. |
For the regime, death by starvation was no problem,
it was a goal. Khmer Rouge leaders often said, "All we need to build our
country is a million good revolutionaries. No more than that. And would
rather kill ten friends than allow one enemy to live."95
The hostility to "love, beauty, aesthetics and culture" that had showed
itself in Mao's Cultural Revolution reached the point of insanity with
the Khmer Rouge. Anyone who combed his hair, took a little care in his
appearance, or even wore glasses was regarded as an "enemy of the people."
The excerpt below is taken from a speech made by the director to the prisoners
in a Khmer Rouge camp:
In Democratic Kampuchea, under the glorious rule of Angkar, we need to
think about the future. We don't need to think about the past. You New
People must forget about the pre-revolutionary times. Forget about the
cognac, forget about fashionable clothes and hairstyles…
We don't need the technology of the capitalists. We don't need any of
it at all. Under our new system, we don't need to
send our children to school. Our school is the farm. We will write by
plowing. We don't need to give examinations or award certificates.
Knowing how to farm and how to dig canals-those are our certificates.
VICTIMS OF KHMER ROUGE BRUTALITY
The Khmer Rouge attached numbers to some of those they were about
to execute and took their photographs. Thousands of mass graves
were found in the Khmer Rouge's "killing fields." The bones in the
photo on the right belong to Cambodians suffocated with plastic
bags over their heads. |
We don't need doctors any more. They are
not necessary. If someone needs to have their intestines removed I will
do it. It is easy. There is no need to learn how to do it by going to
school.
We don't need any of the capitalist professions!
We don't need doctors or engineers. We don't need professors telling
us what to do. They were all corrupted. We just
need people to work hard on the farm!
And yet, comrades, there are some naysayers and troublemakers who do
not show the proper willingness to work hard and sacrifice! Such people
do not have the proper revolutionary mentality! Such people are our enemies!
And, comrades, some of them are right here in our midst!
These people cling to capitalist ways of thinking!
They cling to the old capitalist fashions! We have
some people among us who still wear eyeglasses. And why do they use eyeglasses?
Can't they see me? If I move to slap your face and you flinch, then you
can see well enough. People wear them to be handsome in the capitalist
style. They wear them because they are in vain. We don't need people like
that any more. People who think they are handsome
are lazy! They are leeches sucking energy from others!96
The Maoist psychopaths who seized Cambodia with China's
support murdered almost three million innocents. At first, those to be
killed were shot in the head. Later, however, this was decided to be a
"waste of bullets," so more brutal methods were resorted to. Besides "saving
bullets," these methods were preferred so that Khmer Rouge militants could
satisfy their sadism. Fifty-three percent of victims had their skulls
crushed with iron bars, axe handles, or sometimes hoe handles; six percent
were hanged or asphyxiated with plastic bags, and five percent had their
throats slit.97
In 1979, the Khmer Rouge regime came to an end when Vietnam occupied
Cambodia. To show the brutality of the earlier regime, the Vietnamese
dug up the rice paddies known as the "killing fields," exhumed the bodies,
and put them on display. The bones and skulls of all the thousands killed
by the Khmer Rouge are now on display in a museum in the capital, Phnom
Penh.
Communism, which found its "scientific" foundation in a book by Charles
Darwin, took shape from the nonsense of Marx and Engels, became a world
power through the brutality of Lenin and Stalin, reached its pinnacle
of madness under Mao, and showed its real face to the world in the savagery
practiced in Cambodia.
North Korea and Vietnam
In Asia, Communist brutality was not limited to China and Cambodia. The
regime of North Korea also inflicted merciless terror on its own people.
An estimated 1.5 million were killed under the dictatorship of Kim Il
Sung. Hundreds of thousands were subjected to torture in North Korea's
terrible prisons. The Black Book of Communism describes how prisoners
were treated like animals:
In her penitentiary, some 6,000 people, including 2,000
women, worked as slave labor from 5:30 a.m. until midnight, manufacturing
slippers, holsters, bags, belts, detonators, and artificial flowers. Any
detainees who became pregnant were brutally forced to have abortions.
Any child who was born in the prison was smothered or had its throat cut.98
A camp guard who fled to Seoul describes the torture and executions inflicted
in the concentration camps of North Korea:
North Vietnam under Communist rule, 1968
|
Who carried out the executions? The choice was left
to the discretion of security agents, who shot when they did not want
to dirty their hands or killed slowly if they wished to prolong the agony.
I learned that people could be beaten to death, stoned, or killed with
blows from a shovel. Sometimes the executions were turned into a game,
with prisoners being shot at as though they were targets in a shooting
competition at a fairground. Sometimes prisoners
were forced to fight each other to the death and tear each other up with
their bare hands . . . With my own eyes, I saw several atrocious
deaths. Women rarely died peacefully. I saw breasts
slashed with knives, genitals smashed in with shovel handles, necks broken
with hammers . . . In the camps, death is very banal. And political
criminals do whatever they have to do to survive. They do anything to
get a fraction more corn or pig fat. Even so, every day four or five people
would die in this camp, of hunger, by accident, or through execution.99
Another characteristic of the North Korea's Communist regime was its
adoption and cruel implementation of the eugenics
theory, which was another product of Darwinism. As we saw earlier,
eugenics was proposed by Darwin's cousin Francis Galton, and appeared
as a scientific enterprise at the beginning of the 20th century. The aim
of eugenics is to sterilize people who are sick, disabled, or of a particular
race and to have healthy people reproduce. It was imagined that in the
end, this process would bring a healthier race into being. The first country
to implement eugenics as an official policy was Nazi Germany. At first,
Hitler gathered congenitally ill and disabled people into "sterilization
centers," and later had them killed.
North Korea's Darwinist-Communist regime implemented this cruelty under
the name of "accelerating evolution." The Black Book of Communism
described eugenics, North Korean style:
Anyone who is handicapped in North Korea suffers
terrible social exclusion. The handicapped are not allowed to live
in Pyongyang. Until recently they were all kept in special locations in
the suburbs so that family members could visit them. Today they are exiled
to remote mountainous regions or to islands in the Yellow Sea. Two such
locations have been identified with certaintly: Boujun and Euijo, in the
north of the country, close to the Chinese border. This policy of discrimination
has recently spread beyond Pyongyang to Nampo, Kaesong, and Chongjin.
Ho Chi Minh, the dictator of North Vietnam.
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Similar treatment applies to anyone out of the ordinary.
Dwarves, for instance, are now arrested and sent
to camps; they are not only forced to live in isolation but also
prevented from having children. Kim Jong II himself
has said that "the race of dwarves must disappear."100
Vietnam was another bloody Communist dictatorship in Asia. North Vietnam
carried on a long war first with the French and then with the Americans.
In 1975 it took South Vietnam and formed a single united Communist Vietnam.
Ho Chi Minh, the founder of North Vietnam, and those who followed him
did not hesitate to torture their own people and subject them to severe
oppression. Between 1975 and 1977, a Vietnam writer opposing the regime
wrote a letter in which he described the conditions of the country:
Conditions inside the prisons are unimaginably bad. In the Chi Hoa prison,
the official Saigon prison, 8,000 people under the old regime were kept
in conditions that were universally condemned. Today there are more than
40,000 people in the same prison. Prisoners often die from hunger, lack
of air, or torture, or by their own hand…
There are two sorts of prison in Vietnam: the official
prisons and the concentration camps. The latter are far out in the jungle,
and the prisoner is sentenced to a lifetime of forced labor. There are
no trials, and hence no possibility of using a legal mechanism in their
defense.101
Similar instances of cruelty were suffered when Vietnam occupied Laos
in 1975 and turned it into a Communist regime. The Pathet Lao Communists
gained strength in this poor country in the middle of Indo-China and,
after they came to power, subjected opponents of regime to oppression.
As a result, tens of thousands became refugees.
The Maoist Danger Continues
Throughout its history, far-eastern Asia has been a scene of serious
severe armed clashes, blood feuds, and savage acts of vengeance. With
the advent of Communist ideology, which supported violence and regarded
brutality as legitimate and even necessary, the result was disastrous.
Communism turned the rice paddies into killing fields. In far-eastern
Asia, moreover, its hostility to culture and civilization was even more
marked. Its unthinking ideology rejected civilization in favor of ignorance,
ugliness, and monotony.
Interestingly, many organizations and currents of thought would blindly
adopt such a cruel and primitive ideology and spread it throughout the
world. Today, a number of Maoist terror organizations and ideological
groups are operating in various countries. Maoists claim that the collapse
of the Soviet Union revealed the "failure of a false interpretation of
Communism" and proved that Maoism is right. They close their eyes completely
to Mao's brutality, crimes, famines and terrible acts of cruelty and try
to argue that this benighted ideology is the only alternative for the
world's future. Maoists organize particularly in underdeveloped countries,
implementing their outmoded theory they call "Third
Worldism," and try to seduce these countries into the darkness
of Communism.
Clearly, these Maoists aren't satisfied with the tens of millions whom
their namesake tortured to death. They want more bloodshed.
In this book's last section, we'll examine Maoism's subtle growth in
greater detail.
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