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."
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.
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
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 magazineNew 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"
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 yethe 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), andthe 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?
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 Duxiuand even in the 1970s he looked back nostalgically to the studies of Darwin he did in his youth.70
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
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.
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:
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
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.)
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. Sometimesadditional 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
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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
China's Savagery in Occupied Countries
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
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..
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 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
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.
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:
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.
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.
57. Robert M.Young, Darwinian Evolution and Human History, Open University course on Darwin to Einstein: Historical Studies on Science and Belief, 1980
58. Richard Milner, Encyclopedia of Evolution, Facts on File Publisher, 1990, sf. 82
59. Jacob Heilbrunn, "Mao More Than Ever," The New Republic, April 21, 1997
60. Benjamin Schartz, Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951, p.37
61. Benjamin Schartz, Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951, p.45
62. Charlotte Furth, Ting Wen-chiang: Science and China's New Culture, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970, p.27
63. Charlotte Furth, Ting Wen-chiang: Science and China's New Culture, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970, p.71
64. James Reeve Pusey, China and Charles Darwin, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1983, p.438
65. Michael Ruse, The Long March of Darwin, New Scientist 103 (Aug. 16, 1984) p.35
66. James Reeve Pusey, China and Charles Darwin, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1983, p.4
67. James Reeve Pusey, China and Charles Darwin, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1983, p.257
68. James Reeve Pusey, China and Charles Darwin, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1983, p.449-452
69. Clare Hollingworth, Mao, Triad Paladin Grafton Books, Glasgow, 1985, p.26
70. Clare Hollingworth, Mao, Triad Paladin Grafton Books, Glasgow, 1985, p.27
71. Clare Hollingworth, Mao, Triad Paladin Grafton Books, Glasgow, 1985, p.26
72. Jacob Heilbrunn, "Mao More Than Ever," The New Republic, April 21, 1997
73. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge, p. 491-492
74. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge, p. 492-495
75. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge, p. 493-494
76. Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine, New York: The Free Press, 1996, p. 72-73
77. Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine, New York: The Free Press, 1996, p. 73-74
78. Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine, New York: The Free Press, 1996, p. 76
79. Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine, New York: The Free Press, 1996, p. 75
80. Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine, New York: The Free Press, 1996, p. 92
81. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge, p. 491
82. James Reeve Pusey, China and Charles Darwin, p.456
83. James Reeve Pusey, China and Charles Darwin, p.455
84. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge, p. 494-495
85. K. Mehnert, Kampf um Mao's Erbe, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1977
86. Talk at an Enlarged Central Work Conference, January 30, 1962 (http://www.maoism.org/msw/vol8/mswv862.htm)
87. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge, p. 481-482
88. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge, p. 509
89. Malachi Martin, The Keys of This Blood, p.406
90. Ken Ling, Miriam London and Tai-Ling Lee, La Vengeance du Ciel: Un Jeune Chinois dans la Revolution Culturelle, Paris, Laffont, 1981. (Original English version 1972) Pages 20-23.
91. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge, p. 520
92. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge, p. 470-471
93. Nien Cheng, Vie et mort a Shangai, Paris, Albin Michel, 1987, p.86
94. Donnet, Tibet, p.63
95. Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son, p. 317
96. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge, p. 604
97. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge, p. 601
98. Laurence Picq, Beyond the Horizon: Five Years with the Khmer Rouger, trans. Patricia Norland (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989), pp. 147-148
99. Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son, p. 248
100. Haing Ngor, Surviving the Killing Fields, pp.139-140
101. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge, p.553.
58. Richard Milner, Encyclopedia of Evolution, Facts on File Publisher, 1990, sf. 82
59. Jacob Heilbrunn, "Mao More Than Ever," The New Republic, April 21, 1997
60. Benjamin Schartz, Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951, p.37
61. Benjamin Schartz, Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951, p.45
62. Charlotte Furth, Ting Wen-chiang: Science and China's New Culture, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970, p.27
63. Charlotte Furth, Ting Wen-chiang: Science and China's New Culture, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970, p.71
64. James Reeve Pusey, China and Charles Darwin, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1983, p.438
65. Michael Ruse, The Long March of Darwin, New Scientist 103 (Aug. 16, 1984) p.35
66. James Reeve Pusey, China and Charles Darwin, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1983, p.4
67. James Reeve Pusey, China and Charles Darwin, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1983, p.257
68. James Reeve Pusey, China and Charles Darwin, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1983, p.449-452
69. Clare Hollingworth, Mao, Triad Paladin Grafton Books, Glasgow, 1985, p.26
70. Clare Hollingworth, Mao, Triad Paladin Grafton Books, Glasgow, 1985, p.27
71. Clare Hollingworth, Mao, Triad Paladin Grafton Books, Glasgow, 1985, p.26
72. Jacob Heilbrunn, "Mao More Than Ever," The New Republic, April 21, 1997
73. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge, p. 491-492
74. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge, p. 492-495
75. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge, p. 493-494
76. Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine, New York: The Free Press, 1996, p. 72-73
77. Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine, New York: The Free Press, 1996, p. 73-74
78. Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine, New York: The Free Press, 1996, p. 76
79. Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine, New York: The Free Press, 1996, p. 75
80. Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine, New York: The Free Press, 1996, p. 92
81. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge, p. 491
82. James Reeve Pusey, China and Charles Darwin, p.456
83. James Reeve Pusey, China and Charles Darwin, p.455
84. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge, p. 494-495
85. K. Mehnert, Kampf um Mao's Erbe, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1977
86. Talk at an Enlarged Central Work Conference, January 30, 1962 (http://www.maoism.org/msw/vol8/mswv862.htm)
87. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge, p. 481-482
88. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge, p. 509
89. Malachi Martin, The Keys of This Blood, p.406
90. Ken Ling, Miriam London and Tai-Ling Lee, La Vengeance du Ciel: Un Jeune Chinois dans la Revolution Culturelle, Paris, Laffont, 1981. (Original English version 1972) Pages 20-23.
91. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge, p. 520
92. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge, p. 470-471
93. Nien Cheng, Vie et mort a Shangai, Paris, Albin Michel, 1987, p.86
94. Donnet, Tibet, p.63
95. Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son, p. 317
96. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge, p. 604
97. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge, p. 601
98. Laurence Picq, Beyond the Horizon: Five Years with the Khmer Rouger, trans. Patricia Norland (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989), pp. 147-148
99. Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son, p. 248
100. Haing Ngor, Surviving the Killing Fields, pp.139-140
101. Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge, p.553.
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