12-18-2016, 10:23 PM
What a horrifying exercise in ideological apologetics.
There is consensus among scholars who have studied the Great Leap Foward in a serious way that the policy errors of the Maoist regime led directly to the deaths of tens of millions. Perhaps it is 15 million, perhaps it is 50, but the magnitude of the horror is extraordinary in either case. We know that these "losses" were known by the top leadership, and tolerated in the name of the advancement of the ideological cause. We know that widespread state violence was used not only to enforce the procurement policies that lead to starvation, but themselves killed hundreds of thousands or millions of people directly. We know that the "problems of the first few years" were so severe as to cause the largest famine ever known.
Most tragically, we know that improving life expectancy and basic standard of living can be accomplished without the overwhelming loss of life, because it has happened to nearly every country in the world during the 2nd half of the 20th century. Nothing irreplaceable was accomplished by the millions dying, all the benefits obtained could easily have been replicated under almost any other economic regime.
Having wasted my time reading this article, it amounts to nothing more than an exercise in minimizing, evading, and misdirecting. Nothing of substance is said that contradicts the mountains of scholarship on the topic.
To quote: "Mistakes were made and many must have been demoralized when they realized that some of the results of the Leap had been disappointing." What a heartless, idiotic thing to say about the deaths of tens of millions. Orwell exposed the banality of this sort of apologetic argument, with its passive voice, its vague dissembling, its lack of intellectual or moral rigor, and that was decades before the GLF had even occured.
-Jester
There is consensus among scholars who have studied the Great Leap Foward in a serious way that the policy errors of the Maoist regime led directly to the deaths of tens of millions. Perhaps it is 15 million, perhaps it is 50, but the magnitude of the horror is extraordinary in either case. We know that these "losses" were known by the top leadership, and tolerated in the name of the advancement of the ideological cause. We know that widespread state violence was used not only to enforce the procurement policies that lead to starvation, but themselves killed hundreds of thousands or millions of people directly. We know that the "problems of the first few years" were so severe as to cause the largest famine ever known.
Most tragically, we know that improving life expectancy and basic standard of living can be accomplished without the overwhelming loss of life, because it has happened to nearly every country in the world during the 2nd half of the 20th century. Nothing irreplaceable was accomplished by the millions dying, all the benefits obtained could easily have been replicated under almost any other economic regime.
Having wasted my time reading this article, it amounts to nothing more than an exercise in minimizing, evading, and misdirecting. Nothing of substance is said that contradicts the mountains of scholarship on the topic.
To quote: "Mistakes were made and many must have been demoralized when they realized that some of the results of the Leap had been disappointing." What a heartless, idiotic thing to say about the deaths of tens of millions. Orwell exposed the banality of this sort of apologetic argument, with its passive voice, its vague dissembling, its lack of intellectual or moral rigor, and that was decades before the GLF had even occured.
-Jester