

Archives: Mao's Great Leap Forward 'killed 45 million in four years' - cwan
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/maos-great-leap-forward-killed-45-million-in-four-years-2081630.html

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dgordon
45 million dead in four years. Yep, that's about right for the Holodomor times
four.

Of course, Stalin and Mao still aren't as synonymous with ultimate evil as
Hitler was, and won't be, despite killing quite a few million more people. For
decades Western leftists even praised them. It probably has to do something
with not being utterly defeated in the biggest war of all time. History is
written by the winners and all that, and Stalin was a winner of WWII. (Mao
wasn't in power yet.)

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lzw
Very good point, but there's also, seemingly, a widespread perception that
those killed by government policy are not really murdered the way those killed
in the holocaust were. Start 100 million and you can always blame it on "the
capitalists" who "were too greedy", even if your country was a communist one.

Never seems to have the impact of killing 10 million in gas chambers, which is
why it is the more popular method than gas chambers for the modern mass
murderer.

