Page 129 - Communism in Ambush

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 mur-
dered 50 million people; Mao, 60 million.

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 pro-
duction," all peasants were forced to surrender their land to coopera-
tives. The confiscations of Stalin's Russia were repeated. Moreover, Mao
punished peasants in some parts of China for not accepting collectiviza-
tion 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 demon-
strated 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 inhab-
itants), where the first people's commune in the country had been estab-
lished, "The problem is not that food is lacking. There are sufficient
quantities of grain, but 90 percent of the inhabitants are suffering from ide-
ological difficulties." In the autumn of 1959 the class war was momentarily
forgotten, and a a military-style offensive was launched against the peas-