Page 132 - Communism in Ambush

A Communist
Party militant de-
livering
Communist prop-
aganda in the
years of the Great
Leap.

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.
84

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 com-
munes of between 100 and 300 families—which greatly reduced agricul-
tural 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 be-