On Sat, 8 Feb 1997 05:58:20 -0800, Ralph McGehee <[log in to unmask]> wrote: >>the Chinese leadership starved to death 30 million Chinese >>citizens in a three-year span from 1959 to 1961. The total number >>of deaths has been placed as high as 80 million for the entire life >>of the regime. > > Thank you Mr. McGuire for a good laugh this morning. You >have increased my burden however by 50 million, I must now prove >that 80 million did not die verses the previous thirty million. Please try to read my posts carefully. I stated clearly that it had been reported in a PBS documentary that Chinese Marxists starved to death 30 million people during three years: 1959 to 1961. I then stated that it has also been reported from other sources that Chinese Marxists may have murdered as many as 80 million people *during the entire existence of the Marxist regime*. Here is my source for the latter statement: <qnotes> .newspaper article author=Daniel Southerland title=Study of famine in China reveals cannibalism cases newspaper=The Boston Sunday Globe date=July 17, 1994 pages=20 original.newspaper=The Washington Post body= BEIJING -- The time was more than three decades ago; the place, a county in east-central China. A ferocious, abiding hunger had settled across much of the land, and top official Zhao Yushu issued this ruling: Children abandoned in roads and fields by their starving parents must be left to die. People were so desperate in one Fengyang County commune during the monstrous famine, which was caused by Mao Zedong's 1958-60 Great Leap Forward, that on 63 occasions they ate others who had died--or resorted to killing, carving up and eating their own children. "In Damiao commune, Chen Zhangying and her husband Zhao Xizhen killed and boiled their 8-year-old son Xiao Qing and ate him," said a startling report that has recently become available in the West. "In Wudian commune, Wang Lanying not only picked up dead people to eat, but also sold two jin [2.2 pounds] from their bodies as pork." The 581-page report detailing how the famine affected Fengyang in Anhui Province, prepared in 1989 by the official Chinese Academy of Social Sciences for internal use by top Chinese officials, is just one example of material that has recently emerged about the staggering human toll exacted by Mao's belief in "permanent revolution." This and other new evidence shows that the number of people who died in more than a dozen repressive, often violent political campaigns between 1950 and 1976--especially the Great Leap Forward and the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution--is millions higher than previously thought. According to some high estimates, Mao's repression, radicalism and neglect may have been responsible for up to 80 million deaths. The material--unearthed by Chinese and Western scholars--also shows that areas of China previously believed to have escaped the chaos of these campaigns were not immune from the tumult masterminded by Mao, who died in 1976 but is still revered or at least admired by many Chinese. </qnotes> > Since you refuse to go to your neighborhood library and provide >more sources for your claim(s) let me respond. You have yet to provide ANY sources for your claims. I cited the Sue Williams documentary. You have failed to reciprocate with a counter-source. So far you have stated that you personally didn't hear of any death by starvation. That is not a convincing source. A convincing source would be a source which collated and analyzed all the available reports about starvation in China during the period we are talking about. Nearly the entire Western intellectual elite--including the New York Times--denied during the thirties and forties that the Soviet Union had murdered more than 20 million innocent civilians. Your denials of Chinese political crimes remind one a good deal of Western apologetics for the Soviet Union earlier in the century. > 6. The CIA ran the "Mighty Wurlitzer," a propaganda organ on which >it could play any "tune" anywhere in the world. It has been my >frequent observation that whenever the CIA opts to overthrow >a government -- we suddenly find our media afloat in stories >of the suddenly, devilish, murdering target of those operations. Like the Soviet Union, for instance? Do you deny that the Soviet Union engaged in mass murder on a scale exceeding even that of the Nazis? >>We need a strong covert capability, and the nerve to use it with force >>when necessary. We should use covert methods wisely and well, until >>the day the peaceable kingdom arrives. The world is yet teeming with >>dangerous predators. > >I agree with the last part of your assessment. In other words, the world is teeming with dangerous predators--but the Western democracies should refrain from using covert operations to deal with them? I strongly doubt that you will ever convince any Western government to buy into that proposition. Feel free to keep trying, however. -- Wayne McGuire http://www.cybercom.net/~wmcguire