Mao's Great Famine, horrific as it was,
with its cannibalism and people eating mud in search of sustenance,
was only part of a saga of oppression, cruelty and lies on a gargantuan scale.
In the draconian, top-down, militaristic system that ruled China,
the harsh execution of orders was a way for officials to win promotion
as they were set impossible targets for everything – even for the number of executions.
The inefficiency, waste and destruction were gigantic.
The masses in whose name the Communist party claimed to rule were eminently disposable.
From 1927 to their victory in 1949,
Mao and his companions had waged ruthless warfare
(against equally ruthless if less effective nationalist opponents);
now the campaign was economic and the farmers and industrial workers
were the fodder expected to sacrifice themselves
for the cause dictated from on high.
Anybody not ready to lay down their life
would have it taken from them
in the name of the higher good of the cause.

LENIN-MAO MAN-MADE STARVATION

To understand the origins of the Russian famine,
we have to go back to the October 1917 Revolution when the Bolsheviks,
led by a ruthless clique of Marxist revolutionaries
including Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin,
seized power in the name of the workers and peasants of the Russian Empire
to create a Marxist paradise,
using terror, murder and repression....
So what is the truth about the Holodomor - the Hunger?
The Ukraine was the bread basket of Russia,
but the Great Famine of 1932/3 was not just aimed at the Ukrainians as a nation -
it was a deliberate policy aimed at the entire Soviet peasant population -
Russian, Ukrainian and Kazakh -
especially better-off, small-time farmers.
It was a class war designed to
'break the back of the peasantry'.

Mao's Great Famine
by Frank Dikötter
book review by Jonathan Fenby, Observer, Sep 5, 2010

Frank Dikötter has written a masterly book that should be read not just by anybody interested in modern Chinese history but also by anybody concerned with the way in which a simple idea propagated by an autocratic national leader can lead a country to disaster, in this case to a degree that beggars the imagination. The basic narrative of the great famine that hit the People's Republic around 1960 has been known outside China at least since Jasper Becker's groundbreaking 1996 account, Hungry Ghosts. Its claims were doubted by those who could not accept the sheer monstrous scale of the calamity visited on the Chinese people as a result of the Great Leap Forward launched by Mao in 1958 to propel China into the ranks of major industrial nations. But now Dikötter's painstaking research in newly opened local archives makes all too credible his estimate that the death toll reached 45 million people.

Staggering though it is, the statistical total is only part of the story that this book tells. By digging into the records, Dikötter provides a detailed litany of the degree of suffering the Great Helmsman unleashed and the inhumane manner in which his acolytes operated. Horrors pile up as he tells of the spread of collective farms and the vast projects that caused more harm than good and involved the press-ganging of millions of people into forced labour. As the pressure mounted to provide the all-powerful state with more and more output, the use of extreme violence became the norm, with starvation used as a weapon to punish those who could not keep up with the work routine demanded of them. The justice system was abolished. Brutal party cadres ran amok. "It is impossible not to beat people to death," one county leader said.

In the draconian, top-down, militaristic system that ruled China, the harsh execution of orders was a way for officials to win promotion as they were set impossible targets for everything – even for the number of executions. The inefficiency, waste and destruction were gigantic. The masses in whose name the Communist party claimed to rule were eminently disposable. From 1927 to their victory in 1949, Mao and his companions had waged ruthless warfare (against equally ruthless if less effective nationalist opponents); now the campaign was economic and the farmers and industrial workers were the fodder expected to sacrifice themselves for the cause dictated from on high. Anybody not ready to lay down their life would have it taken from them in the name of the higher good of the cause.

The book's title is somewhat misleading. Horrific as it was, with its cannibalism and people eating mud in search of sustenance, the famine generated by the Great Leap's failure and the diversion of labour from farming was only part of a saga of oppression, cruelty and lies on a gargantuan scale. Initially launched to enable China to overtake Britain in steel production, Mao's programme took on a deadly life of its own. At the apex of the system, the chairman refused to recognise reality, spoke of people eating five meals a day, insisted on maintaining food exports when his country was starving and indulged in macabre throwaway remarks such as: "When there is not enough to eat, people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill."

The depth of Dikötter's research is enhanced by the way in which he tells his terrible story. The book is extremely clearly written, avoiding the melodrama that infused some other recent broadbrush accounts of Mao's sins. He also puts the huge disaster that befell China into the context it needs – the Sino-Soviet split, Mao's ambitions for the People's Republic and the acquiescence of most of those around him until it was too late. Finally, somebody had to confront the leader. As China descended into catastrophe, the second-ranking member of the regime, Liu Shaoqi, who had been shocked at the conditions he found when he visited his home village, forced the chairman to retreat. An effort at national reconstruction began. But Mao was not finished. Four years later, he launched the Cultural Revolution whose most prominent victim was Liu, hounded by Red Guards until he died in 1969, deprived of medicines and cremated under a false name.

The Cultural Revolution is widely remembered, the Great Leap much less so. Having gone through those two experiences, not to mention the mass purges that preceded them and the Beijing massacre of 4 June 1989, it is little wonder if the Chinese of today are set on a very different course that rejects ideology in the interests of material self-advancement. But there is one enormous snag. The Communist party still holds that Mao was 70% good, 30% bad. The Great Helmsman's face stares out over Tiananmen Square and from the country's bank notes. If the bad things that happened under him are common knowledge, he has slipped into the time-honoured category of rulers who wished to do good but whose aims were traduced by evil subordinates. Though some mainland historians have bravely delved into the history of the period covered in this book, the truth is still too troubling to be acknowledged openly by the current rulers of China for one simple reason: Mao is the first emperor of the regime established in 1949 and they are his heirs. Dikötter's superb book pulls another brick from the wall.

Russia's Holocaust by Hunger
(the truth behind Stalin's Great Famine)
book excerpt from "Sashenka" by Simon Sebag Montefiore
Daily Mail, Jul 26, 2008

...The brutal Soviet dictator Josef Stalin reflected that he would have liked to deport the entire Ukrainian nation, but 20 million were too many to move even for him. So he found another solution: starvation. Now, 75 years after one of the great forgotten crimes of modern times, Stalin's man-made famine of 1932/3, the former Soviet republic of Ukraine is asking the world to classify it as a genocide. The Ukrainians call it the Holodomor - the Hunger.

Millions starved as Soviet troops and secret policemen raided their villages, stole the harvest and all the food in villagers' homes. They dropped dead in the streets, lay dying and rotting in their houses, and some women became so desperate for food that they ate their own children. If they managed to fend off starvation, they were deported and shot in their hundreds of thousands. So terrible was the famine that Igor Yukhnovsky, director of the Institute of National Memory, the Ukrainian institution researching the Holodomor, believes as many as nine million may have died.

For decades the disaster remained a state secret, denied by Stalin and his Soviet government and concealed from the outside world with the help of the 'useful idiots' - as Lenin called Soviet sympathisers in the West. Russia is furious that Ukraine has raised the issue of the famine: the swaggering 21st-century state of Prime Minister Putin and President Medvedev see this as nationalist chicanery designed to promote Ukraine, which may soon join Nato and the EU. They see it as an anti-Russian manoeuvre more to do with modern politics than history. And they refuse to recognise this old crime as a genocide. They argue that because the famine not only killed Ukrainians but huge numbers of Russians, Cossacks, Kazakhs and many others as well, it can't be termed genocide - defined as the deliberate killing of large numbers of a particular ethnic group. It may be a strange defence, but it is historically correct.

So what is the truth about the Holodomor? And why is Ukraine provoking Russia's wrath by demanding public recognition now? The Ukraine was the bread basket of Russia, but the Great Famine of 1932/3 was not just aimed at the Ukrainians as a nation - it was a deliberate policy aimed at the entire Soviet peasant population - Russian, Ukrainian and Kazakh - especially better-off, small-time farmers. It was a class war designed to 'break the back of the peasantry', a war of the cities against the countryside and, unlike the Holocaust, it was not designed to eradicate an ethnic people, but to shatter their independent spirit. So while it may not be a formal case of genocide, it does, indeed, rank as one of the most terrible crimes of the 20th century.

To understand the origins of the famine, we have to go back to the October 1917 Revolution when the Bolsheviks, led by a ruthless clique of Marxist revolutionaries including Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, seized power in the name of the workers and peasants of the Russian Empire to create a Marxist paradise, using terror, murder and repression. The Russian Empire was made of many peoples, including the Russians, Ukrainians, Kazakhs and Georgians, but the great majority of them, especially in the vast arable lands of Ukraine, southern Russia, the northern Caucasus, and Siberia, were peasants, who dreamed only of owning their own land and farming it. Initially, they were thrilled with the Revolution, which meant the breakup of the large landed estates into small parcels which they could farm. But the peasants had no interest in the Marxist utopian ideologies that obsessed Lenin and Stalin. Once they had seized their plots of land, they were no longer interested in esoteric absurdities such as Marx's stages in the creation of a classless society. The fact is they were essentially conservative and wanted to pass what little wealth they had to their children. This infuriated Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who believed that the peasantry, especially the ones who owned some land and a few cows, were a huge threat to a collectivist Soviet Russia. Lenin's hatred of the peasantry became clear when a famine occurred in Ukraine and southern Russia in 1921, the inevitable result of the chaos and upheaval of the Revolution. With his bloodthirsty loathing for all enemies of the Revolution, he said 'Let the peasants starve', and wrote ranting notes ordering the better-off peasants to be hanged in their thousands and their bodies displayed by the roadsides.

Yet this was an emotional outburst and, ever the ruthless pragmatist, he realised the country was so poor and weak in the immediate aftermath of its revolutionary civil war that the peasants were vital to its survival. So instead, he embraced what he called a New Economic Policy, in effect a temporary retreat from Marxism, that allowed the peasants to grow crops and sell them for profit. It was always planned by Lenin and his fellow radicals that this New Economic Policy should be a stopgap measure which would soon be abandoned in the Marxist cause. But before this could happen, Lenin died in 1924 and Stalin defeated all his rivals for the Soviet leadership. Then, three years later, grain supplies dropped radically. It had been a poor crop, made worse by the fact that many peasant farmers had shifted from grain into more lucrative cotton production. Stalin travelled across Russia to inspect supplies and ordered forcible seizures of grain from the peasantry. Thousands of young urban Communists were drafted into the countryside to help seize grain as Stalin determined that the old policies had failed. Backed by the young, tough Communists of his party, he devised what he called the Great Turn: he would seize the land, force the peasants into collective farms and sell the excess grain abroad to force through a Five Year Plan of furious industrialisation to make Soviet Russia a military super power. He expected the peasants to resist and decreed anyone who did so was a kulak - a better-off peasant who could afford to withhold grain - and who was now to be treated as a class enemy. By 1930, it was clear the collectivisation campaign was in difficulties. There was less grain than before it had been introduced, the peasants were still resisting and the Soviet Union seemed to be tottering. Stalin, along with his henchman Vyacheslav Molotov and others, wrote a ruthless memorandum ordering the 'destruction of the kulaks as a class'. They divided huge numbers of peasants into three categories. The first was to be eliminated immediately; the second to be imprisoned in camps; the third, consisting of 150,000 households - almost a million innocent people - was to be deported to wildernesses in Siberia or Asia. Stalin himself did not really understand how to identify a kulak or how to improve grain production, but this was beside the point. What mattered was that sufficient numbers of peasants would be killed or deported for all resistance to his collectivisation programme to be smashed. In letters written by many Soviet leaders, including Stalin and Molotov, which I have read in the archives, they repeatedly used the expression: 'We must break the back of the peasantry.' And they meant it. In 1930/1, millions of peasants were deported, mainly to Siberia. But 800,000 people rebelled in small uprisings, often murdering local commissars who tried to take their grain. So Stalin's top henchmen led armed expeditions of secret policemen to crush 'the wreckers', shooting thousands. The peasants replied by destroying their crops and slaughtering 26 million cattle and 15 million horses to stop the Bolsheviks (and the cities they came from) getting their food. Their mistake was to think they were dealing with ordinary politicians. But the Bolsheviks were far more sinister than that: if many millions of peasants wished to fight to the death, then the Bolsheviks were not afraid of killing them. It was war - and the struggle was most vicious not only in the Ukraine but in the north Caucasus, the Volga, southern Russia and central Asia. The strain of the slaughter affected even the bull-nerved Stalin, who sensed opposition to these brutal policies by the more moderate Bolsheviks, including his wife Nadya. He knew Soviet power was suddenly precarious, yet Stalin kept selling the grain abroad while a shortage turned into a famine. More than a million peasants were deported to Siberia: hundreds of thousands were arrested or shot. Like a village shopkeeper doing his accounts, Stalin totted up the numbers of executed peasants and the tonnes of grains he had collected. By December 1931, famine was sweeping the Ukraine and north Caucasus. 'The peasants ate dogs, horses, rotten potatoes, the bark of trees, anything they could find,' wrote one witness Fedor Bleov. By summer 1932, Fred Beal, an American radical and rare outside witness, visited a village near Kharkov in Ukraine, where he found all the inhabitants dead in their houses or on the streets, except one insane woman. Rats feasted on the bodies. Beal found messages next to the bodies such as: 'My son, I couldn't wait. God be with you.' One young communist, Lev Kopolev, wrote at the time of 'women and children with distended bellies turning blue, with vacant lifeless eyes. 'And corpses. Corpses in ragged sheepskin coats and cheap felt boots; corpses in peasant huts in the melting snow of Vologda [in Russia] and Kharkov [in Ukraine].' Cannibalism was rife and some women offered sexual favours in return for food. There are horrific eye-witness accounts of mothers eating their own children. In the Ukrainian city of Poltava, Andriy Melezhyk recalled that neighbours found a pot containing a boiled liver, heart and lungs in the home of one mother who had died. Under a barrel in the cellar they discovered a small hole in which a child's head, feet and hands were buried. It was the remains of the woman's little daughter, Vaska.

A boy named Miron Dolot described the countryside as 'like a battlefield after a war. 'Littering the fields were bodies of starving farmers who'd been combing the potato fields in the hope of finding a fragment of a potato. 'Some frozen corpses had been lying out there for months.' On June 6, 1932, Stalin and Molotov ordered 'no deviation regarding amounts or deadlines of grain deliveries are to be permitted'. A week later, even the Ukrainian Bolshevik leaders were begging for food, but Stalin turned on his own comrades, accusing them of being wreckers. 'The Ukraine has been given more than it should,' he stated. When a comrade at a Politburo meeting told the truth about the horrors, Stalin, who knew what was happening perfectly well, retorted: 'Wouldn't it be better for you to leave your post and become a writer so you can concoct more fables!' In the same week, a train pulled into Kiev from the Ukrainian villages 'loaded with corpses of people who had starved to death', according to one report. Such tragic sights had no effect on the Soviet leadership. When the American Beal complained to the Bolshevik Ukrainian boss, Petrovsky, he replied: 'We know millions are dying. That is unfortunate, but the glorious future of the Soviet Union will justify it.' Stalin was not alone in his crazed determination to push through his plan. The archives reveal one young communist admitting: 'I saw people dying from hunger, but I firmly believed the ends justified the means.'

Though Stalin was admittedly in a frenzy of nervous tension, it was at this point in 1932 when under another leader the Soviet Union might have simply fallen apart and history would have been different. Embattled on all sides, criticised by his own comrades, faced with chaos and civil war and mass starvation in the countryside, he pushed on ruthlessly - even when, in 1932, his wife Nadya committed suicide, in part as a protest against the famine. 'It seems in some regions of Ukraine, Soviet power has ceased to exist,' he wrote. 'Check the problem and take measures.' That meant the destruction of any resistance. Stalin created a draconian law that any hungry peasant who stole even a husk of grain was to be shot - the notorious Misappropriation of Socialist Property law. 'If we don't make an effort, we might lose Ukraine,' Stalin said, almost in panic. He dispatched ferocious punitive expeditions led by his henchmen, who engaged in mass murders and executions. Not just Ukraine was targeted - Molotov, for example, headed to the Urals, the Lower Volga and Siberia. Lazar Kaganovich, a close associate of Stalin, crushed the Kuban and Siberia regions where famine was also rife. Train tickets were restricted and internal passports were introduced so that it became impossible for peasants to flee the famine areas. Stalin called the peasants 'saboteurs' and declared it 'a fight to the death! These people deliberately tried to sabotage the Soviet stage'.

Between four and five million died in Ukraine, a million died in Kazakhstan and another million in the north Caucasus and the Volga. By 1933, 5.7 million households - somewhere between ten million and 15 million people - had vanished. They had been deported, shot or died of starvation. As for Stalin, he emerged more ruthless, more paranoid, more isolated than before. Stalin later told Winston Churchill that this was the most difficult time of his entire life, harder even than Hitler's invasion. 'It was a terrible struggle' in which he had 'to destroy ten million. It was fearful. Four years it lasted - but it was absolutely necessary'. Only in the mind of a brutal dictator could the mass murder of his own people be considered 'necessary'. Whether it was genocide or not, perhaps now the true nature of one of the worst crimes in history will finally be acknowledged.

CHINA FOODFIGHT FOR CANADA POTASH

CHINA IN CANADA SAY SPY CHIEF & GOLDSTEIN CONSPIRACY IN 1984

CANADA COMMIE LENIN-MAO STATUE

WEATHER-FOOD-WATER-AIR CONTROL & TAKE NOT OUR DAILY BREAD & LENIN BEHIND ENVIRONMENTALISM


Russia considers bid for Canada's Potash, Bloomberg, Nov 3, 2010 (...Russia’s biggest fertilizer companies have been studying combining operations to expand output as shrinking arable land and rising world food demand spur consumption of their products. OAO Silvinit, Russia’s largest potash producer, and rival OAO Uralkali are both controlled by billionaire Suleiman Kerimov and his partners, who plan to merge the two companies. OAO PhosAgro, the largest maker of phosphate fertilizers in Russia, asked the state to help fund a purchase of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan-based Potash Corp., Vedomosti said today, citing an Oct. 20 letter from PhosAgro Chairman Vladimir Litvinenko to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. PhosAgro said by e-mail that it wouldn’t comment on the report until Canada rules later today on BHP Billiton’s unsolicited offer for Potash Corp....In his letter to Putin, Litvinenko said Canadian banks had agreed to provide half the funding for a takeover and Russian banks should provide the remainder, according to Vedomosti. While there has been reported interest from Chinese and Indian companies in making a counterbid for Potash Corp., nothing has materialized so far, Troika added....)

Canada First Nations join China in potash bid
by Jason Warwick, Financial Post, Oct 28, 2010
In what seems like an unlikely bid, a group of Saskatchewan First Nations is stepping into the takeover battle for Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan with a planned offer of its own. The First Nations group said it is collaborating with merchant banks, pension funds and Chinese investors to prepare a multibillion-dollar competing bid for Potash Corp. -- currently the target of an almost $40-billion hostile takeover attempt by BHP Billiton. A flurry of meetings has taken place in the past week between provincial ministers, First Nations leaders, potential investors and Potash Corp. officials, according to a spokesman for a group called the Indigenous Potash Group. "We cannot be left out. We are moving on this," said spokesman Rick Gamble, who is also chief of the Beardy's and Okemasis First Nation. "This is exciting stuff. We're ready to go".... Go to INDIAN LAND CLAIMS DISBELIEVED & TAKING CANDY FROM INDIAN BABY

Canada exaggerate Ukraine genocide death toll
(says Soviet communists starved 10-million people)
by Peter O'Neil, Calgary Herald, Oct 29, 2010
KYIV, Ukraine — Prime Minister Stephen Harper is being accused of exaggerating this week the extent of the 1932-33 famine that was declared a genocide by Canada's Parliament two years ago. Harper indicated on both days of his first-ever journey to Ukraine that "almost" 10 million people died in what is known as the Holodomor — or "death by starvation". Critics, while stressing that the death toll of the famine caused by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's policies is massive and remains one of history's great crimes against humanity, said the true figure is roughly a third of Harper's.... Harper spokesman Dimitri Soudas said Friday "nobody" can be sure how many died. "To minimize this act of genocide by claiming exaggeration is quite sad because there are a number of published estimates," Soudas wrote in an email. Harper made two references to the famine while in Ukraine. "Some 10 million people, up to 10 million people, and we'll never know the numbers for sure, (were) killed, and killed through the deliberate plans of their own government," he said at the joint news conference in the capital city of Kyiv while sitting next to President Viktor Yanukovych. On Tuesday, Harper raised it again while speaking to students at a small Catholic university in Lviv, in Ukraine's nationalist heartland. "Now as you know almost as many — or you may know — almost as many Ukrainians died in the Holodomor during the 1930s as there were Canadians alive at that time," he told them. During the time of the famine there were approximately 10.6 million Canadians, according to Statistics Canada.... University of Alberta historian John-Paul Himka wrote in a 2008 academic journal that the 10 million figure is arrived at only by including the children who would have been born if not for the famine. The true victims of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's brutal policies, should be "unsullied by falsehood" and inflated figures not be used as a "political tool," Himka argued. "I find it disrespectful to the dead that people use their deaths in a ploy to gain the moral capital of victimhood. To this end, they inflate the numbers."

Canada PM defends trade talks with Ukraine
(despite new regime's strong-arm tactics)
by John Ibbitson, Globe and Mail, Oct 24, 2010
Stephen Harper arrived Sunday to a Ukraine of diminishing freedoms and rising strong-arm tactics. And yet the Canadian government is working to sign a free-trade deal with the regime. The Prime Minister landed in Kiev from the meeting in Switzerland of La Francophonie, the 70 nations with links to the French language and culture. That group’s final communiqué stressed the importance of protecting human rights and the rule of law no fewer than three times, even though many of its governments are either undemocratic or corrupt or both. How does this Conservative government square the contradiction of seeking business deals with countries whose governments exhibit varying degrees of unsavouryness, while taking a principled stand on human rights? The answer, according to the Prime Minister, is to deny the contradiction exists. The question assumes “that there is an inherent tension between these two issues, between wanting to do business and raising issues of human rights and the rule of law,” he told a reporter Sunday when asked how he juggled the two subjects in conversations with leaders. “And I will not deny that sometimes there is tension. But in fact these go hand in hand.” That tension may enter the room when Mr. Harper meets with Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, whose government has tightened its grip since its election in February – even as negotiations proceed on a trade agreement with Canada. An early sign of an agreement is the deal to be signed this week that allows young people to work, study and travel more easily between both countries

Red China eyes Canada Potash (anti-Chinese sentiment rising in potash province) & Canada allow sale if China pay top bid for potash (politicians on trade-trips soliciting communists) & Securing food a top priority for Red China (owns potash projects in Canada & Congo) & Chinese eating monkey brains in 1979 (now want Canada beef says Potash CEO) & China's Sinochem weighs Canada Potash bid (Communists also scooping up oil/gas/iron ore...) & Canada allow Red China takeover potash motherlode (most important crop fertilizer on planet) & Canada's potash feeds the world (gov't plans to sell national treasure to Red China) & China hungers for Canada's breadbasket (China in foodfight for Canada's potash). Bloom/AFP/NP/Star, Aug 24-Sep 2, 2010

Mao's Great Famine, by Frank Dikötter, book review by Jonathan Fenby, Observer, Sep 5, 2010

Russia's holocaust by hunger (the truth behind Stalin's Great Famine), book excerpt from "Sashenkaby" by Simon Sebag Montefiore, Daily Mail, Jul 26, 2008

WAS FARMER JONES GARETH JONES? (...The first reliable report of the Russian famine was given to the world by an English journalist, a certain Gareth Jones, at one time secretary to Lloyd George. Jones had a conscientious streak in his make-up which took him on a secret journey into the Ukraine and a brief walking tour through its countryside. That same streak was to take him a few years later into the interior of China during political disturbances, and was to cost him his life at the hands of Chinese military bandits....)

GARETH JONES PROOF DISCUSSION (...To answer your question of how to academically argue that Gareth Jones was Farmer Jones I suggest you read Orwell's 1946 essay: THE PREVENTION OF LITERATURE where he mentions the cover-up of the Ukraine famine (amongst other things). I think this contributes to my opinion that Orwell had a truthsayer of the famine in mind when he wrote about it in Animal Farm and for that reason chose the name of Jones. This essay also mentions how the Communist press "barred" journalists from telling the truth about what they saw. That may therefore answer Russ's earlier question about the "five barred gate" which is mentioned in Animal Farm....)

Jackie Jura
~ an independent researcher monitoring local, national and international events ~

email: orwelltoday@gmail.com
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