Comments on: So Twenty Years Ago

By: Ron Snyder

Ron Snyder — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:51:45 +0000

Prowler, the 20 million pluss number is more on the order of what I’ve read over the years, and it was perhaps closer to 70 million. The numbers are staggering, and even if one were to play games with percentages of population, it is still an almost inconceivable number.

Heck, even the Chinese do not know how many he killed, or caused to be killed by his policies or edicts. Probably the largest number of people killed by one person/regime in history. (Too tired/lazy to research it at the moment)

Great Leap Forward indeed.

By: ProwlerAMDO

ProwlerAMDO — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:52:39 +0000

Lex, I hate to say you’re not completely correct but I’m pretty sure you are drastically underestimating Mao’s death toll that he unleashed on China from the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution combined. Even the most conservative estimates I’ve heard are over 20 million dead. Maybe not all intentionally executed a la the Holocaust, many just starved from asking peasant farmers to stop farming and try to smelt pig iron and other egregious examples, but dead as a result of disastrous communist/marxist theories nonetheless.

By: lex

lex — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:25:02 +0000

An utter disaster in Cuba, and for all intents and purposes abandoned in China, in both places maintained only as a fig leaf for unchallenged, single party rule. But not before wreaking China’s economy, causing the persecution of some 36 million people during the Cultural Revolution, of whom as many as 3 million may have died.

These are very simple questions that you’re asking.

By: Draft no over 130 in 1971

Draft no over 130 in 1971 — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 06:36:55 +0000

“beginning of the end for Communism as an organizing political theory”? Excuse me, but what about China and Cuba?

By: hajo-hi

hajo-hi — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:57:51 +0000

Neat move from Uncle Joe. You must imagine him in a big show-room, selling Soviet-era cars. Would you rather take a new or a used one?

By: OldT6Pilot

OldT6Pilot — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:18:08 +0000

Yes I remember reading or seeing some documentary where Reagan, in the limo on the way to the speech, said, “well the boys at State are going to be mad at me…” or words to that effect.

Now all the revisionists and apologists are starting to line up and minimize the impact of that speech just as they minimize all the impact that those who stridently opposed communism during the cold war had on ending its grip on millions. Even those at the forefront were surprised as William F. Buckley found out when traveling in Eastern Europe after the wall came down and the Soviet Union dissolved. The words of Reagan and the writings of Buckley and others in national Review and such had made their way behind the Iron Curtain fanning the embers of hope in the breasts of millions who refused to give in to oppression. Buckley was greeted as a hero demonstrating the truth even he had not been sure of: that words spoken and written in opposition of tyranny had made a difference, even as they had been mocked as simplistic and naive by those convinced that accommodation was the best course.

The parallels in our approach with dealing with this eras tyrants are there to be seen, the lessons to be learned, even as, the evidence suggests, we have so soon forgotten them.