This is the biggest "Duh!" moment we've had in a while.
Author Frank Dikotter pours through thousands of documents from Mao-era China and discovers that 45 million people were killed during the Great Leap Forward when the Communists starved its own people to "progress."
As Moe Lane points out:
(T)he People’s Republic of China’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ caused truly frightening numbers of deaths: looking at the actual source material, its author is now estimating a death toll of 45 million (50% more than previous estimates). That works out to about 6.5% of its population, based on the 1960 census: to put that in perspective, the equivalent for 2010-era USA would be 20.15 million, or just over the entire population of New York State.
You don't hear the apologists for communism as much now as you used to, but "progressives" will occasionally argue that the problems with Stalin and Mao were in execution (literally), not theory. But the theory is evil, as well, and there's nothing "democratic" in any of the "democratic" communist regimes.
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