Communism Kills People

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.

"One of the greatest threats to mankind today is that the world may be choked by an explosively pervading but well camouflaged bureaucracy."

That's from Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution, who died at the age of 95.

In the late 1960s, most experts were speaking of imminent global famines in which billions would perish. "The battle to feed all of humanity is over," biologist Paul Ehrlich famously wrote in his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb. "In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." Ehrlich also said, "I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971." He insisted that "India couldn't possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980."

But Borlaug and his team were already engaged in the kind of crash program that Ehrlich declared wouldn't work. Their dwarf wheat varieties resisted a wide spectrum of plant pests and diseases and produced two to three times more grain than the traditional varieties. In 1965, they had begun a massive campaign to ship the miracle wheat to Pakistan and India and teach local farmers how to cultivate it properly. By 1968, when Ehrlich's book appeared, the U.S. Agency for International Development had already hailed Borlaug's achievement as a "Green Revolution."

Contrary to Ehrlich's predictions, we haven't suffered huge famines. Food is actually more abundant and cheaper than ever in history. The world has truly lost a great man.

Hey, Germans Suffered During World War II, Too

Forget the little matter that the Germans started WWII or that they killed millions of people in gas chambers. This summer, President Obama will visit the Buchenwald concentration camp, where Germans killed 50,000 people. But he will also visit Dresden.

But he will be aware of the sensibilities of his German hosts before the D-Day commemoration and by travelling to Dresden — a city destroyed by ferocious Allied bombing in February 1945 — Mr Obama will also acknowledge how Germany suffered during the Second World War.

Sounds like the sort of equivalency Pho would approve of.

Reality Check

I've always had a soft spot for Honest Abe because he and I share a birthday spot on the calendar. By the time I was in third grade, I'd read every biography of the great man I could get my hands on. I used to kid people that being born on Lincoln's birthday meant I would either become president, grow a beard, or get shot.

So the Obama campaigns coopting of the greatest president of our country is sort of a personal insult to me. And these comparisons are embarrassing.

“It’s very hard to say who has a tougher job,” says Holzer. “Is it the man who’s facing a fiscal crisis worse than any since the Depression and also the specter of nuclear war, terrorism, health pandemics, and all of the issues that a 21st century president has to deal with and hopefully solve? Or is it the President who is facing the destruction of the entire country that he’s been elected to lead?”

Is he serious? He wants to compare the disintegration of our nation to an economic slowdown? This sort of thing is insulting and diminishes both men.

Lincoln presided over the single costliest war in U.S. history. We lost more than 600,000 men in that conflict and the economic devastation to the South was unparalleled, taking generations to rebuild. The problems with race relations today can be traced directly back to the fighting of that war and the harshness of Reconstruction after it (why do you think the Texas governor is not the seat of power?).

And outside of the actual human costs, there was the loss of innocence about what the republic was about. If you read the Federalist Papers, there's this implied consent of the states to be joined to the federal government, a consent that can be withdrawn through secession at any time. But Lincoln recognized that a country whose states could withdraw from the union at will was a country without much of a future. While the history taught to children is that the Civil War was all about slavery, there is this other crucial aspect to the fight.

And while I don't dislike Barack Obama (although I'm starting to) and I am happy for a black person to be president, these inflated comparisons to Lincoln are starting to anger me. I pray that Obama doesn't measure up to Lincoln, because it would mean another Civil War here. What Obama will be dealing with are simply the typical difficult duties of being the chief executive of the United States. Of course, he'd be better prepared for it had he actually had some experience, but too many voters wanted style over substance.

UPDATE: The differences are far more obvious.

The French Revolution

Anyone wishing to understand the abject contempt many liberals on the web have for America and its institutions need to study the French Revolution.

Today, I watched The French Revolution on the History Channel and realized that the Pandagonistas are the philosophical direct decendants of the blood-thirsty leaders who overthrew the monarchy. This is in no way a defense of the behavior of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, but when you look at the anarchy which arose, you have to wonder if it is not the sort of thing many advocate.

Oddly, to read Daily KOS or Pandagon, one would think we actually had Louis XVI reincarnated as George W. Bush. And I can't help but wonder who, exactly starved or had their Constitutional protects shredded by the 43d president? Other than the inconvenience of removing one's shoes at the airport, I can't find many "liberties" banned. We still have a free--and ultra-critical--press at work (at least when a Republican is president). One can still travel without enormous difficulty both within the country and without. And despite what you hear, food and health care are both readily available.

But having read the hysterical writings regarding trivial matters (Rick Warren's invocation invitation comes to mind), I have to wonder if these radicals wouldn't fit better in 18th Century France.