Remembering the biggest mass murder in the history of the world

Washington Times ^ | August 3, 2016 | Ilya Somin

[grundle]

Who was the biggest mass murderer in the history of the world? Most people probably assume that the answer is Adolf Hitler, architect of the Holocaust. Others might guess Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who may indeed have managed to kill even more innocent people than Hitler did, many of them as part of a terror famine that likely took more lives than the Holocaust. But both Hitler and Stalin were outdone by Mao Zedong. From 1958 to 1962, his Great Leap Forward policy led to the deaths of up to 45 million people – easily making it the biggest episode of mass murder ever recorded.

Just recently, the socialist government of Venezuela imposed forced labor on much of its population. Yet most of the media coverage of this injustice fails to note the connection to socialism, or that the policy has parallels in the history of the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and other similar regimes. One analysis even claims that the real problem is not so much “socialism qua socialism,” but rather Venezuela’s “particular brand of socialism, which fuses bad economic ideas with a distinctive brand of strongman bullying,” and is prone to authoritarianism and “mismanagement.” The author simply ignores the fact that “strongman bullying” and “mismanagement” are typical of socialist states around the world. The Scandinavian nations – sometimes cited as examples of successful socialism- are not actually socialist at all, because they do not feature government ownership of the means of production, and in many ways have freer markets than most other western nations.

[MadMax, the Grinning Reaper]

A name correction; The producer of the film “Ride The Thunder” is Richard Botkin, not Gerald Boykin. I think Boykin is a retired Special Forces general who has written a book on Vietnam.

[gleeaikin]

I don’t think this list is specifically blaming the British for the deaths, merely calling it the period of “British India”. Before the British there was probably plenty of death from famine and disease, but much fewer organized records of these deaths.