Cruelty or Humanity

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Rees Stuart. Cruelty or Humanity

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CRUELTY OR HUMANITY

—Robert S. White, author of Pacifism in English Literature

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The greatest mass murderer in history is considered to have been Mao Zedong, founder of the People’s Republic of China. From 1958 to 1962, during a policy named The Great Leap Forward, designed as an effort to catch up with Western economies, 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death.17 That period of mass killings had been preceded, in the 1940s and 1950s, by the elimination of landlords, peasants and anyone who dared to challenge the social and economic transformation ordered by Mao.

There’s an irony in these killings. Records were carefully kept by China’s Public Security Bureau, but were secret. Keeping the records of cruelty secret enabled subsequent denials that such action occurred. That’s a process we’ll see again and again.

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