You won't find this in our history books!

[Guest guest]

Krishen Kak <krishkak@d...> wrote:

 

A datum about a man who was responsible for the deaths of more humans

than Hitler, Stalin, Genghis Khan and Timurlane put together. And he

remains the presiding deity of those who control the central

government today.

 

[extract, emphasis added]

 

http://www.dailypioneer.com/indexn12.asp?

main_variable=BOOKS&file_name=book1%2Etxt&counter_img=1

The Pioneer 14/8/05

 

Mao's dirty linen washed in public

Marxists in India, unmindful of Mao's monstrous follies,

continue to peddle the fiction that Mao's triumph in 1949 'is the

second greatest event in human history', the first being the 1917

October Revolution in Russia. Both are undisputed milestones in the

history of horrors inflicted on humankind for the cause of ideology -

Kanchan Gupta

 

MAO: THE UNKNOWN STORY, BY JUN CHANG & JON HALLIDAY,RANDOM

HOUSE, £25

 

 

During the heyday of the Naxalite movement, when it was

fashionable to flaunt the Little Red Book of Chairman Mao and young

men and women were naïve enough to believe that the People's Army was

on its way to liberate Kolkata, a great deal of revolutionary romance

was attached to the slogan 'Power flows from the barrel of a gun'.

Such terse summation of the revolution of the proletariat could be

the Great Helmsman's alone.

 

 

 

Tragically, Mao Zedong, unlike other revolutionary

practitioners of cynical politics, believed in his own slogan and

implemented it with great fervour. He was China's sole big gun and

all power flowed from him, more often than not with the cruel intent

of subjugating the masses over whose destiny he presided with

remarkable ruthlessness from 1949 till his death in 1976.

 

 

 

Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, in Mao: The Unknown Story, tell

the story of that era, without wincing at any of the gory details

which provide a fascinating, though morbid, insight into the deeply

flawed personality of the man whom millions - from Canton to Calcutta

to Cuba - hailed as the liberator of the oppressed masses, especially

the peasantry.

 

 

 

With single-minded determination Mao pursued his dream of

dominating the world. Fashioning himself after Stalin, he persisted

in this endeavour with disastrous consequences. There was neither

ideology nor idealism that sustained his quest that led to the

greatest famine in recorded history, claiming the lives of 38 million

Chinese, most of them impoverished peasants. By the time he died, his

leadership had taken a toll of 70 million lives....................

 

 

 

 

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