Notes:
- Matt Ray's ongoing research has updated data and discussion.
- Mao is widely credited in the West with tens of millions of
killings (49-78,000,000) but the sources are generally vague and
contradictory. It is particularly difficult to pin down the deaths of
the Cultural Revolution on him. Even assuming that the numbers are
correct (and living witnesses saw very few people die during those
years), Mao certainly started it, but after a few months he had lost
control over the events, and there is no evidence whatsoever that he
ordered or approved the many killings committed in the name of the
Cultural Revolution: they were not carried out by the army or the police
but by radicals. Crimes committed by the "red guards" cannot be
automatically blamed on him. His wife Jiang Qing is widely despised in
China and considered to have exerted an evil influence on those events
(and was eventually arrested). In 1968 Mao called for "Big Unity"
between the radical and conservative factions that were fighting all
over China (not for more blood but for less blood). Before dying he
appointed Hua Guofeng, a provincial governor, as his successor bypassing
all the senior officials who were responsible for the excesses of the
Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution indirectly caused
starvation, but the number of people who died of that starvation is
probably lower than Westerners thought (again, judging from living
witnesses) and he can only be considered indirectly responsible for
them. A failed policy does not constitute "genocide" (otherwise this
list of genociders would be much longer).
- I read Burying Mao, The Unknown Story and many other books on China.
I also happen to travel frequently to China (3 months total over 2014-15)
and have Chinese friends both in the USA and China who grew up during the
Cultural Revolution. I am obviously not a fan of the Chinese
regime (my website was banned in China for a while) but my view is that
we still don't have a clear understanding of what happened under Mao.
None of my Chinese friends and none of their parents know someone who was
killed during the 1950s/60s: not a family member, not a friend,
not a neighbor, not even a friend's friend's friend. Contrast with the
Holocaust: virtually every older German and Pole knows of at least one
Jewish family that disappeared during World War II. Nonetheless, all books
on Mao published in the West routinely talk of millions killed under Mao.
But there is really no study to justify those numbers. Whenever you read
that he is responsible for 10, 20, 30... 70 million deaths, you should notice
that they don't provide any evidence that would fly in a court of law.
We literally don't have the names of those 70 million people who supposedly
were killed under Mao (we do have the names of the people killed in Hitler's
death camps, and the names of the people killed in Stalin's gulags).
The avalanche of anti-Mao books started in the 1980s after Deng Xiaoping
launched an ideological campaign against the legacy of the Great Leap Forward
and the Cultural Revolution.
Ye Jian Ying's speech in 1979 and Liu Zeng's report of 1981 (both attacking
the Great Leap Forward) were widely publicized by the Communist Party.
Many books published in the West are simply quoting the figures published
by Deng's clique back then without realizing that Deng's agenda was not to
tell the truth but to defeat his opponents within the Communist Party.
His enemies were the ones who had worked with Mao on the Great Leap Forward
and the Cultural Revolution, therefore Deng had to discredit both events.
We cannot trust any study published in China in the 1980s, at the peak
of this ideological war, but most Western books are based precisely on
those "revelations".
The first major Western "studies" about Mao's massacres came out in
the China Quarterly, and to this day those "studies" are routinely
plagiarized in books and magazines. Well, we now know that this journal
was covertly funded by the CIA (London Review of Books, Volume 23,
no. 10, 24 May 2001). That magazine never funded any study aimed
at defending Mao. It only funded studied to discredit him.
Eyewitness accounts cited by Jasper Becker, Jung Chang, and others are
just not enough to conclude that tens of millions of people were killed.
At most, an impartial jury would reach the conclusion that Mao is responsible
for a few thousand deaths (keeping aside the civil war during which
atrocities were committed by both sides).
I respect historians like Richard Baum, Frank Dikotter, Jung Chang,
Judith Banister, Richard MacFarquhar, etc
but for every book that alleges Mao is responsible for those deaths one
could write a book alleging the opposite. It is just that in the West
we don't have historians interested in defending Mao.
It wouldn't be difficult to write a book showing that the Great Leap Forward
actually improved China's economy and that life expectancy in the 1960s
increased (a number that is hardly consistent with the claim that 70 million
people died a premature death). I could list dozens of papers published
over the years by economists, sociologists and technologists who had
no political agenda but happen to reach conclusions that one could use
to paint a brighter picture of Mao's era. (I have no interest in doing
this because i don't like Mao, and wouldn't want to spend the rest of
my life defending those papers).
In other words, we tend to be victims of China's own anti-Mao propaganda,
taking for literally true what was originally a project to marginalize
Mao's allies. That project succeeded, but it doesn't mean that Mao's allies
were lying and that Mao's enemies were telling the truth.
We don't really scrutinize anti-Mao books the same way we scrutinize
books on other subjects. Banister, for example, assumes "under-reporting
of deaths" and unilaterally decides how many people died. She is not saying
"people reported x number of deaths" but "people did not report x number
of deaths" and then goes on to conclude that millions died.
Chang claims to have interviewed Mao's English teacher Zhang Hanzhi,
not knowing that Zhang read the New York Times, and, having found out
about that claim, she wrote to the newspaper that she never even met Chang.
If this had been a book attacking George W Bush, Fox News would have spent
days hammering it. But nobody does it when it's a book about Mao.
- The numbers for Stalin have decreased in recent years by
admission of the Ukrainian authorities. If you have read a book
published before 2010, that book was not aware of this recent
admissions.
- The atrocities committed by right-wing dictators have always
been easier to track down than the crimes against humanity committed by
communist leaders, so the figures for communist leaders like Stalin and
Mao are mere guesses.
We also don't know how many dissidents have been killed by order of Kim
Il Sung in North Korea, although Westerners suspect many thousands.
- I often get asked if Hiroshima/Nagasaki qualify as a genocide. I
disagree. First of all, why only nuclear weapons? The carpet bombings
of German cities and of Tokyo killed the same numbers of people.
Second, Winston Churchill and Harry Truman did not start that war: they
ended it. It is even debatable if these bombings killed or saved lives:
Hiroshima probably saved a lot of Japanese lives, because a long
protracted invasion like the one that took place in Germany would have
killed a lot more people (Germany lost 2 million people, Japan only
300,000, because Japan was never invaded, while Germany was invaded from
all sides). Actually, more Japanese died in two weeks of battles with
the Soviet Union in Manchuria than in the two nuclear bombings. As
horrific as it sounds, i suspect that a nuclear bomb on Berlin would
have killed 100,000 people but caused Germany to surrender right away,
thus saving many German lives. (I know, it is gruesome to count dead
bodies like this; but, again, i didn't start that war, Germany and Japan
started it).
The USA had a casualty rate of 35% in the battle of Okinawa: they
expected to lose one million soldiers in a land invasion of Japan, and
the estimates were that Japan would lose the same number of soldiers and
many more civilians. Most historians believe that it was the atomic
bomb that convinced Japan to surrender, and it was the second one: after
the first one, there were still members of the Japanese cabinet who
were opposed to surrender (the cabinet had to be unanimous in order for
the emperor to surrender). The dissenters who wanted to continue the war
even tried a coup to overthrow the emperor rather than obey the order
to surrender.
After the first bomb, Nishina (head of the Japanese nuclear program) was
asked if it were possible that the USA could build another atomic bomb
within six months: obviously the people who asked him the question were
not going to surrender unless a second bomb was possible. Koichi Kido,
advisor to emperor Hirohito, said: "We of the peace party were assisted
by the atomic bomb in our endeavor to end the war." Hisatsune Sakomizu,
chief secretary of Cabinet, said that the atomic bombs were a "golden
opportunity given by heaven for Japan to end the war." Thus the Japanese
themselves (those who wanted to surrender) seem to indicate that the
two atomic bombs were indispensable to end a war that was killing
hundreds of thousands of people per battle (the battle of Okinawa killed
more Japanese than the atomic bomb on Nagasaki).
It is also estimated that throughout Japan-occupied Asia about 200,000
civilians were dying every month (of disease, hunger, etc): if the
atomic bombs helped Japan surrender even just six months earlier, that
saved the lives of one million Indonesians, Indochinese, Philipinos,
Chinese, etc. (Notable dissenting voices were the two most powerful USA
generals, Dwight Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur, who both felt that
the atomic bombs were unnecessary to finish Japan).
People die in wars. During the previous world-war, millions died of
everything from guns to chemical weapons. The fact that a more or less
efficient weapon is used to fight a war does not constitute genocide,
per se. It is not the weapon, but the intent. Churchill's and Truman's
intent was to end the war, not to exterminate the peoples (which they
could have done easily, had they wanted to). In fact, i think that
Churchill and Truman are exemplary of how to treat a defeated enemy:
instead of annihilating the enemies, they helped Germany and Japan to
rebuild themselves and become stronger and wealthier than they had been
before the war. It may have been the first time in history.
Furthermore, we know that Werner Heisenberg in Germany and Yoshio
Nishina in Japan were working on an atomic bomb: what if they had had
the time to complete one? Heisenberg in Germany had failed to correctly
calculate the critical mass of uranium required to sustain a chain
reaction, but Nishina in Japan had just done that in 1944. It was a
matter of time before German and Japanese scientists would find out the
right recipe. Thus the first bomb saved a lot of lives, probably
millions of lives (not just Japanese lives, but lives of all the nations
that were being massacred by the Japanese). Last but not least, the USA
dropped 720,000 leaflets on Hiroshima and other cities two days
earlier, warning of the impending destruction of the city.
It is certainly debatable, instead, if the second atomic bomb was
necessary. The USA only waited three days to see the effect of the
first atomic bomb and of its leaflets. Today sitting in our living
rooms we can calmly debate this issue forever. Of course, it was a
different kind of decision for the man sitting in the White House in the
middle of a world war that had been raging for four years.
-
I've been asked why i blame the USA only for part of the civilian deaths
in Vietnam while i blame the Soviet Union for all of the civilian
casualties in Afghanistan. The USA "invasion" of Vietnam is not as
clearcut as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan:
1. Even today many in Vietnam think that the aggressor was North
Vietnam, not the USA, at least at the beginning, whereas everybody in
Afghanistan blames the Soviet Union for that invasion. Nobody welcomed
the Soviet Union, whereas about half of Vietnam welcomed the USA.
2. When the Soviet Union withdrew, almost no Afghan followed them,
whereas, when the USA withdrew, about eight million Vietnamese left with
them and about three million ran away from Vietnam in the following
decades risking their lives (the "boat people").
3. There are documented large-scale atrocities by the North
Vietnamese against their own population (read the Black Book of
Communism) while i haven't seen evidence of any large-scale atrocity by
the Afghan fighters against their own population
4. The Soviet Union tried to invade the WHOLE of Afghanistan. The
USA never tried to invade the northern part of Vietnam: it simply fought
the Vietcong that wanted to annex south Vietnam to north Vietnam (if
you read the history of the country, north and south Vietnam have fought
wars for more than 1,000 years: go to the Timeline of Indochina
and look for Annam and Champa. the ancient names of the two kingdoms).
When the USA bombed civilians in North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia
(countries that had never attacked the USA nor anyone else), then i
consider it a war crime. (Germany and Japan had attacked their neighbors
and killed millions of them - carpet bombing German and Japanese cities
was a way to protect those millions of people from further massacres).
- The most frequently asked questions are always about current
unpopular USA presidents: Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II... The moment
the USA elects a new president, i start receiving emails asking to add
him to the list of "genociders". The moment the president leaves office
the same people forget about him and jump on the next one. Can we
consider George W Bush a genocider due to all of the civilians killed in
Iraq under his watch? I don't think so, because the vast majority of
civilians killed in Iraq were NOT killed by US troops and certainly not
by his order. It is genocide, but the "genociders" are others, and the
situation is still too murky to decide who exactly killed those 100,000
civilians. (If Bush is indirectly guilty of it, then certainly Islam is
too). The USA bears some clear responsibilities for the chaos, but
ineptitude, miscalculation, ignorance, etc do not qualify as genocide.
Otherwise the United Nations and France would be responsible for the
genocide in Rwanda (900,000 people). Even if one wanted to count all
the civilians killed in that civil war as Bush's and Blair's
responsibility, it would be (as of 2013, long after the USA and Britain
withdrew) 120,000 people in ten years, i.e. 12,000 a year. In 20 years
Saddam Hussein was responsible for the killing of 600,000 people (that
he personally ordered), an average of 30,000 a year plus the victims of
his invasion of Iran. Therefore, technically speaking one could argue
that the war, by removing Saddam, saved lives. Putin would be a better
candidate for "genocider", since the vast majority of Chechen civilians
killed under his watch were killed by Russian troops. However, i have
never received a single email nominating Putin...
-
Specifically about Bush II (the hot topic between 2003 and 2008). I
have seen no evidence whatsoever that he or anybody working for him or
the British prime minister or the Australian prime minister wanted to
kill Iraqi civilians. And even less evidence that Iraqi civilians were
killed in any large number by US soldiers. The Iraqi civilians killed by
US soldiers are estimated at about 4% of all deaths, which is a little
over 5,000. With all due respect for those families, a seven-year war
that kills only 5,000 people (less than 1,000 a year) does not register
anywhere in the history of the world. All the other civilians were
killed by militias, suicide bombers, etc. and almost always in the name
of Islam (so it would be more appropriate to vent your anger at that
religion than at the USA). In fact, documents show that some caution was
taken by the US and Britain to avoid mass civilian casualties. Compare
with Vietnam, when the US bombed densely populated areas knowing that
thousands of civilians would die. In fact, the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan might be the first large-scale wars in which the winners
went out of their way to avoid mass civilian casualties. Compare with
any other war. Future generations (who will face other crises and will
be more concerned with their presidents than with Bush II) may see more
clearly who is responsible for those killings. Most of them were killed
by fellow Iraqis or at least fellow Muslims, not by US soldiers. Once we
remove all the personal emotions against this or that politician, it is
self-evident who/what killed those Iraqi civilians. If you simply
scream hysterically against the president of the USA, you are not
helping solve the real problem of those places.
-
Coming to more serious issues, Lothar von Trotha massacred the Herero
and Namaqua in Namibia in 1904-1907. That episode is not listed here
(despite the large number of victims) because the German government
never ordered those massacres. Once the facts became known, outrage in
Germany among the political class forced the Kaiser to fire Von Trotha.
So i consider this event the folly of one overzealous and racist man
rather than a real genocide.
- Slobodan Milosevic's responsibility for the Yugoslavian civil
war is probably proven beyond doubt but he's involvement in the
genocides is not clear. Radovan Karadzic and his general Ratko Mladic
were responsible for the genocide in Bosnia. Kosovo was not quite a
genocide.
|
