Comrade Sparrow: Chinese Famine 1959 - 1961.

Communist China Starves to Death

            Between the three years of 1959 to 1961, China suffered a famine in which 40 million people starved to death. The famine was caused almost exclusively by the distribution policies of the government, but those sympathetic to Maoist communism erroneously put the blame on “enemies of the state” or natural disasters. When the government of China initiated The Great Leap Forward, private farms were abolished and the responsibility of grain distribution was placed in the hands of the state. The communes in charge of food production had to produce enough grain to meet state-imposed quotas, and the surplus grain they kept for themselves. However, as the government quotas increased, there became less and less grain left over as surplus. It also didn’t help that the communes had adopted idiotic farming techniques contrived by Soviet pseudoscientist, Trofim Lysenko, which further stunted crop yields. As a result, all the grain being produced by Chinese communes by 1959 was being seized by the state and the peasants starved en masse. For the next three years, China would experience the worst famine in recorded history, marked by violent crime, suicide, death, widespread cannibalization, and the market of human flesh. The eating of children and babies was common, where parents would swap each other’s children so they didn’t have to eat their own offspring.

            Unable to see why the glorious and infallible doctrines of communism could cause such a catastrophe, the Chinese government naturally blamed “enemies of the state” and sent armed thugs across the country to seize any food they could find from peasants. They also initiated what came to be known as the Four Pests Campaign, which encouraged the killing of rats and sparrows, thought to be main destroyers of crops. Millions of sparrows were put to death. However, this only prolonged the famine since the mass death of sparrows allowed crop-eating insects like locusts to thrive and this further stunted the crop production.

Don't kill the sparrows. They're your comrades.

            Widespread famines are not uncommon in socialist countries, but they are almost unheard of in capitalist ones. The fact that even some of these famines were the direct consequence of policies enforced by those socialist governments is a strong indictment against this reprehensible ideology.