Yang Jisheng: The man who discovered 36 million dead

A related work is the The Black Book of Communism:<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Black-Book-Communism-Repression/dp/0674076087" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/The-Black-Book-Communism-Repression/dp...</a><p>"Already famous throughout Europe, this international bestseller plumbs recently opened archives in the former Soviet bloc to reveal the actual, practical accomplishments of Communism around the world: terror, torture, famine, mass deportations, and massacres. Astonishing in the sheer detail it amasses, the book is the first comprehensive attempt to catalogue and analyze the crimes of Communism over seventy years. [...] As the death toll mounts—as many as 25 million in the former Soviet Union, 65 million in China, 1.7 million in Cambodia, and on and on—the authors systematically show how and why, wherever the millenarian ideology of Communism was established, it quickly led to crime, terror, and repression. An extraordinary accounting, this book amply documents the unparalleled position and significance of Communism in the hierarchy of violence that is the history of the twentieth century."

The BBC...when is the BBC going to "discover" the famine they caused in Ireland in the 1840s? I guess they're too busy digging up the Chinese..."commemorate Empire Day, when we try to remember the names of all those from the Sudbury area who so gallantly gave their lives to keep China British"...China had famines for thousands of years, including in the 20th century before the communists took over. The one they mention is their last one. The unusual thing is not the 1961 famine but that there have been no famines in China for a half century. Because the communists smashing the Four Olds and industrializing the country and kicking out the foreign imperialists got the country on track. Of course the British ignore the famines they cause, and dig up so-called famines by their former imperial conquests. China would not have had to industrialize so quickly if England was not threatening China from Hong Kong and so forth. That does not count of course. Thankfully, anti-imperialists are crashing into the US/UK all the time now, showing those hubris-filled imperialists who live by the sword shall feel the sword coming from the other end as well.

"Even now, 50 years on, Chinese official history insists the famine of 1958-61 was a natural disaster."

Kind of a wake-up call for me. In the west we'll have some incident where a few people were killed, say the Saint Valentine's Day massacre of 1929, and there'll be books, movies, TV specials, and so forth.<p>In other countries you lose 36 million people -- six times the size of the holocaust in WWII -- and you're not supposed to even ask any questions about it.<p>We truly do have a lot to be thankful for.

I want to read his book now. Must find that book somehow.

Also worth reading is "Hungry Ghosts".