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May 03, 2005
Communism = Hunger
One of the worst effects of Communism on the people enslaved to it is the starvation. It is quite possible that Communism has killed more people through starvation than through other forms of violence and oppression. Two of the biggest episodes of Communist caused starvation were the great leap forward in China and the forced starvation of Ukraine by Stalin. I recently finished reading We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History by John Gaddis, which discusses the first half of the cold war, but uses recently declassified documents from the former Soviet Union to do so.
One of the stories in the book that I had not heard of was about how wasteful the Great Leap Forward was. Mao had families set up furnaces in their back yards to forge steel to beat the West in industrial production. Of course most families did not know how to forge steel, did not have the supplies to forge good steel, and this was probably the least efficient way to make large quantities of steel. On one train trip across China Mao's handlers made sure everyone who lived near the train track had fires burning to make it look like everyone across the country was forging steel. One of the many problems this caused was that instead of working on crops like they knew how to, farmers had to waste time and energy on collective farming and other wasteful projects that were never productive anyways. Untold millions died as a result.
Christopher Hitchens has a similar story in Slate about how Communist imposed starvation has effected present day North Korea. Hitchens writes:
Concealed in that pitch-black night is an imploding state where the only things that work are the police and the armed forces. The situation is actually slightly worse than indentured servitude. The slave owner historically promises, in effect, at least to keep his slaves fed. In North Korea, this compact has been broken. It is a famine state as well as a slave state. Partly because of the end of favorable trade relations with, and subsidies from, the former USSR, but mainly because of the lunacy of its command economy, North Korea broke down in the 1990s and lost an unguessable number of people to sheer starvation. The survivors, especially the children, have been stunted and malformed. Even on a tightly controlled tour of the place North Korea is almost as hard to visit as it is to leave my robotic guides couldn't prevent me from seeing people drinking from sewers and picking up individual grains of food from barren fields. (I was reduced to eating a dog, and I was a privileged "guest.") Film shot from over the Chinese border shows whole towns ruined and abandoned, with their few factories idle and cannibalized. It seems that the mines in the north of the country have been flooded beyond repair.
Previous reports of North Koreans have shown them to be stunted in growth and several inches shorter than South Koreans on average. There are also reports that there are no more elderly or handicapped people because there is no food for them and that younger people are lucky to eat every other day. Even basic supplies that the Soviet Union always had (like paper) are absent. Hitchens suggests an underground railroad, which is not a bad idea, but it will take semi-Communist China to take the initiative (or else a coup against Kim) in solving the North Korea starvation problem. One of the saddest parts of all of this is that many people still believe Communism is a solution to hunger, not a cause of it.
Posted by Pete at May 3, 2005 09:54 PM
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Comments
As I recall, one of the other famine causes of the Great Leap Forward is that it wasn't as if the villagers had access to iron ore to smelt, but they were still required to fulfill certain quotas. That meant they were forced to melt down the only iron they had available: their farming instruments. The famine was all the worse because their farming abilities were knocked back to the stone age.
Posted by: Dangerous Dan at May 3, 2005 11:10 PM