Trudeau Senior & the Monster Mao
Stéphane Courtois et al.
P 493 f, Wei Jingsheng, a witness of famine in China, 1968:
“Before my eyes, among the weeds, rose up one of the scenes I had been told about, one of the banquets at which the families had swapped children in order to eat them. I could see the worried faces of the families as they chewed the flesh of other people’s children. The children who were chasing butterflies in a nearby field seemed to be the reincarnation of the children devoured by their parents. I felt sorry for the children, but not as sorry as I felt for their parents. What had made them swallow that human flesh, amidst the tears and grief of other parents – flesh that they would never have imagined tasting, even in their worst nightmares? In that moment I understood what a butcher he had been, the man ‘whose like humanity has not seen in several centuries, and China not in several thousand years’: Mao Zedong and his henchmen, with their criminal political system, had driven parents mad with hunger and led them to hand their own children over to others, and to receive the flesh of others to appease their own hunger.”
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Most researchers into the history of famine say that famine in China under the Great Leap Forward (1958-61) of Mao Zedong was the greatest in history. Probably about 30 million people died of hunger there, and there were about 33 million “lost births,” meaning that, because of the weakness caused by hunger, the number of births was reduced by 33 million. (The Soviet Union had famine deaths of about 5 million in 1932-34, largely because of misguided political policies.)
