Victims Will Have a Voice

The seeming monolithic and impenetrably powerful persuasion of those who use the mainstream media to promote and secure their ends appear - but only appear - to be able to lock in their mythology.

Not so. Lest the present so-called "health care reform" mania with its bizarre, "sincere" cafeteria Catholics in leadership promoting abortion-on-demand ("Women's Health Issues") at the behest of the most pro-abortion president in history cause one to despair, remember the facts that Carl Olson at Ignatius Insight calls to our attention:

The sad fact is that over the decades—especially in the 1960s, but also beyond—there have even been Catholics who have tried to defend Mao or at least ignored the truth about his murderous ways, a fact documented in The Red Book of Chinese Martyrs. That book is an important addition to the growing body of work exposing the evils of Mao, his minions, and communism. Gerolamo Fazzini, in the Introduction to the book, writes:

The Red Book of Chinese Martyrs, which was printed in the original Italian edition within a few weeks of the thirtieth anniversary of Mao's death (September 9, 1976), intends to be (also) a denunciation of Maoism and its crimes. Although the aging and nostalgic fans of the "Great Helmsman" (who are willing to allow him a thirty percent margin of error) may still be putting up a pathetic resistance, a critical reappraisal of Mao and of his epoch has been underway for some time now in the West. (This is not yet the case in China: the present leadership has preferred thus far to sideline the unwieldy figure and to avoid coming to terms with history.) After decades of ideologically skewed propaganda, a "demythologization of Mao", of his ideology and of his methods, is finally taking place.

A decisive contribution along these lines was made recently by the monumental biography by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday entitled, Mao: The Unknown Story (2005). If we consider the simple data contained in this and other works (for example, Jasper Becker's exhaustively documented Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine [1996]), it is no exaggeration to state that Mao Zedong, the "Red Sun", is directly or indirectly responsible for crimes which—in terms of cruelty, intensity and duration—are equal to or even worse than those of Stalin or of Hitler himself. Does this sound like a joke? Far from it. Chen Yizi, a former Party leader who escaped abroad, declares that he saw an internal Communist Party document that put the death toll from "non-natural causes" at eighty million, most of these deaths occurring during the "Great Leap Forward" (1958-1961)..MORE>>