So what's a hundred million dead?

In last week's seminars at Lakeside we were fortunate to hear Kerry Dumbaugh and see some interesting film on the current social and economic challenges in China in 2009--much of it starting in 2008 just as ours did. 60,000 factories closing, 14 million migrants returning home, owners of factories fleeing without paying the workers, lack of health benefits, no retirement, and a "stimulus package" that is 18% of GDP. China's economic growth, she said, is shrinking--7.2% in 2009, which would be wonderful in the U.S., but China needs a minimum of 8%. Their migrant workers (traveling outside the region where you were born in China makes you an illegal migrant) work 11 hour days, 6 days a week at the lowest level jobs, regardless of their training and education. 23,000,000 have become unemployed since November 2008, and they have no unemployment benefits. In 2009, 6.1 million graduated from college and 3/4 have no jobs. Now this is all on top of all the older problems like no contract law, no health and safety regulations, forced abortions resulting in the former safety net of family being destroyed, and property seizures.

And so as we watched with heavy hearts this dismal collapse, there were hints that the rise of capitalism replacing communism and reverence for Mao might be at the root of the demise of the "workers paradise." More than one member of the class pondered whether democracy works everywhere, and wouldn't the Chinese be better off to go back to the socialist model where the government controlled every aspect of their lives from conception to death?

Sure. As long as you don't consider the lives of the millions and millions who died under this totalitarian form of government. Selective memory, these old folks (this is not pejorative--most were my age or older). Especially those peace advocates who believe war is the only way huge segments of civilians are killed. Communist/marxist/national socialist governments kill their own people. Democracies, with all their faults that come with the failed idealism of the voting booth which often gives us corrupt or spineless officials, don't slaughter their own populace. At least not in my life time.

Go read China's Bloody Century by R. J. Rummel for some sobering facts and stats.

"Such democide [death by government] has been far more prevalent than people have believed, even several times greater than the number killed in all of this [20th] century's wars. Just consider that alone 61,911,000 people were murdered by the Soviet Union, 38,702,000 by the Chinese communists, 10,214,000 by the Chinese Nationalists, 17,000,000 by the German Nazis, and 5,890,000 by the Japanese militarists during World War II. This does not even exhaust the list of this century's mega-murderers, which also would include the past governments of Turkey, Cambodia, Pakistan, Yugoslavia; nor does it include the lesser killers responsible for hundreds of thousands of corpses each, such as past governments of Uganda, Indonesia, Albania, Burundi, Czechoslovakia, Ethiopia, Hungary, Romania, Spain, and Vietnam. Then there are the numerous third-class murders who have "only" killed in the tens of thousands. In sum well over 100,000,000 people have been murdered by their governments since 1900, several times greater than the 35,654,000 battle-dead from all the foreign and domestic wars fought in these years, including World Wars I and II.

Yes, it's pleasant to sit in a comfortable, air conditioned seminar at the lake and speculate 60 years after the Communists killed nearly 40 million of their own people, that wouldn't the Chinese people be better off with a smidgen more totalitarianism or maybe a reeducation camp or two. I mean, why should they have what we have?

And for the life of me, I don't understand why liberals want what they have struggled so desperately to leave to the point of voting one into the presidency!