The Great Leap Forward - Mao's elimination of his allies

I had posted this a few days ago in connection with the enviro-idiot who took hostages at the Discovery building:

What I find amusing is that if you study the rise and FALL of each of these power hungry idiots is that the first action they take when they are in their ultimate position of power is to liquidate all of the people who helped them gain that power. Considering that those who are ignorant of history are condemned to repeat it � if the Obama regime ever does try to establish a tyranny, the first people to go will be their supporters � the liberals, the academics, the Labor Unions� They are so blind that they cannot see.

Here is a perfect example of exactly what I was talking about. It is the 1960's in China. From the UK Literary Review:

Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62
In 1936 Mao Tse-Tung, then a cave-dwelling revolutionary, told Edgar Snow his life story. Snow recorded Mao's self-serving autobiography in Red Star Over China, which for decades made the American's name as the leading reporter in China.

Back in China twenty-four years later, Snow was pestered by news agencies enquiring about mass starvation. The Snow of the 1930s had gone into the field to see for himself a prolonged drought in the north-west, where people were rumoured to be selling their children. But this time he relied on his access to top officials such as Premier Zhou Enlai, and foreigners who flacked for China such as the New Zealander Rewi Alley. In the book he wrote about that trip, The Other Side of the River, Snow stated, 'I saw no starving people in China ... Considerable malnutrition undoubtedly existed. Mass starvation? No.' And most positively: 'Whatever he was eating, the average Chinese maintained himself in good health, as far as anyone could see.'

A bit more:

Now Frank Dik�tter, a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and at Hong Kong University, has laid out the vast horror in detail, drawing on local and provincial archives that have only recently become available to approved foreign scholars. In terms of Mao's reputation this book leaves the Chairman for dead, as a monster in the same league as Hitler and Stalin - and that is without considering the years of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), when hundreds of thousands more Chinese died. One of Dik�tter's observations is that Mao instigated the Cultural Revolution to wreak revenge on close colleagues who had dared to show him up. It is a mark of the historical darkness that still envelops China that many Chinese blame the famine on the Soviet Union, which, they maintain, snatched food from the mouths of starving Chinese by insisting that Beijing export grain to repay Moscow's loans.

Emphasis mine. And there are those who deny this -- we have people in our own administration who view Mao as a great leader and someone to take inspiration from. (Ron Bloom -- Manufacturing Czar and Anita Dunn -- White House Communications Director) A big hat tip to the �cumenical Volgi who writes at The Gormogons.