Mao's Great Famine

A Book Review

Anyone who has argued about political ideology in dorm rooms, bars, or the depths of internet forums knows about the rhetorical institution that is the murder debate. Who killed more, who killed the most? Hitler and the 6 million Jews he murdered usually provides the comparative foundation for pure evil, and the trick is to go higher. Maybe Stalin killed 10 million, maybe only 1. If one switches to percentages rather than absolute totals, Pol Pot begins to shine with a nearly 25% murder rate from a pool of the entire Cambodian population. If one claims that communism is responsible for 100 million deaths, then perhaps another will call for capitalism’s tally to be drawn up as well, sometimes including the fascists and sometimes the slave trade. But the winning move is to play Mao, and to point to the famine that occurred during The Great Leap Forward, the famine which killed tens of millions and stands as the single greatest man-made mass death in the history of humanity.

Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962 by Frank Dikötter is a history of the Great Leap Forward and an attempt to win the murder debate. The Great Leap Forward can often win with sheer numbers, but can and often has been countered with arguments about its status as a famine rather than deliberate state murder. Dikötter begins the book with his intention to counter this counter, and put the Great Leap Forward in the same camp as the mass killings that “took place under Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler, or Joseph Stalin.” Although his title includes the word, he fears that the term famine “lends support to the widespread view that these deaths were the unintended consequence of half-baked and poorly executed economic programs.” The book, based on previously restricted and unexamined archival records, is supposed to correct this, revealing that the Great Leap Forward was yet another man-made atrocity directed from the top, and probably the worst one ever. In service of both history and prosecution, Dikötter tells the story of the famine starting with a play by play of how the upper echelons decided on and implemented their policies, and then follows this with detailed sections on the different ways these years transpired in particular areas of Chinese society. The case for guilt comes first and then the horror of the crime itself. It is worth examining both in turn.

The Case for Guilt - The Facts

In 1958, the Chinese Communist Party was in firm control of the country, and Mao was in slightly less-firm control of the party. While the Chairman who had led China to communism was undoubtedly the leading figure in government, Chinese power-politics of the era was fast and brutal. Mao was paranoid -  purging, humiliating, and murdering loyal friends and subordinates - but reading through Dikötter’s work gives the impression that power easily changed hands and could have been seized away from him, it just wasn’t because of his superior politicking. Most importantly for the famine was an ongoing dispute about the economic development of the country.

The CCP as doctrinaire communists believed that China needed to develop economically. This is one of the best communist beliefs, and one shared with pro-growth capitalists and progressives, and was clearly true at the time. China’s agricultural output was still far behind modern countries like the United States and Soviet Union, and was poor enough that the country had suffered from famines constantly before Communist rule, although Dikötter doesn’t mention this last point. It was even further behind on all sorts of industrial production, and the upper echelon of the party was painfully aware of the country's lagging metrics in areas such as steel. All agreed that to be a true communist society, China needed to develop, but there was tension about how exactly to do it.

Mao, not a particularly astute economist, favored going as quickly as possible. In 1956, he implemented aggressive policies towards increasing growth and the policies all seem to have failed in ways obvious to those around him, and thus weakened his grip on power. But in a pattern that repeats itself countless times over Mao’s decades of rules, he was able to overcome his demonstrable policy failure with superior political skirmishing. He chaotically encouraged common people to criticize the party and then immediately after persecuted everyone who had followed his encouragement, with the end result being that Mao was back in power and it was time to pursue development even faster. At a meeting with the rest of the socialist countries in Moscow in November 1957, Khruschev announced that the Soviet Union would overtake the United States economically within 15 years. Mao, seemingly purely in reaction to this and eager to assert China’s preeminence among the socialist nations, announced that China would overtake Britain’s steel production within 15 years. Holding to this promise made in front of his peers was the beginning of the Great Leap Forward.

Mao in Moscow

On Mao’s return to Beijing, he shored up support and over the next few months launched a fleet of parallel mass initiatives to modernize the country. Without foreign capital investment or expertise, Mao decided that China would catch up on steel production via the force of their laboring population, putting up backyard furnaces everywhere. Farming needed better water infrastructure, so a massive water conservancy and irrigation infrastructure program was started largely by pulling laborers from their farmwork. And the farms themselves needed to be modernized in accords with true communism. This meant the imposition of top-down modern farming techniques which weren’t always suited for local conditions and most devastatingly meant collectivization of all private property into people’s communes. Amid all this internal development, Mao insisted on massive export targets of both food and industrial products.

The party state was obsessed with measurement at every level. Mao's commitment to do everything at the same time was about producing better numbers to show China's competitive strength. This attitude trickled down, and each level of government - national, provincial, local - chased the highest figures. This created a situation where large parts of life were horrible illustrations of Goodhart's Law. Necessary farming equipment was thrown into the makeshift furnaces to produce reject steel in the service of validating Mao's boast about overtaking Britain. Production targets were essentially conjured out of the air for political purposes rather than constructed from an assessment of capacity.

When Xie Fuzhi, the boss in Yunnan, was told by Beijing that the national target for grain output had been raised to 300 million tonnes, he immediately convened a telephone conference to explain to county leaders that this really meant 350–400 million tonnes. Yunnan, he rapidly calculated, contained about one-thirtieth of the total population, meaning a share of 10 million tonnes. Since Yunnan did not want to trail behind the rest of the country, Xie raised this to a nicely rounded total of 25,000,000,000 jin, equivalent to 12.5 million tonnes. Everybody from the region down to the county, commune, brigade and village had to scramble and adjust the local quotas accordingly.

But perhaps even worse was this tendency combined with the party state's compulsive lying. It was always easiest simply to make up figures and lie all the way to the top about the conditions of any responsibility, whether it was agriculture, industry, or the death rate. Cadres responded to insane demands from the top with even insaner promises to exceed their targets. They could not afford to be the lowest performer among their peers, and after the summer of 1959, low production targets were considered to be a sign of rightist sabotage against socialism, punishable with all the tools the party used against political enemies. The top party officials accepted these promises and therefore felt assured enough to ask for even higher targets. This feedback loop was allowed to spiral out of control with the end result being that targets were impossible to hit, but policy was determined according to the expectations. The high-ranking official Li Fuchun presented a plan to overtake Britain in steel production in only 3 years.

The early months of the program are horrifying to any reader who knows what is to come. Although all the cadres were passing around their own inflated figures, no one seemed to actually understand that all of it would turn out to be wrong. When discussing the expected grain surpluses, Mao advised a local official:

With so much grain, in future you should plant less, work half time and spend the rest of your time on culture and leisurely pursuits, open schools and a university, don’t you think? . . . You should eat more. Even five meals a day is fine!

It seems this advice was followed. People ate more because agriculture was about to revolutionized. They also ate more because all of their private stores were about to be absorbed into the collective farms. People slaughtered their animals and feasted on the meat, not knowing what to expect.

“The vegetables are green, the cucumbers plumb, the yield is abundant” 1959 poster, IISH collection, Chineseposters.net, https://chineseposters.net/posters/e11-992

Soon after, hunger began. Despite the Great Leap Forward’s intentions and promises, nearly every factor contributed to lower outputs than before. Farmers had been forced away from agricultural work, had just thrown their equipment into furnaces that didn't work, and had their incentives for growing food destroyed. Reports of food shortage and famine can be found even in the spring of 1958. In 1959, famine was endemic and millions were dying. All the grain targets could only be fulfilled by seizing it from the farmers and when the cadres found that their targets had not been met, they attributed it to the farmer’s hiding their excess. So they seized it all. The famine grew worse in 1960. In the spring of 1961, Liu Shaoqi, now defacto head of state as Mao’s designated successor, visited his hometown in Hunan province and saw firsthand the devastation of the famine. Upon his return to Beijing, he began to blame the party for the famine. By Winter, Mao's policy had lost out. The other senior party members admitted that things were not as they seemed:

Li Yiqing, a senior party secretary, reported that in 1958 more than 140,000 tonnes of farming tools had been thrown into the backyard furnaces in the model province of Henan. Wu Jingtian, vice-minister of railways, explained how one in five locomotives was out of circulation because of engine damage. Peng De, vice minister of transportation, announced that fewer than two out of three vehicles under his command actually worked. Vice-minister of metallurgy Xu Chi noted that the steelworks of Angang were forced to stop for weeks on end over the summer because of coal shortages.

All of this was couched in the language of self-effacement, and on the face of it everyone blamed themselves for failing to carry out Mao’s pure intentions. But all knew the Great Leap Forward was Mao’s initiative, and that it was over, and that it had failed.

The Case for Guilt - The Party

How did the country take years to reverse economic policies that were killing 30 million people?

Ignorance is the party's best hope for absolution. There was no point where the party ordered mass death. When the party received reports it trusted that there were abuses or that people needed deliverance, they responded. Local abuses were dealt with, but they never understood how widespread the problems were. Perhaps the party was simply deceived, a mistake.

Dikötter’s account of Mao and other top officials never conclusively proves that they knew, but does prove that they should have. The fact that all the statistics and expected targets were made up and that all the cadres were lying was not a shock to anyone who had survived in the Communist Party. Mao was constantly and consistently paranoid because he knew the party he had done so much to create was ruled by this sort of competition. Top party leaders regularly used field trips to see actual working conditions because they did not trust reports from their subordinates, a common knowledge-gathering institution in totalitarian one-party states, the fact of which is a demonstration of how systematic the information problem was. But whenever Mao encountered evidence of serious problems, he took advantage of the general ignorance to attribute it to other causes. Starvation, abuse by cadres, any problem was attributable to local failure or the plotting of sinister rightists. The upper ranks of the party received word there was starvation in 1959, but Mao responded by circulating reports that villagers in affected areas were indeed getting enough to eat. To these former military commanders, some sacrifice was acceptable in the name of achieving the great goals of national progress. Throughout the disaster Mao would continue to repeat a maxim on sacrifice: ‘Doesn’t everybody have ten fingers? We can count nine of those fingers as achievements, and only one as a failure.’

More direct confrontation did not manage to break through either. At a meeting in the summer of 1959, several top officials raised alarm over the level of famine in the countryside. Mao perceived this as a challenge to his power, not incorrectly, and purged the dissenters followed by a nationwide campaign against "anti-party" elements, leading to thousands of deaths and increasing the suffering of the people. The Great Leap Forward was always both an economic project for China and a political project for Mao. He perceived any reports about the disastrous results of his policies as political opposition, and responded to them with oppression and purges that trickled down from top officials to minor cadres to thousands of innocent people fantastically accused of being rightists.

In the later years it is hard to doubt that the party did know that the situation was bad, but they had other priorities. Mao wanted to keep exports elevated. The Sino-Soviet split in 1960 led to China prioritizing international prestige and leadership over any concerns with the famine. When China could not both fulfill its export commitments for meat and feed its people Mao had a suggestion: "Some people don’t eat meat...Can we pass a resolution that nobody should eat meat, and that all of it should be exported?"

Once the problem was realized, there was deep resistance to admitting it. Constant deflection of blame was at this point a deeply ingrained habit in all of China’s top political survivors. In the middle of the famine, Mao took to noting that he had been more concerned with military matters when the people's communes were planned. Liu Shaoqi on his visit to Hunan initially blamed his ignorance of the famine on the local officials who had stopped him from receiving letters about how bad conditions had gotten. One wonders why he hadn’t noticed that he had stopped receiving letters before this. Even after the policies were ended, no one acknowledged fault. Retreat was not in the political vocabulary, so it took a desperate situation to finally break through. If the party had not sidelined him, Mao may never have given up.

Mao and the central leadership rarely come off sympathetically, mostly because it is hard to come off sympathetically when 32 million people are dying because of policies you implemented. The leadership were concerned with vain power games more than the lives of their people. It is clear from Dikötter’s narrative that Mao and the party are to blame for the great famine, and it is clear that they could have ended it far sooner than they did.

Ignorance and Intention

Because Dikötter is participating in the murder debate, there are times when he overstates his case. After the book's release in 2010, many scholars who are far from defenders of Mao or communism took issue with certain characterizations or omissions. In his prosecution, Dikötter quotes Mao during 1959 as saying: "When there is not enough to eat people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill." This has caused a long string of controversy with Dikötter’s critics looking like they at least have some points. The remark was in the context of a discussion of industrial policy, and strangely enough, it is also not out of character for Mao to argue about industrial policy by talking about the need for some people to starve to death - the CCP then and now are addicted to overly dramatic hyperbole for mundane discussions. Mao let millions of people starve to death for the sake of a policy program that didn’t work and he never took responsibility for it, but it doesn’t seem like he ever discussed it so casually.

Other parts of Dikötter’s case against Mao and the CCP are less glaring but still leave one uncertain. He claims based on his archival evidence that the party insisted on accelerated repayment of Soviet loans after the Sino-Soviet split at a time when the famine needed to be addressed, but suggests no particular reason why they did this, leaving a hanging implication that the party didn’t value lives at all. While his examination suggests that Soviet repayment demands cannot be blamed for the famine as they sometimes have been, it does not prove that the payments were pursued for the sake of needless cruelty.

There has been a great amount of speculation over whether climatic conditions are at least somewhat to blame for the famine. Unsurprisingly, the party and its defenders, then and now, have often argued that the famine was a natural disaster with human contributions. Dikötter largely dismisses this, treating the deaths as entirely the responsibility of the state. The evidence for the climate thesis is not particularly strong, but one wishes that Dikötter had more conclusive arguments for how little he considers it.

Overall the standard that Dikötter holds Mao and the party to is that they should have dropped all other priorities and just focused on not killing 45 million people. Which is a reasonable moral standard that we should hold people to. But in terms of the murder debate, we are not comparing Mao and the CCP to normal people, we are comparing them to world leaders who are in absolute terms usually a mixed bag.

Mao killed his own people, but from what we currently know, there was never a moment when he consciously chose to kill all the millions of the great famine. This is an important distinction. Hitler certainly chose to kill, and Stalin personally ordered the execution of his thousands of rivals. Mao too ordered the death of thousands of political enemies, but never the millions. What caused those deaths was his insistence on bad policies, his refusal to admit error, his obsessive pursuit of power and pride over the wellbeing of his people, and his deep willful ignorance about the murder he was committing. These are evil, but they are also more understandable. Nearly all politicians whether in democracies or paranoid totalitarian party states refuse to admit fault and put their own pursuit of power over the wellbeing of others. Military decisions are sometimes made based on the timing of elections.

In the case of 1950s China, these errors were multiplied into the greatest catastrophe ever known. China was the most populous nation on earth, and its centralized institutions and vulnerability to famine make it a regular contender on large mass death lists throughout its history. Massive forced labor projects for irrigation and industry leading to famine is sadly a repeated story throughout Chinese history for thousands of years. In the century before the Great Leap Forward, there are many documented cases of famines which cost millions of lives, though none compete for the top spot. There are even plausible arguments that the public health and economic improvement the CCP oversaw in the lead-up to the famine dramatically reduced the potential death count in the famine caused by the party.

Communism was another multiplier. The party state's systematic dysfunction and internal ignorance dramatically worsened the problems of famine, and kept it going far longer than it should have. The Communist Party of the Mao era was the worst government of a country that has had many bad governments, but the distinction is more of degree than kind. Excess cruelty drips from every regime decision - the use of violence during collectivization, refusing international offers of aid, pledging to excessively high export targets, accepting the suffering as a means to an end - but these cruelties are small compared to the overall destruction. The Great Leap Forward can be characterized as one of the great evils of communism as an ideology, but the greatest errors were the faith in central planning and the trust in official reports. The party was totalitarian like the other great murderers, but its specific mechanism of killing through policy and ignorance was special. Mao was in a unique position to be able to kill so many.

By utilitarian standards, Mao is perhaps the worst person to ever live. After the Great Leap Forward he took a hit to his power, but once again took over with the Cultural Revolution (another important entry in the murder debate though more for its qualitative aspects than its body count) which plunged the country into violent chaos for a decade and largely halted development. But after that, China had another shot at economic growth under the Communist party and this time it worked. Deng Xiaoping was involved in plenty of the murderous atrocities that characterized the Mao era including the Great Leap Forward, but was a more capable economic manager who favored a slower approach than the chairman. Finally given the chance to implement his policies in 1979 - using free market mechanisms and gradually rolling back many aspects of the planned economy - it worked. Deng Xiaoping oversaw countless political murders including the atrocity of Tiananmen Square and he prioritized the party’s political power over the welfare of the Chinese people, but by utilitarian standards he might be the best person to ever live. China has mostly caught up. There are no more famines. And there might never be again. Deng and Mao’s results were remarkably different, but what distinguished them as moral agents was in their methods, not in their character. Mao was ultimately correct that China needed to develop, but one wishes he would have just entrusted Deng to carry it out. If Mao had simply been a bumbler and halted the Great Leap Forward at the first signs of trouble, he may still have killed millions.

Mao's ignorance continues to be his best defense because his worst sins were mundane. But what the Great Leap Forward reveals is that ignorance too can be deeply evil. Mao held the power to end the lives of millions of people and remained willfully ignorant of how he was using it. The systematic disinformation he was immersed in was the product of a party made in his image. He legitimately believed that China could overtake its peers economically through collectivized agriculture and ground-up industrialization, even though this belief was foolhardy and disproven by prior experience. When confronted with evidence of local starvation in 1960 he was visibly moved and sought to address the problem, but did not mobilize the state to end the famine as a whole. He should have known better, and had the tools to know better, but he didn’t. He was a paranoid, arrogant, vain, selfish, flawed, and deeply cruel man. He was the one who chose not to see the consequences of his actions, but he is more sympathetic because he did not see them. Mao was a monster who killed more of his own people than anyone else in human history, but he did not intend to kill them. Mao created a state that completely obeyed his every whim and was capable of killing 36 million people without his knowledge. The fact that he was ignorant is supposed to absolve him, but the fact that on some level he didn’t know he was killing is more terrifying than if he did.

Dikötter wants his book to show that Mao is just as bad or worse as his deliberately murderous 20th century colleagues. But a more reflective review of the evidence shows that Mao's evil was not worse or equivalent to that of Hitler, Stalin, or Pol Pot; it shows that it was different and that being different doesn't change the horror of the results.

Thinking through the details of the story presented in Mao’s Great Famine, one rediscovers the basic fact that one might know from lying in bed or the train ride home or reflecting after logging off: the murder debate is kind of dumb. Putting all the regimes in history on a one-dimensional scale of evilness doesn’t actually say very much that is useful about the ideologies behind them. Nazism was bad because murder is bad, and the Nazis directly believed in murder. Communism was bad because they believed in murder too, but also was bad because of economic and political policies which killed an incredible number of people even though their leaders never consciously willed their murder. Former debaters such as myself ought to agree to a cease-fire and focus on the harder and more important questions such as: how do we ensure that governments stop killing people. There are many ways to kill. Bloodthirstiness and cruelty are attractive qualities for an adversary, but bumbling technical mistakes covered up by systematic ignorance have the power to kill far more. Dikötter's claim that the Great Leap Forward was not "the unintended consequence of half-baked and poorly executed economic programs" certainly has weight, but perhaps the more interesting truth embedded in this history is that such unintended consequences can still be the deepest evil that humanity has ever encountered.

The Crime

In Xinyang [the investigative team] found a nightmare. In Guangshan county, ground zero of the famine, they were met by quiet sobs of despair from famished survivors, huddled in the bitter cold among the rubble of their destroyed homes, surrounded by barren fields marked by graves. The hearths were stone cold, as everything from doors, windows and lintels to the straw roofs had been ripped out for fuel. The food was gone. In a reign of terror after the Lushan plenum, the local militias had rampaged through the villages searching for hidden grain, confiscating everything to make up for the shortfall in output. In a hamlet once humming with activity, two children with drumstick limbs and skeletal heads, lying by their cadaverous grandmother, were the only survivors. One in four people in a local population of half a million had perished in Guangshan. Mass graves were dug. Ten infants, still breathing, had been thrown into the frozen ground in Chengguan. In total in 1960 over a million people died in the Xinyang region. Of these victims 67,000 were clubbed to death with sticks.

In the years of the Great Leap Forward, the most populous country in the world was transformed into a living hell. Entire villages were wiped out by starvation, refugees taking to the country roads to beg for whatever they could find. Party cadres imposed the excesses of their power on the disobedient and the starving, killing constantly through punishment and torture, and often taking away by force the food needed to live while they themselves continued to hold regular feasts.

Farmers died of poison from eating cotton seeds because there was nothing else left. Cannibalism was well known and human flesh was traded on the black-market. Everyone was fighting for survival against the planned economy, so most survivors stole or lied in order to live. Roving bands of robbers formed to seize the sustenance they needed from those who, like them, were starving. Those confined to prison camps by the political purges, innocent by any reasonable standard, were subjected to physical torment on top of hunger.

Famine was not evenly distributed. The cities felt the famine, but largely did not starve. The farmers who grew the food were the ones who suffered the full horrors of the disaster. This basic inequality shows that the food required to live was always seized through the violence of the state. Hunger is about distribution, and it was the party in its planning, its requisitions, and its violent cadres, who ultimately chose those who were to die.

Tens of millions died of starvation, withering in constant pain into nothingness. No matter the intention or knowledge of the perpetrators, the crime stands as a great black mark against the human species.

The Terror of Ignorance

During the Great Leap Forward, all party members were captured in various versions of ignorance and self-delusion about the nature of the disaster; the common people were even worse off. No official channels of information could acknowledge the existence of the famine, so all the hundreds of millions who experienced it could only rely on rumor and imagination to understand what was killing them. There were rumors that collectivization had ended, or that the party encouraged taking food in times of hunger, or that the government was collapsing and the people should make banners to welcome the incoming army of Chiang Kai-Shek. All who acted on such rumors were severely punished.

Most heart-wrenching of all are the countless stories of those who trusted their government and believed they would be saved. Millions of letters were sent to provincial authorities, top party leaders, and Mao himself to explain the hardships of the people and to ask for relief. Many believed that their suffering was the result of local abuses, and that as long as they could get word to the benevolent rulers, relief would finally come. A common result of these letters is that they were opened by the first level of authority to possess them and the writers punished for attempting to go over their heads. Of those that reached the higher levels, some were responded to, some were ignored. No one drew the larger conclusion, that China was starving to death.

If you were living through the end of the world, would you know it? Disaster is normally a collective experience; wars and droughts are catastrophic events that no one should live through, but their victims know their experience is shared. The Great Leap Forward was the largest disaster in human history, but it seems that no one who experienced it truly understood that anything more than their own death was happening.

The Terror of Continued Ignorance

The famine can only be understood in retrospect and it cannot yet be fully understood.

Mao’s Great Famine is likely the best one-volume account of The Great Leap Leap Forward that has been written, and the best humanity is likely to have for some time. Dikötter's research relied on an archival law passed in the 90s which opened certain historical archives that until then had been restricted to those with party credentials. From his own description, his access was not evenly distributed and largely depended on how much the local officials in charge allowed. Most importantly, the central party archives in Beijing were never opened to him or to anyone who might write an honest account, and a complete history of the era will have to wait until this far off possibility. With the rise of Xi Jinping, the archives were closed once again; further liberalization of access to documents cannot be easily predicted.

The book, like the period it describes, is filled with statistics and figures. The price of iron, provincial grain collection targets, the number of women raped by party officials in a small city. These are often given without context, without base rates to calibrate against. Partially this is in service of the prosecution, but also because larger more comprehensive numbers cannot yet be known. Each archive has its own underestimations and falsehoods, and even a researcher in possession of all the material has no real hope of synthesizing them into a comprehensive narrative that goes beyond simply listing out each horror individually.

The single figure that is most important though is the final tally. Throughout this piece, I have changed the number used for the death count at each mention because there is so much uncertainty about the exact count and so much certainty that it dwarfs any other comparable event. Estimates go as low as 15 million. The most standard numbers come from the first release of birth and death statistics by the government in the 1980s, which ends up settling at around 30 million dead. Population statistics are extremely difficult, as is measuring excess death, and these problems are made far worse by the mixed incentives of a one party state in a period of political terror. Just as the economic output was inflated, deaths were hidden at every level. During the 1980s, the government had a team of 200 demographers comb through all the levels of records to understand the death toll with no public result released. One member who fled China after the Tiananmen Square crackdown claims it came to 43-46 million, but has no verification. Dikötter estimates that based on systematic exaggeration, the number is best put at 45 million. Yang Jisheng, a Chinese journalist with access to other material, has estimated the number at 36 million. All scholars and critics agree it is difficult to be exact. The variance between figures exceeds the toll of most major genocides.

No one yet can fully understand the Great Leap Forward and its tragedies. Not the 45 or 32.5 or 36 million whose lives were ended by it, not foreign researchers attempting to seek truth from the shreds of evidence left, not Chinese leaders muzzled by the same party system which carried out the disaster. But no small part of what killed all those people was not just cruelty, but ignorance - ignorance of what policies would work, and ignorance of the bloody effect those policies were having, ignorance that the personal hell experienced by one was being experienced by all. All governments have the power to kill but this power can be used without knowledge and without intention. Famine is slowly disappearing from human history, but the capacity for great evil may well outlast it. Mundane sins may still have the opportunity to kill millions.