Over the past few blogs, we have seen that Hitler and Stalin did not kill millions on their own but there were thousands of others who actively approved and carried out their orders. When I was searching the internet for the book on the Ukraine famine, I found another book that illustrates this point again. This one involved China, Mao, and the Great Leap Forward.
The Great Leap Forward was Mao’s attempt to rapidly bring China into the modern world by setting lofty goals for industry and agriculture in order to stimulate new methods of accomplishing particular tasks. The leaders in the cities and country in order to show support for this initiative set even loftier goals. These goals proved to be impossible to meet. The result was violence against the worker in an attempt to increase output. Safety and quality took a backseat to quantity which resulted in many industrial accidents. In the country, the rulers vastly overestimated the harvest and when the national government took what it was told was excess produce the result was little food left for the farmers which resulted in the starvation of millions. The result of all this political maneuvering was that in the years 1958 to 1962 between 32 and 45 million Chinese died unnecessarily.
So who was responsible for all this suffering and deaths? Was Mao the only person who committed all these atrocities? As Dikötter explains: “. . .a dictatorship never has one has one dictator only, as many people become willing to scramble for power over the next person above them.” [1]
There were many party members who did not back the Great Leap Forward with sufficient enthusiasm were removed from their positions. [2] The question is how far would we go when commanded by our superiors in government or business to take actions that would go against our Christian beliefs? Would we find some way to justify such actions or would we be willing to suffer the consequences?
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[1] Frank Dikötter. Mao’s Great Famine. London: Bloomsbury, 2010, p. 41.
[2] Ibid., pp. 100-103.
