This is the estimated number is from The Black Book of Communism: if some people consider that number suspect, there’s also Frank Dikötter’s estimate* of 45 million killed during the “Great Leap Forward.” Even the New York Times thinks that 30 million died in that atrocity, while noting that the ChiComs admit to 16 million murdered by the state** during that time period. In short: Mao Zedong was a ruthless dictator who killed on a scale equivalent to Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin.

NEVER QUOTE HIM AGAIN ON A DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION-RUN KID’S WEBSITE.

EVER.

I understand that they’ve already scrambled to get the quote off of the site, but… nobody checks this stuff? – And that’s a question that should be asked Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the next time he’s speaking in front of Congress. We would be seeing zero tolerance if they had put up quotes by the aforementioned German and Russian genocidal psychopaths: why, exactly, should we be expected not to care now? Is it because Mao’s victims were Chinese, and thus apparently not as important to apologists for this administration?

I certainly hope that this is not the case. I’d hate to think that the Left was still struggling with that kind of institutionalized racism…

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962.

**Oh, pardon me: “died in a famine.”