Although I know this is boring as hell, at least for the likes of me, I feel it needs to be given a reality check once and for all. I hope I end the dangerous infatuation many people, especially youngsters, have with this man. Let this also give us an insight into this man based on the factual evidence we have at our disposal.
First things first, please remember Prabhakaran was a blood red communist and atheist (see here). He firmly believed till the end that there was no god and frowned upon believers of all stripes. His ethnic cleansing of Muslims and Saiva Vellalars from North & East Sri Lanka stands testimony to this statement of mine. For more on that, please read my earlier post here.
By communists, I exclude our Indian communists like CPI, CPI(M), CPI(ML), etc, who, by the way, are truly admirable for standing firmly by Indian women on all issues, be it their entry into Lord Shani’s shrine at Shingnapur (see here), the Haji Ali Dargah (see here), Triple Talaq (see here), etc, and so much more. In their place, I’d include BJP which has in the recent past implemented crude Stalinist/Maoist policies like limiting the cash we take out of our own accounts (now removed), charging us for each ATM transaction, taxing us heavily to apparently “Make in India” and Innovate (read the full thread here) but failing to do so (more here), etc. Not to mention actually supplying arms to Maoists in the Red Corridor (see here) headquartered in Chhattisgarh & Jharkhand (both ruled by BJP for over a decade, see here and here).
I’m getting way off track now, so now let’s get back to Prabhakaran’s Eelam, or what Eelam would’ve been had LTTE won the Eelam war. Just to give an insight to our misguided youth. Please bear in mind Prabhakaran is of the same ilk as Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Josef Stalin, etc, and would’ve done nothing better than them if he had actually ruled Eelam. Let me take you on a journey through history.
This isn’t to deride India’s long time friend Russia or its predecessor USSR, but the real nature of communism and communists must be known to all. To know more about Marxism, please read this brilliant book by Ludwig von Mises (from the Austrian School of Economics) “Marxism Unmasked” here.
1. Let me start with Josef Stalin, the Premier of the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1953 and the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1952.
He replaced Vladimir Lenin’s "New Economic Policy” with his own policies like a centralized command economy, industrialization and collectivization. What were the consequences of his ruthless policies?
Interjection: If you do not have the stomach to digest crude imagery, I’d suggest you stop reading immediately, or you can scroll quickly to the bottom of this post. Thanks!
The first Soviet famine of 1932-33, of which Holodomor was a part, was the first outcome of Stalin’s policies. Here are some images.
These are just a handful of photos. The innumerable blood-curdling horrors that happened during the great Soviet famine of 1932-33 that took the lives of 7 million people are out there for all to see. The worst affected areas included Ukraine, Northern Caucasus, Volga Region and Kazakhstan, the South Urals, and West Siberia.
Then between 1934 and 1939, Stalin organized the "Great Purge” against his enemies whom he dubbed as “enemies of the working class”, including senior political and military figures, were interned in Gulag-run prisons, exiled or executed, often without due process. During 1937-38, NKVD (Soviet Secret Police) headed by Nikolai Yezhov, exterminated between 600,000 and 3 million people.
Here’s an image of the “Great Purge”.
These people were “enemies of the people” apparently. Most of them were killed with no trial.
Note that this was BEFORE the Second World War. AFTER the Second World War, Josef Stalin organized the Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature in response to another major famine from 1946 to 1947.
One might argue: USSR just came out of the war, so there was food shortage. But then so did the USA, the UK, France, and others! There was no report of such major famines there! But to some extent, this can be excused.
Here are records of the official number of deaths under Josef Stalin:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09668139999056
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2002/sep/12/highereducation.historyandhistoryofart
http://necrometrics.com/20c5m.htm#Stalin
2. Next I move on to Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung), the first Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the first Chairman of the People’s Republic of China.
A brief history of this fellow: He was losing out to Chiang Kai-shek and had the United States intervene and save his ass each time. More on the treason of George Catlett Marshall here:
http://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1951mccarthy-marshall.html
Indeed, this speech was delivered by Joseph McCarthy before the Senate on 06/14/1951.
After capturing China from Chiang Kai-shek (who later fled to Taiwan), what did Mao Tse-tung do?
During 1948-50, he committed a “classicide” against landowners/landlords in order to redistribute their lands to the peasant class. An estimated 4.5 million people perished during this purge. There was also this “struggle session” wherein landlords were publicly shamed, humiliated, tortured and executed, not by some secret police as in the neighboring USSR, but by radicalized peasants themselves!
Here’s an example of what classicide was like:
And mind you, not one, but 4.5 million landlords were publicly humiliated, tortured and exterminated thus.
Then from March 1950, Mao initiated a campaign to suppress counterrevolutionaries known as Zhenfan. In other words, those who didn’t agree with him were purged and put to death. This occurred till August 1952. Here’s an image of one such incident:
Due to this purge, the number of people killed would’ve ranged from 712,000 (Yang Kuisong) to 2 million (Li Changyu). Most of those killed were former Kuomintang officials, businessmen, former employees of Western companies and intellectuals whose loyalty was suspect. If added to those who perished during the classicide and also being sent to “reform through labor” camps, the total deaths could go well above 6 million.
Around the same time, the Three-Anti campaign was started in Manchuria towards the end of 1951. The aim was to rid China of corruption and enemies. The three antis were: corruption, waste and bureaucracy. If they were found guilty of any of these charges, they were publicly humiliated, executed, sent to labor camps (Laogai) across China or made to commit voluntary suicide.
On January 1952, Mao began the Five-Anti campaign. The five antis were bribery, theft of state property, tax evasion, cheating on government contracts and stealing state economic information. The estimated death toll of voluntary suicides in both these campaigns stands between 200,000 to 300,000.
The Sufan movement launched in 1955 and ended in 1956 took the lives of an estimated 770,000 people, although real numbers are hard to come by. While previous campaigns targeted the remnants of the Kuo Min Tang (KMT) movement, this one mainly targeted the communist party members whose loyalty was suspect.
Mao himself admitted killing 800,000 people in the classicide (see here) and 712,000 people in the suppression of counterrevolutionaries (see here).
This doesn’t end here. The REAL genocides are yet to begin.
In 1957, Mao announced “The Great Leap Forward” to transform China from an agrarian economy to an industrialized socialist one. This lasted from 1958 to 1962. Mao prohibited private farming and collectivized all farms by 1958. People’s communes were established with 5,000 households per commune. A total of 25,000 communes were established. These communes included not just farmlands, but also light industries and construction projects. Mao’s main focus was on industrialization. China invested heavily in state enterprises to boost steel production. 1,587, 1,361 and 1,815 medium large scale state projects were started in 1958, 1959 and 1960 respectively, more each year than the First Five Year Plan.
In 1958, 21 million Chinese people were added to the non-agricultural state payrolls. This number rose to its peak at 50.44 million in 1960. The urban population swelled by 31.24 million people. Due to this, China’s food rationing system came under immense stress and the demand for rural food production reached unsustainable levels. During this expansion, coordination suffered and material shortages spiked, leading to increased wages for laborers with no significant rise in manufactured goods. Facing this massive deficit, the government cut financing for industries from 38.9 billion to 7.1 billion.
Mao (who had no knowledge of metallurgy) encouraged setting up backyard steel furnaces in every commune and neighborhood after seeing an experimental backyard furnace in Hefei, Anhui shown to him by Zeng Xisheng that was claimed to be manufacturing high quality steel. So Mao forced peasants to manufacture steel. Peasants moved away from farming and manufactured steel from everything they got, like scrap metal, pots, pans and other metal artifacts. To fuel the furnaces, environments were denuded of trees and the woods taken from the doors and furniture from the houses of the peasants. The outcome was low quality pig iron which was of no use. His private doctor Li Zhisui commented that after visiting Manchuria in January 1959, Mao realized high quality steel could only be produced in large-scale factories powered by coal, but let the “mass mobilization of peasants” continue so as not to disturb their “revolutionary enthusiasm”.
Irrigation works were often built without inputs from trained engineers. Mao proposed moving 600 million cubic meters for each water conservancy project. Mao criticized the excess use of corvée (unpaid unfree labor), but mass mobilization of peasants continued, and several hundreds of thousands were killed in this process.
Close cropping and deep plowing were encouraged on the false assumption that this would increase agricultural output, but it actually went down.
The villagers suffered acutely during this entire episode. They were forced to work for intolerable hours through day and night, in most cases, without food. Communes were mostly occupied by officials who forced village peasants to work. Those who disobeyed or couldn’t work were humiliated, tortured, sent to labor camps or executed.
To increase agricultural output, Mao initiated the Four Pests campaign wherein he targeted rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows. Sparrows which ate some of the grains, were shot at, their nests destroyed, their eggs broken and chicks killed. This reduced their population by a huge percentage. But the outcome of this disastrous campaign was that insects, locusts and bugs started to multiply in number and ate up all the grains, resulting in further shortage. Locusts started to swarm the entire nation and caused further ecological imbalance in addition to the Great Leap Forward due to widespread deforestation and the misuse of poisons and pesticides. Ecological imbalance further exacerbated the Great Chinese Famine, which killed an estimated 23 million (Peng Xizhe, 1987) to 55 million (Yu Xiguang, 2005) people. Some images below:
Here’s an article from the New York Times on the same:
http://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/05/books/horror-of-a-hidden-chinese-famine.html
In 1966, Mao initiated the “Cultural Revolution” to remove capitalist and bourgeois elements within the Communist Party of China through violent class struggle. This came at the backdrop of Mao being sidelined. He targeted Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. Chinese youth formed Red Guards throughout the country. The movement spread into the military, urban workers and within the communist party itself. It led to widespread factional struggles in all walks of life. Millions of people suffered a wide range of abuses like public humiliation, arbitrary imprisonment, torture, hard labor, sustained harassment, seizure of property, and in some cases, execution. A large segment of the population were displaced, especially urban youth moving to the rural areas. Historical relics & artifacts were destroyed and cultural & religious sites were ransacked.
Although Mao declared the Cultural Revolution over in 1969, it actively continued till the death of military leader Lin Biao in 1971. Mao died of multiple heart attacks on 09/09/1976. His Gang of Four (Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Wang Hongwen) were arrested the same year and reformists led by Deng Xiaoping dismantled Maoist policies and laid the stones for modern capitalist China in 1979. In 1981, the Party declared that the Cultural Revolution was "responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the country, and the people since the founding of the People's Republic". The estimated death toll due to the Cultural Revolution ranges from 400,000 (see here) to 10 million (see here).
3. Now I move on to Hồ Chí Minh of Viet Nam.
This man’s ragtag group of communist thugs was trained by Mao’s Red Chinese Army and armed by China and USSR.
He formed the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930 in Hong Kong with the aid of Phan Boi Chau and returned to Viet Nam in 1941 to overthrow the French. Phan Boi Chau was popular among all Vietnamese people as a nationalist. Ho, afraid that he would be sidelined by Chau, aided the French police in arresting Chau and took over his place. Communist followers of Chau were accepted while others were betrayed to the French police for a sum of money. Thus Phan Boi Chau’s movement was completely destroyed and subsumed by Ho Chi Minh.
There was a much darker side to Ho than his deceit and treachery however.
In 1930 and 1931, his Indochinese Communist Party conducted an assassination program against competitors, landowners and officials, that was so sweeping it prompted a rebuke from the Comintern (for whom he worked as a spy). Through the 1930s & 40s, as ICP grew in size, thousands of Vietnamese people were killed, betrayed to the French for money or forced to flee to Japan & China. When it suited Ho Chi Minh’s purpose, some would serve in his government; when it no longer did, they would die or flee the country.
After the French left, Ho Chi Minh took control of North Viet Nam and completely eliminated all competition from nationalists, liberals and communists alike. Communists were subsumed into his movement while others were eliminated. Moderates like Bui Quang Chieu were exterminated as a matter of fact to “purify” the Vietnamese people. Even Ho’s personal friend Ta Thu Thau was assassinated for which he replied: “Anyone who does not follow the line determined by me will be smashed.”
The last to go were the nationalist Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang, eliminated through military action against the areas they controlled as well as arrests of the leadership and confiscation of their assets. By the end of 1946 there was no one left to contest Ho Chi Minh for leadership of North Viet Nam.
In the name of “land reforms”, just like Mao & Stalin, from 1953 to 1956, Ho Chi Minh pitted peasants against the middle class and the wealthy and even against each other. This resulted in approximately 500,000 deaths. It was so brutal that peasants revolted. Ho Chi Minh called in an entire division of the People’s Army of Viet Nam and slaughtered peasants indiscriminately till the revolt was put down. If you’re interested, you can read more on that here:
https://www.amazon.com/Bloodbath-Hypothesis-Pattern-Vietnams-Radical/dp/B001J4NQT8
Members of the National People’s Party were also killed en masse. If these numbers are added to the land reform numbers, it would go up to nearly a million.
Viet Nam was demarcated after the First Indochina War into North and South in 1954. The North was allied to USSR & China, while the South was allied to the USA. The Viet Nam War episode also involved the communist Viet Cong (VC) which was active in South Viet Nam and the communist rebels in Cambodia and Laos. Getting into this episode would take me a full 2 days, so I leave this at that.
Fast forward to 1976. When the USA pulled out of South Viet Nam, the Viet Cong (VC) and the People’s Army of Viet Nam (PAVN) captured Saigon (renamed to Ho Chi Minh City) and reunified Viet Nam. In the reunification process, Ho Chi Minh’s followers (Ho Chi Minh died on 09/02/1969) killed an estimated 840,000 to 2.4 million political prisoners and people who were opposed to communism in South Viet Nam.
To gauge the severity of Ho Chi Minh’s cruelty, I’d suggest reading this article from November 1968:
http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/hochiminh.html
To summarize, Ho Chi Minh is responsible for the deaths of minimum 1.7 million Cambodians, 230,000 Laotians (people in Laos) and 2 million Vietnamese people, due to his ruthless communist policies and warmongering.
4. Now I move on to the next communist, Pol Pot who ruled Democratic Kampuchea, now known as Cambodia.
For his higher education, Pol Pot went to France, where he got radicalized into a Marxist and quit his education.
Pol Pot headed the Khmer Rouge (the Khmers are the largest ethnic group in Cambodia) and captured power in 1975. He renamed the country to Democratic Kampuchea.
He immediately forced the closing of all national banks, schools, hospitals, etc, and started collectivizing farms under his government’s control. He forced all his people to work for long hours in farms, under the guns of his armed forces. People who complained of sickness were frowned upon and forced to go back into the farms. People who opposed him were killed, as was also the case with Ho Chi Minh, Mao Tse-tung and Josef Stalin.
What’s the worst part is that he targeted educated people! Anybody who was educated, or even looked educated, was killed! This horrible purge was dubbed by the Khmer Rouge as the “Purification of the Cambodian People”!
An estimated 1-3 million people, around 25% of the country’s total population, was exterminated as a result of Pol Pot’s ruthless policies.
It took the Vietnamese Army to invade Kampuchea in 1979 and liberate their people to end the madness of Pol Pot!
Here are images of Pol Pot’s torture.
A memorial for the victims.
5. And last but not the least, Nelson Mandela.
Yeah, this quote of his is so famous, but how many people know about his dark side?
Note: I’m not a racist, nor support racism or discrimination of any form! But reality has to be brought to light! I oppose Apartheid, but Nelson Mandela’s brand of communism isn’t any better, if not much worse!
Now on to Mandela. How many blacks has Mandela killed for not agreeing to his communist philosophy? I’d say thousands.
How many of you Prabhakaran/LTTE lovers know about “necklacing”? No, I’m not talking about gold, silver or diamond necklaces that our women wear at home, I’m talking about car tires being used as necklaces, to be doused with kerosene/gasoline and set alight!
Warning! If you do not have a hard heart, skip this video immediately!
https://www.liveleak.com/view?i=e94_1317489390
This was how he acted against blacks whom he felt were conspiring with the Apartheid government. Those who disagreed with his communist leanings were brought to justice thus.
As to why Mandela did this? He’s from the Xhosa tribe in South Africa. Mandela’s tribe believed that inhaling toxic smoke disconnects one from their ancestors, so before death, disconnect the target from his/her ancestors.
Before his election as the First President of post Apartheid South Africa in 1994, the Shell House massacre took place. Read more on that here.
The less I talk about his legacy, the better. Long story short, South Africa today is #1 in AIDS, rape, murders, unemployment, unsanitary water and lawlessness. Read more about his party African National Congress' torture camps from a survivor here.
Another victim of necklacing.
A Norwegian article on necklacing: http://www.vg.no/nyheter/utenriks/soer-afrika/frykter-nye-hat-angrep-mot-utlendinger-etter-fotball-vm/a/10007092/
I had to expose Nelson Mandela, because his crimes against fellow blacks were legion & gruesome and the country he inherited has become what one can now dub “Hell on Earth”.
This ends our journey through history. There are other prominent communist personalities such as Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, etc, who weren’t brutal to the scale of the above 5. They were really terrible at economic management, but apart from that, their legacies aren’t tainted with as much blood and gore as those of Josef Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot or Nelson Mandela.
Now on to Prabhakaran and LTTE. Dear Naam Tamilar, PMK and MDMK fans, now that our brief journey through the history of communism is over, I ask you to read diligently my previous post on Eelam here.
https://moonchronicles.tumblr.com/post/162077082669/the-eelam-story
And tell me, if you can, whether Prabhakaran would’ve been any different. You be the judge!
I do believe that Prabhakaran, like all of the aforementioned people, had good intentions in the beginning, but ultimately, they all went haywire and ended up destroying themselves and their people more than their purported enemies! This is why your ideology is very important! But that’s a long topic which would need a separate session!
That’s the end of a long journey, even by my standards!
Thank you all for reading! Have a good day!