Last modified on June 30, 2020, at 00:05

Communism and cannibalism

Below is information relating to Communism and cannibalism.

Chinese communism, Pol Pot's communist regime and cannibalism

See also: Atheism and cannibalism and Atheism and mass murder and Militant atheism and Atheism and communism

A People's Republic of China propaganda poster stating "Destroy the Old World & Forge the New World," with a worker smashing a crucifix, a Buddha murti, and a classical Chinese sacred text; 1967.

In 1955, Chinese communist leader Chou En-lai declared, "We Communists are atheists".[1] In 2015, the Communist Party of China reaffirmed that members of their party must be atheists.[2] See also: Atheism and cannibalism and Atheism and communism

The New York Times reports:

Newly disclosed confidential government documents suggest that the Cultural Revolution plumbed previously unreported depths of savagery.

The documents, prepared by local government offices in the 1980's, two decades after the events they describe, seem to offer a meticulous record of how Red Guards and Communist officials in one province not only tortured their victims to death but also ate their flesh.

Copies of the documents have been smuggled out of China by Zheng Yi, a prominent writer wanted by the Chinese authorities for his work for the democracy movement at Tiananmen Square in 1989. After three and a half years as a fugitive, Mr. Zheng is to arrive in New York on Wednesday. Some Ugly Details

At some high schools, students killed their principals in the school courtyard and then cooked and ate the bodies to celebrate a triumph over "counterrevolutionaries," the documents report. Government-run cafeterias are said to have displayed bodies dangling on meat hooks and to have served human flesh to employees.

"There are many varieties of cannibalism," declares one report, "and among them are these: killing someone and making a late dinner of it, slicing off the meat and having a big party, dividing up the flesh so each person takes a large chunk home to boil, roasting the liver and eating it for its medicinal properties, and so on."

The documents suggest that at least 137 people, and probably hundreds more, were eaten in Guangxi Province in southern China in the late 1960's. In most cases, many people ate the flesh of one corpse, so the number of cannibals may have numbered in the thousands.[3]

According to the book The Black Bible of Communism:

The populace was invited to be present at the public trials of the "counter-revolutionaries" -who happened to be condemned to death in an almost identical manner. They would watch those executions, shouting "Death! Death!" and egging on the Red Guards who were assigned to the slow carving of the victims. They often cooked body parts and ate them, or forced the victim's family to eat them, in front of the condemned person, who was still alive.

Everyone was invited to the feasts where they would distribute the heart and liver of the former landowner, and to the assemblies where the speaker would address the people standing in front of a row of poles on which they had impaled recently chopped-off heads.

This fascination with vindictive cannibalism, which we find again in Pol Pot's Cambodia and corresponds to a very old archetype that was broadly prevalent throughout eastern Asia, had often made its appearance during other moments of paroxysm in Chinas' history. Thus, in an era of foreign interventions, in 613, the emperor Yang (of the Sui Dynasty) took his revenge on a certain revolutionary, by persecuting even his most distant relatives: "Those who were more severely punished had to undergo the punishments of being cut into four quarters and their head exposed atop a spear, or they would be cut to pieces, pierced with arrows. The emperor had ordered the high-ranking officers to devour the flesh of the victims, piece by piece."

The renowned author Lu Xun, a sympathizer of Communism, at a moment when he no longer concurred with nationalism and anti-Westernism, wrote: "The Chinese are cannibals..."[4]

Breibart reported:

Witness Meu Peou told a court during an ongoing genocide hearing in Cambodia about a woman the Khmer Rouge executed and ate in front of him.

“She was asked to take off her clothes and her body was cut open,” he wept to the court. “There was blood everywhere. … [H]er liver was taken out and was cooked for a meal.”[5]

Soviet Union and cannibalism

Joseph Stalin, the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953, patronised the League of Militant Atheists, whose chief aim, under the leadership of Yemelyan Yaroslavsky, was to propagate militant atheism and eradicate religion.[6][7]

See also: Soviet Union and morality

According to the University of Cambridge, historically, the "most notable spread of atheism was achieved through the success of the 1917 Russian Revolution, which brought the Marxist-Leninists to power."[8] See also: Atheism and communism

Kerry Kubulius in his article entitled Cannibalism in the Soviet Union wrote:

In the years 1920-21, the Soviet Union was hit hard by famine. Civil war had wiped out grain stores, and drought affected harvests. Struggling peasants and Gulag prisoners alike fell victim to starvation. Hungry individuals ate what they could find – the last of their livestock, cats and dogs, and then finally, fellow human beings. Cannibalism in Soviet Russia and elsewhere in the Soviet Union manifested itself in prisons camps, in urban settings, and in the countryside. The practice of cannibalism was seen as a survival measure rather than a true crime by those who had nothing else to eat....

It goes without saying that cannibalism in the Soviet Union was outlawed. Those who were caught cannibalizing their fellow citizens were sent to prisons, even though cannibalism was practiced in the Gulag, as well...

While some individuals ate the bodies of the already dead, others murdered for the purpose of providing themselves with food. Gangs of children would kill adults, while adults would find children to murder and eat. Escaped prisoners might take along fellow inmates to serve as future meals – unbeknownst to the escapees' companions themselves.

Cannibalism in the Soviet Union was sometimes a result of an individual or individuals seeking revenge.[9]

Ron Rosenbaum wrote in Slate:

,,,our culture still hasn't assimilated the genocidal equivalence between Stalin and Hitler, because, as Applebaum points out, we used the former to defeat the latter. *

The full evil of Stalin still hasn't sunk in. I know it to be true intellectually, but our culture has not assimilated the magnitude of his crimes. Which is perhaps why the cannibalism jolted me out of any illusion that meaningful distinctions could be made between Stalin and Hitler.

Perhaps we've failed to assimilate what we've learned about Stalin, Soviet communism, and Mao's communism (50 million may have died in the Great Leap Forward famine and the Cultural Revolution's murders) because for some time the simmering argument had a kind of disreputable side. In the mid-'80s there were German historians such as Jürgen Habermas accusing other German historians such as Ernst Nolte of trying to "normalize" the Nazi regime by playing up its moral equivalence to Stalinist Russia, by suggesting even that Hitler's murderous methods were a response to Stalinist terror and genocide, which some saw as an attempt to "excuse" Hitler.

But the disreputable uses to which the argument has been put—normalizing Hitler by focusing on Stalin's crimes—should not blind us to the magnitude and consequences of those crimes.[10]

North Korea and cannibalism

North Korea has state atheism and public religion is actively discouraged.[11]

The Express reports:

A North Korean man living in Australia has claimed that human flesh is served up to eat in the country’s third largest city.

Sung Min Jeong, 44, claims that in Chongjin – a city at the tip of the North Korean coast – a shopkeeper serves up human meat.

Fears that famine-stricken North Koreans are being forced to eat human flesh heightened earlier this year following claims a man was executed for murdering his two children for food.

Fears of cannibalism in the country surfaced in 2003 too, amid testimony from refugees who claimed poor harvests and food aid sanctions had resulted in children being killed and corpses cut up for food.

According to reports, requests by the United Nations World Food Programme to access "farmers' markets" where human meat was said to be traded, were turned down by Pyongyang, citing "security reasons".

Those caught selling human meat face execution, but one source told the North Korean Refugees Assistance Fund: "Pieces of 'special' meat are displayed on straw mats for sale.

"People know where they come from, but they don't talk about it."[12]

External links

Notes

  1. Noebel, David, The Battle for Truth, Harvest House, 2001.
  2. China's Communist Party Bans Believers, Doubles Down On Atheism
  3. A Tale of Red Guards and Cannibals, New York Times
  4. Atheistic cannibalism: How atheism can turn Man into a beast, Source: "The Black Bible of Communism" (Greek edition), Athens 2006. Excerpt taken from pages 504, 505. of the 4th edition
  5. Witness Describes Cannibalism Under Khmer Rouge Regime, Breitbart
  6. Michael Hesemann, Whitley Strieber (2000). The Fatima Secret. Random House Digital, Inc.. Retrieved on 9 October 2011. “Lenin's death in 1924 was followed by the rise of Joseph Stalin, "the man of steel," who founded the "Union of Militant Atheists," whose chief aim was to spread atheism and eradicate religion. In the following years it devastated hundreds of churches, destroyed old icons and relics, and persecuted the clergy with unimaginable brutality.” 
  7. Paul D. Steeves (1989). Keeping the faiths: religion and ideology in the Soviet Union. Holmes & Meier. Retrieved on 4 July 2013. “The League of Militant Atheists was formed in 1926 and by 1930 had recruited three million members. Five years later there were 50,000 local groups affiliated to the League and the nominal membership had risen to five million. Children from 8-14 years of age were enrolled in Groups of Godless Youth, and the League of Communist Youth (Komsomol) took a vigorous anti- religious line. Several antireligious museums were opened in former churches and a number of Chairs of Atheism were established in Soviet universities. Prizes were offered for the best 'Godless hymns' and for alternative versions of the Bible from which ... the leader of the League of Militant Atheists, Yemelian Yaroslavsky, said: "When a priest is deprived of his congregation, that does not mean that he stops being a priest. He changes into an itinerant priest. He travels around with his primitive tools in the villages, performs religious rites, reads prayers, baptizes children. Such wandering priests are at times more dangerous than those who carry on their work at a designated place of residence." The intensified persecution, which was a part of the general terror inflicted upon Soviet society by Stalin's policy, ...” 
  8. "Investigating atheism: Marxism". University of Cambridge (2008). Retrieved on July 17, 2014. “The most notable spread of atheism was achieved through the success of the 1917 Russian Revolution, which brought the Marxist-Leninists to power. For the first time in history, atheism thus became the official ideology of a state.”
  9. Cannibalism in the Soviet Union' by Kerry Kubulius
  10. Stalin's Cannibals, Slate
  11. Elizabeth Raum. North Korea. Series: Countries Around the World. Heinemann, 2012. ISBN 1432961330. p. 28
  12. North Korean reveals cannibalism is common after escaping starving state, Express