Yes. I, too, read that when Mao found his productivity plans ceased to impress, when the workforce was doing its utmost, he made demonically impossible demands on them, and I don't doubt terrible cruelty and torture was inflicted absolutely unjustifiably simple in terms of what was possible, never mind the wickedness of the response of the Government's de facto enforcers.
Nevertheless, I should like to hear from you both, as regards your estimates of the number of people across the globe, whose premature deaths the West, and the US, in particular, have been responsible for since the end of WWII; and more recently in Russia, the same statistics, when it was pillaged by your multinationals at the break-up of the USSR. Although I suspect the Russians are too ashamed of it, to have produced their own figures.
Fortunately for the Chinese, they were not prepared to let it happen to their country, although the still rapid switch to 'wild and woolly', neoliberal capitalism, albeit Communist-controlled, still caused unutterable hardship and doubtless many more premature deaths to millions of their people, who flocked to the cities looking for often non-existent work.
And what about the rest of the world. You have robbed countless countries of their natural resources - not least, of course, S America, by installing puppet, fascist dictators, who ruthlessly protect the interests of the American multinationals, and their own wealthy quisling supporters. And hideously cruel as the tortures you describe, presumably truthfully, (although you are only fed wall-to-wall propaganda by your MSM), they didn't begin to approach the incredible, sexual depravity of the tortures to which women were subjected by Pinochet's goons - supervised, as were the Argentinian junta's torturers by young American 'lecturers' or 'professors' from that prestigious centre of higher learning, the School of the Americas - still extant, but glorying under a different name, evidently from modesty.
'About 1.56 million people, or about 0.5% of the U.S. population, used an emergency shelter or a transitional housing program between October 1, 2008 and September 30, 2009. ... There were an estimated 57,849 homeless veterans estimated in the United States during January 2013, or 12 percent of all homeless adults.'
- from Wikipedia.
Add to that, the fact that you have no national health service, with all the attendant premature deaths from all manner of sicknesses, that would lead to, as well as the millions of ABORTIONS over the years. Can you imagine what it would be like, sleeping rough, particularly in the winter ? The average age at time of death is in the low forties. The stress has been assessed as equivalent to that suffered by a soldier permanently in the field.
Pardon me if I don't argue with you any more. As Christians, you should not swallow your politicians' propaganda, wholesale, either about your own country's affairs or those of Communist and former communist countries. Because 'sola scriptura', never mind tradition, is unequivocal about the fate of those who fail to see Christ in the face of the destitute and the poor. When doing so, it is Christ you have rejected.
The right wing in the UK are every bit as wicked, but just have had less opportunity with the loss of their empire, though they've been clawing back some of their losses by reprivatizing the utilities, for example - and even parts of the National Health Service.
