Reddit reviews Mao’s Last Revolution

When people talk about "genocide" in the Soviet Union or the People's Republic of China (PRC) (and I use quotation marks to distance myself from the debate of whether these atrocities were technically genocides, not to take a position in that debate), they generally refer to two types of state-driven killing: man-made famines and political violence.

For man-made famines, look into the Holodomer in the Soviet Union (http://www.holodomorct.org/) and the Great Leap Forward in the PRC (https://www.amazon.com/Maos-Great-Famine-Devastating-Catastrophe/dp/0802779239/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1495138467&sr=8-1&keywords=mao%27s+great+famine). For the political violence, learn about labor camps (gulags) in the Soviet Union (http://www.thegulag.org/content/gulag-introduction-3) and the Cultural Revolution in the PRC (https://www.amazon.com/Maos-Last-Revolution-Roderick-MacFarquhar/dp/0674027485/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1495138553&sr=8-1&keywords=mao%27s+last+revolution).

Even after accounting for Western bias, it's completely fair to say that communism killed more people in the 20th century than Hitler did (I say this with the caveat that I am much more familiar with the case of China than of the Soviet Union). Here's my argument for why violent atrocities should be attributed as an inherent feature of Marxist thought after a fair amount of study of the PRC:

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx argues per his material dialecticism that persons are made by their relationship to the means of production and that all the suffering of the nineteenth century was due to changes in the relationship of society to the means of production by the creation of a new category of person: the bourgeoisie. Marx's solution to economic problems was both that 1) bourgeoise persons must be eliminated and that 2) the possibility of bourgeoise persons must be eliminated. The leaders of the Soviet Union and of the PRC took these arguments very seriously. The policies that led to the Holodomer famine and the the Great Leap Forward famines were the direct result of Communist leadership attempting to reformulate society in such away that the bourgeoise person becomes impossible. Political violence was intended to either eliminate or reform bourgeoise persons.

Communism and leftist thinking generally leads to violence because it places the sanctity of a set of ideas above the sanctity of life. These are foundational to Marxist thought and not much can be rescued from it without accepting an intellectual path that ultimately justifies innumerable forms of violence in pursuit of the end of violence.

Oh shit. I just finished reading Mao's Last Revolution, incidentally, and hooooly smokes, the Cultural Revolution was pure nightmare fuel.