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Godfree Roberts's avatar

'Ho Chi Minh enacted a popular but violent land reform, where tens of thousands of landlords were killed and their land was redistributed '??

I doubt that very much.

Ho's friend, Mao, conducted a bloodless land distribution, so I expect that Ho's was too, and that you have simply repeated an Official Atrocity Narrative.

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Pryce Davies's avatar

🙄

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Dylan Darnell's avatar

200,000 to 5,000,000 dead is not what I would call "bloodless."

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Godfree Roberts's avatar

200,000 to 5,000,000 dead?

Who? Where? How? Why?

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Godfree Roberts's avatar

William Sewell, then a Christian missionary in China, wrote: "We knew from the papers that, in some parts of China where Land Reform had already taken place, there had been angry scenes, and landlords had been beaten to death by the people or had killed themselves in fear. The government realized that they had greatly underestimated the passions of the people when they were aroused, but now the cadres were wiser and were present to see that matters did not get out of control. After the people had spoken, the landlords were either handed over to the police for trial or allowed to remain free, according to circumstance. Only those proven responsible for a tenant’s death combined with rape or for several deaths were legally liable for the death penalty".

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Apr 24, 2024Edited
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Godfree Roberts's avatar

My point is that it didn't happen. There was no mass killing of landlords in China.

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Apr 25, 2024Edited
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Godfree Roberts's avatar

"deliberately orchestrated by the Party to be carried out by peasants (with naturally varying degrees of enthusiasm)"??

I'm well versed in post-revolutionary history and have not heard of such a thing. Can you provide a reliable source?

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Apr 25, 2024
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Godfree Roberts's avatar

The Civil War was a war in which everything was done. After the war, as I have explained above, the killing stopped.

The source you linked to, CHINA' LAND WAR, say, "To achieve socialist utopia, the Communists imposed and performed a harsh script of peasant liberation through fierce class struggle. While many accounts of the campaigns give false credence to this narrative, DeMare argues that the reality was much more complex and brutal than is commonly understood—while many villagers prospered, there were families torn apart and countless deaths”. There is no evidence for this, and abundant evidence to the contrary.

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