A fun part of that article was that he kept calling Mao genocidal. A mass murderer, absolutely - but I'm having trouble finding anything that says he was out to eliminate a race of people. A class of people, absolutely - but not a race.

Am I missing something?

I dunno why it is, but people just don't react as strongly to the phrase "democide" as they do to the phrase "genocide." I guess living in the USA makes people think that it's as easy for people in other countries to change their demographic group as it is here in the US, so if people are killed based on where they live or how much money they make, they deserve it for not moving out of the targeted demographic fast enough, whereas killing people for their race means you're killing them for something they can't change.

So pretty much any industrial-scale human slaughter is called "genocide" by anyone who wants to draw attention to it, and "democide" by anyone who's trying to minimize it, regardles of which term happens to be correct.

I'm going to propose the incompetence vs malice explanation here. I'm betting that if I put a survey up on any oft-visited sites to question the definition of democide, most folks would get it wrong. Especially if I managed to put it in a multiple guess format with 4/4 definitions being reasonable-sounding.

Mao's universally acknowledged innovation was successfully adapting Marx's essentially industrial theory to an agrarian social setting. Which is how the professors define it. His *actual* innovation was figuring out how to convince millions of peasants to scythe each other into the dust based on *QUOTAS* he didn't even have to publish.

Which is to say, and I really mean no offense here Ron, the only remnant of your own left-wing professors is the fact that you're still able to draw a distinction between race and class when it comes to shoving shrieking six year-old girls across a plank over a pit.

The sad thing is this article shows graphically the bunch in charge doesn't even understand the question.

Luckily since I was a science major I didn't get too many of the lefties and I could ignore most of them. They saw that I was in the USAFRes and wrote me off. As long as I didn't get too controversial they'd leave me alone.

I did have fun with that one incredibly liberal english teacher, though. Kept turning in papers that used actual scientific research to show that people are born gay or that gun control is damned stupid. The fun part was where she told me that she couldn't argue the gun control stuff but it was time to pick a new topic. So I jumped on the born gay thing.

hehe.

Still got an A in the class.