Communism And Cannibalism

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]

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]

“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]

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]

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]

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]