MOBILE DEVICES
Worldwide Web WorldTribune.com

  Commentary . . .
  


Lev Navrozov Archive
Thursday, September 10, 2009

China's money source for rapid military expansion?
Ask Stalin and Mao

Lev Navrozov emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1972. His columns are today read in both English and Russian. To learn more about Mr. Navrozov's work with the Center for the Survival of Western Democracies, click here.

Today countries are still divided into "developed" and "backward," and the output of steel may be used as an indicator of "military-industrial development" of the country.

  

Also In This Edition

In 1917, Russia produced annually three million tons of steel. Stalin (who died in 1953) and his successors drove the output of steel in Russia to 161 million tons in 1986, as against 75 million tons produced by the U.S.A.

Where had Stalin and his successors obtained the money for such military-industrial development of Russia?

In the 1930s, all peasants were obliged to join "collective farms," for which they had worked as serfs had worked for their owners until serfdom had been abolished by Czar Alexander II in 1861. Every "collective farmer" who worked well for the "collective farm," had a small plot of land, on which he and his family grew vegetables, etc. that they could sell on a market in a city. Thus "collective farms" produced — by serf labor — bread, meat, etc., which were sold to the urban population through the state stores, while the collective farmers' plots produced vegetables, chickens, etc., sold in markets.

The wages of the urban employees were barely enough to survive on, and a six-room apartment in Moscow was divided into six rooms for six families, with the kitchen and bathroom shared by those six families, each of which paid a tiny rent out of his or her tiny earnings. Let me enumerate the professions of all the tenants of our six "apartments" in the times of Stalin: a lawyer in a huge ministry, his wife, a clerk in this ministry; a doctor and his wife, a cashier; my father, a writer, struggling with censorship, and my mother, a professor of medicine; a chauffeur of a highly placed official and his wife, taking care of their children; and a bookkeeper and his wife, who had married him because he seemed to her very important.

The money thus saved by Stalin on those six families went into the production of steel and other components of the "industrialization," including weapons, which proved to be good enough to rout Hitler.

Is this possible in a free society? Just try to compel a New York family to live in one room of a former six-room apartment, with five other families! There is a shortage of money in the U.S.A. because there is not enough money for a house or a separate apartment for every American family. There is an excess of money in the hands of the owners of China to lend a couple of trillions of dollars to the destitute United States.

After Stalin's death in 1953, his successors "de-Stalinized" Russia, that is, they represented Stalin as an evil and ruthless tyrant. What about Mao? Said President Hu Jintao on the 110th anniversary of Mao's birth, in 2003: "Comrade Mao Zedong was a great Marxist; a great proletarian revolutionary, strategist and theorist; a great patriot and national hero."

According to a 814-page biography of Mao, published outside China in 2005 by Jung Chang and her husband Tom Halliday and entitled Mao: The Unknown Story, Mao "turned China into a cultural desert of misery and violence, while maintaining dozens of luxury villas and a troupe of female sexual partners." He was not a fanatical idealist, killing for the sake of the happy global future of mankind, but "the bloodiest mass murderer in history," ready to sacrifice mankind, and not only China, for his philistine pleasures of a common gangster.

Mao came to power in 1949. Already in 1954 he started China's nuclear weapons program, and in 1964 China tested a 20-kiloton nuclear bomb. Curiously enough, each test could be detected abroad, but was not reported-in the U.S. media, for example-and even after 25 Chinese nuclear tests, the U.S. "experts" were silent about China's nuclear weapons. The book China Builds the Bomb was published only in 1988.

In 1986, China already produced 52 million tons of steel as compared with 15 million tons produced by Great Britain.

The population of the U.S.A. is about 300 million and that of China 1,333 billion, that is, more than four times over. Let us imagine the diagrams of distribution of human resources in the two countries. The number of students in sciences and technologies will be more than four times greater in China owing to its larger population. But in the statistical Chinese surveys of education, we find that many sciences and technologies simply do not exist in the higher education of China because they have no military use. Thus, the actual number of scientists and technologists useful in warfare will finally be in China not about 4 times, but 8, 12, or 16 times greater than in the United States.

The same applies to weapons and all militarily applicable products. China is thus to become finally militarily superior to the U.S.A. many times over.

U.S. President Obama said that China is home to nearly 1/5 of the world's consumers. Hence he and other Americans like Obama, who think of life primarily in terms of business, and not in terms of military defense, are looking forward to doing business with 1/5 of the world's consumers. But the owners of China can transform this 1/5 of the world's population into armed forces, far more powerful than those of the U.S.A. or of any other country.

What is China's most likely output of steel in 2009? I found the figure published on May 1, 2009 (source: Reuters). Hold onto your chair! The probable Chinese annual figure is 584.88 million tons of steel, while in May of 2009, the U.S.A. produced 4.3 million metric tons of crude steel, that is, the U.S. probable annual output of steel in 2009 as a whole is 51.6 million tons , if we take the May output as the average per month in 2009. In 1986, the annual U.S. output of steel was 75 million tons, while the probable figure for 2009 is 51.6 million tons, that is, less than one tenth of China's likely annual output of steel in 2009.  


Lev Navrozov can be reached by e-mail at navlev@cloud9.net. To learn more about and support his work at the Center for the Survival of Western Democracies, click here. If you intend to make a tax-exempt donation to the non-profit Center, please let us know via e-mail at navlev@cloud9.net, and we will send you all relevant information. Thank you.

About Us     l    Contact Us     l    Geostrategy-Direct.com     l    East-Asia-Intel.com
Copyright © 2008    East West Services, Inc.    All rights reserved.