The Communists declared many wars. Some, like Pol Pot in Cambodia, fought mostly with their own people, hammering doctors with hoes and inciting children to adults. Others, like Stalin, preferred to combine external and internal aggression. But only the Chinese Communist Mao Zedong guessed to declare war on the birds ... and lose in it.
So, the end of the 1950s. Before the Chinese leader named Mao (yeah, Zedong is a name), it begins to reach that China, despite its size and population, is a poor and miserable country. Mao decides to arrange something like Stalin's industrialization, but with amendments to the Chinese mentality. It was planned for five years to increase the output of steel by ten (!) Times, the industry was to grow six times, and agriculture - by 250%. This was to become an epoch-making event, a "big leap" into the future. It has become, but not quite as planned by the Great Helmsman.
Actually, the events of the next few years look like a very long-standing cynical anecdote. Mao drove a hundred million people to smelting steel in the villages - the result was the production in huge quantities of low quality and therefore almost meaningless cast iron and a grandiose crisis with electricity (because coal needed for power plants was threatened as fuel for "village martins"), which led to Multibillion-dollar losses.
Further, Mao decided to reform agriculture - and decided to rely on the research of the infamous academician Lysenko. The result was already a little predictable, but Mao firmly decided to put his name in the world history of failures. Therefore, he takes a difficult decision from the point of view of common sense: to destroy all sparrows in China. Bonus, so that the sparrows are not bored during the genocide, Mao Zedong ordered to destroy mosquitoes, flies and rats. But the key blow took over the sparrows. On March 18, 1958, at the 8th Congress of the Communist Party of China, Mao reported that sparrows eats as much grain as 35 million people would have, and ordered the start of the passerine holocaust.
The order of the Great Helmsman is mandatory for execution. And tens of millions of Chinese people began to hunt naturally for sparrows. They were knocked down with sticks. They threw stones at them. They shot at him. They were hounded. But more often - to save resources - the Chinese raised sparrows in the air and started wildly screaming, hooting, and beating on pots with sticks, so that the sparrows were afraid to land and fell dead from overwork. The picture of screaming Chinese, on which passerine corpses fall from the sky, you can imagine yourself. If you have a developed imagination, you can ask him to finish a small artisanal open hearth furnace in the background ... ... At first it seemed that the sparrows were devastatingly losing. The count of dead birds went already naturally to billions, when nature struck back. It so happened that sparrows eat caterpillars and other suckling pigs. This very snag, without being eaten by sparrows, the world is their dust, began to guzzle itself - and to eat it began the Chinese planted fields. The caterpillars were superbly superimposed on droughts and floods, and these three riders of the Chinese apocalypse arranged what is now called the Great Chinese Famine. For two billion dead sparrows, nature has killed either 30 or 40 million Chinese. This figure is comparable to the entire population of present-day Ukraine. Sparrows successfully came out at least for a draw.
(In the article about the destruction of the sparrows "Wikipedia" after mentioning the number of the dead residents demonstrates the heights of black humor that are beyond my control, indicating that "thus, it has been proved by experience that the agrotechnical use of sparrows is substantially higher than the harm caused".
) As a result of the famine and the failure of the "Great Leap Forward" in all directions, these "reforms" were curtailed. Vorobiev had to be imported from the USSR and Canada, paying for them in currency. Mao did not calm down and proposed now to destroy bedbugs. Bedbugs in response offered to destroy the Communists, but due to the size of no one heard them, but in vain. You look, and the victims among normal people would be less.
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