Which one was more insane?
I intentionally left out the obvious answer of “They were both really insane.” Too easy.
The Leap lead to famine, didn’t it?
I voted for the Great Leap Forward. Because while the Cultural Revolution was clearly crazy and killed millions of people and destroyed a lot of property, it was supposed to do those things. So at that level at least, it was a success. But the Great Leap Forward was crazy even by its own standards.
About thirty million people died.
The Leap. The Cultural Revolution was just another exercise in tried and tested depravity of humans. *
The Leap was pure insanity.
- Makes note to go reread For Whom the Bell Tolls, which isn’t that particularly bad, I didn’t real it until I was an adult and could picture being in the room with a mob outside the door ready to kill me with knives and rent The Killing Fields.