Letter to the editor:

Tyrants responsible for world famines

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Patricia Hershwitzky, Las Vegas

Thursday, May 8, 2008 | 2:02 a.m.

In her Monday letter to the editor, Eileen Schenck asserts that “China remembers all too well the terrible famines” to bolster her position that overpopulation is straining the Earth.

There were far fewer people in the days of Genesis, when a God-centered Joseph so wisely prepared Pharaoh and his subjects for an impending, severe famine. Yet many thousands of years later, and despite quantum leaps in technology and transportation, we’ve witnessed the ghastly deaths of millions of people even given surpluses of food.

One does not have to look beyond China for the root cause. About 50 years ago, Chairman Mao determined that sparrows ate too much grain. In a subsequent campaign to eliminate these “pests,” the natural ecological system was so destabilized that a horrible famine followed.

No, it’s not the nearly 7 billion people who are causing starvation. It’s the excessive number of deadly tyrants and fools.