Talk:Liquidation (disambiguation)
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The meaning was probably taken from business usage, where it does not imply killing. It was borrowed by the Bolsheviks as a term for destroying hostile social groups. This might well involve killing some of them, but this was not the original meaning.
I remember reading a history of a Western teacher who stayed in China for several years after Mao took power. Saying how he and some of his fellow teachers had been 'liquidated' in the Communist sense, in that they no longer operated as they had, but we still alive and well. Intentional misinterpretation by anti-communist sources has been suggested but is hard to prove.
I haven't got that particular source, but I was able to confirm the ambiguity from the OED and also the Free Online Dictionary [1].
--GwydionM 19:11, 10 February 2006 (UTC)
