Comment on Is it me or is everyone in hexbear insane?
SSJMarx@lemm.ee 2 months agothe tens of millions of dead both, Stalin and Mao, were responsible for.
Oh no! Won’t somebody think of the Nazis and Japanese invaders?
Comment on Is it me or is everyone in hexbear insane?
SSJMarx@lemm.ee 2 months agothe tens of millions of dead both, Stalin and Mao, were responsible for.
Oh no! Won’t somebody think of the Nazis and Japanese invaders?
michaelmrose@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Stalin and Mao both killed a hell of a lot of their own people that is what they are referring to
SSJMarx@lemm.ee 2 months ago
The Kulaks and the Landlords deserved it.
michaelmrose@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Mao was responsible for the deaths of 30-50M in famine. Estimates of Stalins score from famine, execution, forced relocation, labor camps is more difficult to ascertain. Estimates range from 3 -20M. Whether you disagree with this estimate it is incredibly likely that the prior poster was referencing the 33M–70M who died in intolerable conditions not the nazis.
The fact that you justify the state getting in the systemic murder business for any cause is a fundamental difference between our understanding of what can ever be morally acceptable.
SSJMarx@lemm.ee 2 months ago
The fact that they don’t tell you in the average anticommunist pop history youtube video is that China had been experiencing famines pretty much every single year for a thousand years by the time the Communists took over. The last famines occurred under Communist rule, but it is because of Communist policies that the cyclical famines stopped. This applies to the USSR as well.
Yes we can look back and see that killing the sparrows was a bad idea, but on the whole collectivized farms produced more food per hectare than smallholder farms did, and the policies of the Communists are what brought in sufficient numbers of tractors and other farming equipment to modernize outdated practices in rural regions. Without the Communists the simple fact is that the famines would have happened anyway, they would have been worse, and their would have been more of them.
This is the reason why, even when you include the famine deaths in your data, the average lifespan under Mao doubled from what it had been when the Republic of China controlled the mainland. The Communists won the war precisely because they treated peasants better than the then-central government did, and when they took power they enacted policies that massively improved the lives of everyone in China, and still continue to do so.