Comment on Is it me or is everyone in hexbear insane?
michaelmrose@lemmy.world 2 months agoMao 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policies of the Communists are what brought in sufficient numbers of tractors and other farming equipment to modernize outdated practices in rural regions.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.
michaelmrose@lemmy.world 2 months ago
It sounds like ANY state of any variety anywhere in the world any time in modern history could have ended famines and you are somehow ascribing the benefits of modern farming to communism.
SSJMarx@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Any state can, but many don’t. And the point here was to explain why I don’t believe that blaming famine deaths on Mao Zedong is a justified position to take, when the cycle of famine was ended under his watch.