westerners making fun of lysenkoism as if the west wasn't neck-deep in eugenics at the time
Yeah say what you will, but dialectical materialism at worst tolerates pseudo-science such as Lysenkoism, but it never allowed for the wholesale adoption of social darwinism and eugenics that capitalist nations with no coherent philosophy of science had informing their murderous and genocidal policy.
Eugenics and racial science weren't so much real ideas as much as rationalisations for something they were already wanting to do.
For instance prior to European colonial inroads into the far east the Chinese were considered white
:this:
The role Law, International Relations, Political Science and Economics (etc) serve today is the same that Anthropology and Phrenology (etc) served in the past.
The fucking weird thing about Lysenkoism was that it was ridiculous and unscientific, but it never precipitated a catastrophic failure. In fact the years of Lysenkoism saw productive increases, which just goes to show how extremely far behind the starting point of the Soviet Union was. They could adopt and enforce statewide pseudoscience and still do better than they were.
I'm convinced that communal farms didn't fully adopt Lysenkoism because the farmers weren't idiots. I know in China they'd bundle up wheat and pretend like it grew that way when the inspections happened.
I'm also sure a lot of the people who were supposed to enforce it saw that it wasn't working and just stopped enforcing it because it would mean they'd also go hungry.
No one obeys laws like that
Here's an article that talks about economic output of the Communes
I can't remember which article had the factoid about walking on top of the grain. I went down a bit if a rabbit hole a year ago and remember reading it. Those sources should be enough to show that even if Lysenkoism was being practiced, it wasn't having a serious effect on crop output and the greater factors were improved water/irrigation systems.
The communes kinda sucked for reasons beyond what you usually read about, mainly weird pay tiers and poor infrastructure. Those problems seem to have been fixed now though and they're much less insane today.
Edit: the numerical evidence for the false reporting would be the difference between the initial and later reports (~350million Ton -> ~250million Ton) there was still a net productivity increase through collectivization, but not as drastic as expected. That would point to the investigators just saying that the output was what the Lysenkoists expected when it was more closely aligned with output of traditional farming methods.
His biggest impact on Soviey agriculture was promoting vernalization (which is tricking autumn seed to growing in the spring by cooling them), which is a real phenomenon and useful in some cases like when you have a harsh winter. His claim that it could double crop yields however was very false. Most of his really kooky beliefs couldn't really be put into mass use. Like his real crime was stopping a lot of useful agricultural research for a decade.
Aw.
After the first sentence I got really excited thinking you'd found an unironic 2021 Lysenkoist.
This is all the insanity with none of the fun.
I'm just here like, gimme ubi I don't care about stalin or mao.
If there's no evidence it's because they covered it up, if there's evidence to the contrary they made it up, I win!
You can make up any story about one of The Bad Countries, and as long as it's not blatantly in the realm of fiction (e.g., space werewolves secretly control Iran) a significant majority of Americans will at least think it's plausible. I don't know if this is more of a human thing than an American thing, but it's definitely a factor in the United States.
What this means is that the road to anti-imperialism (not just opposition to one particular act of imperialism) -- for most Americans -- will run through some form of leftism or not at all. You can get a non-leftist to nod along to a lot of anti-imperialism, but they'll readily backslide the moment a "China bad" or "Iran bad" story hits. The stumbling block is that non-leftists don't believe the vast bulk of the U.S. government is capable of being comprehensively, totally in the wrong on purpose. They're constantly looking for some excuse to say that we were at least partially justified in this particular act of imperialism, or they're looking for some internal U.S. boogeyman that can be removed to fix the problem. They see U.S. empire as a machine that can be fixed, not a machine designed for a terrible purpose that's working as intended.
The way to get past this stumbling block is to get them on board with leftist solutions to domestic problems; problems they actually know and care about, where their personal experience insulates them from buying into outlandish propaganda. Make them a leftist on domestic issues and it'll be far easier to make them an anti-imperialist on foreign issues.
Can't believe we have space werewolf-deniers on hexbear.net. This place is becoming overrun with tankies.
I actually do have a hunch that the USSR's adoption of Lysenkoism and rejection of genetics was at least in part an overreaction to things like phrenology, racist biology, social darwinism etc being so common within western science back then. It probably seemed very obvious to reject science that, at the time, had a huge focus on determining which racial categories had the purest blood. Probably a lot easier to reject it when your country is full of the very people who had been deemed genetically inferior.
Does anyone know more about this or am I completely wrong
My understanding was that Stalin was incredibly in love with his first wife and her untimely death was one of the things that made him colder and less empathetic towards others
That and using violence to solve problems / being exposed to violence lowers your threshold for violence and makes it a solution you think of more easily
They used pseudo-science as a cover under which to commit genocide[edit: allegedly. I know it wasn't a genocide.], as opposed to america, who uses genocide to justify pseudo-science.
This is literally just a "they were the same as the Nazis" argument this person is making.
