this is the funniest subreddit ever. The top two posts are about the deprogram sub, second one is the clutching pearls begging for it to be banned

https://www.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/146n2z4/rthedeprogram_must_be_banned_for_nearconstant/

  • kristina [she/her]
    ·
    1 year ago

    i mean this was during the same rough span of time as the dust bowl. agriculture was a shitshow back then

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      There were important differences. The dust bowl was largely localized. It covered a large area, but that area was in America, which is huge. The Dust Bowl was largely man made and didn't effect agriculture outside of that region. And the US had many other regions producing food, as well as significant agricultural mechanization.

      In the USSR there was a serious drought that affected most of Ukraine, Russia, and a few other republics. This was a very large part of the USSRs arable land. The USSR was dealing with various kinds of kulak sabotage - Refusing to plant, refusing to harvest. They were dealing with serious failures of communication, transport, and logistics, as well as government policies that were inadequate to provide needed relief until the famine was well underway and mass death had already occured. And their overall agricultural mechanization was not as good as some other industrialized countries.

    • blobjim [he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      They're not even in the same league in terms of harm though. But yeah it wasn't like "The West" was so amazing at agriculture.

      • kristina [she/her]
        ·
        1 year ago

        killed something like 10,000 directly as a modest estimate, and made 2 million homeless. the life expectancy of a modern homeless person is 48 years. i doubt they include those early deaths in statistics.

        • 420blazeit69 [he/him]
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          The low Wikipedia estimate I found for deaths during the Soviet famine of 1930–1933 is 5.7 million. Take a zero off that for localizing it to Ukraine, accounting for propaganda, and whatever else and we're still at 570,000. Take another zero off and we're still several times more than the low estimates for the Dust Bowl.

          You have a good point about early-modern agricultural technology and a bunch of contemporary ag crises being important context for the Soviet famine. A 1:1 comparison doesn’t hold water, though.

          For me, the big thing about the Soviet Famine (or the early famine in the PRC) is that it was the last famine. If a machine periodically breaks down, you take over maintenance of it then it breaks down once but never ever ever again, you fixed the machine.

        • blobjim [he/him]
          ·
          1 year ago

          I didn't realize it was even that many people. But yeah that "homeless" label is definitely hiding some bad stuff.

          • Frank [he/him, he/him]
            ·
            1 year ago

            My understanding is that there were few if any starvation deaths recorded. The US had enough other agricultural regions that with some serious government interventions they were able to keep people from starving to death, although there was a lot of serious hunger.