https://hexbear.net/comment/3769474

  • GBU_28@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    The dude killed 50mil plus of his own people, via his idiocy. He can't take credit for life expectancy and not take blame for the needless deaths.

    Clearly we disagree but I think one invalidates the other.

    As reference, consider this source

    https://www.statista.com/statistics/1302736/global-life-expectancy-by-region-country-historical/

    China's rise is obviously a good thing, but is similar to many other nations.

    • Awoo [she/her]
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      1 year ago

      You're missing the point. Life expectancy doesn't go up unless you're better than what came before. The point is that even with his mistakes, the people before him were killing far far more.

      The issue is that you look at these things and never compare to what came before. You look at them in a vacuum. You have no concept of what development over time is, what process is involved with improving and developing a country. You isolate these events and strip them of their historical context for the purposes of misunderstanding them and miseducating others.

      • Egon
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        1 month ago

        deleted by creator

      • PosadistInevitablity [he/him]
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        1 year ago

        Awoo, they are literally incapable of seeing that point.

        You're completely right - an increase of life expectancy even in the face of that famine means that the human suffering would have been FAR WORSE without the communists, but it would NEVER have been discussed as a point against Capitalism.

        • Awoo [she/her]
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          1 year ago

          I know that but you never know who's here lurking, listening, and learning. We were at 500 average users per day a week ago and we're at 650 right now, this federation stuff has caused many new people to find us and I am certain that a lot of them are in the learning phase.

      • GBU_28@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        You defend authoritarian leaders of your favorite flavor, I say fuck em all.

        • Awoo [she/her]
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          1 year ago

          You don't say fuck em all though. You specifically focus upon communist leaders while ignoring that communists are responsible for undoing the horrible exploitation that liberal leaders were doing. You ignore the vast improvements communists consistently bring, and use their past mistakes to argue against communists wanting to bring further improvements to existing society.

          We on the other hand recognise that communists by and large brought improvement to the societies they succeeded in, and we understand that by and large communists would bring improvement to the societies of today. Will they be perfect? Fuck no. We're not utopians. But it is incredibly easy to improve people's lives by taking all the resources currently being exploited out of people and into the pockets of Musk and the rest of the bourgeoisie and instead putting it to use improving the lives of the people.

          You have built your identity around upholding the status quo rather than improving people's lives, and that is why you spend the majority of your time focused on judging communists as bad in historical isolation devoid of context, rather than liberals being bad. You defend and uphold liberal exploitation.

        • emizeko [they/them]
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          1 year ago

          Many westerners come to socialism not out of necessity, but out of disillusionment. We are raised with the idea that Liberal Democracy is the best system of political expression humanity has devised. When confronted with the reality of its shortcomings, rather than narrowly discard liberalism or electoralism, the western anti-capitalist tends to draw sweeping conclusions about the inadequacy of all existing systems. Curiously, though it would at first seem that such denunciations are more principled and severe, they are in fact more compatible with existing and widespread beliefs about the supremacy of the western system. That is to say, when a Marxist-Leninist asserts the superiority of existing socialist experiments, they are directly challenging the idea that westerners are at the forefront of political development. By contrast, the assertions [...] that we need to build a more utopian future out of our current apex are compatible not only with each other, as discussed earlier, but also do not really offend bourgeois society at large. They in fact end up not sounding too different from the arch-imperialist Winston Churchill holding forth on how ours is the worst system, except for all the others which have been tried. Western chauvinists, consciously or unconsciously, struggle with the idea that they should study and humbly take lessons from the imperial periphery. [15] It is much easier for the chauvinist, psychologically, to position oneself as at the very front of a new vanguard.

          from https://redsails.org/why-marxism/

        • Mindfury [he/him]
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          1 year ago

          yet to see you say fuck em about any genocidal authoritarian cappies so far

          • GBU_28@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            As in capitalists?

            Im not discussing economic styles, I'm discussing genocide, nation states, etc.

            But if you need the magic words to finish or whatever fuck Henry Ford he was a Nazi

        • Egon
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          1 month ago

          deleted by creator

        • brain_in_a_box [he/him]
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          1 year ago

          "I say fuck em all (but I will do extensive mental gymnastics to justify why genocidal fascists are better than communists)

    • invalidusernamelol [he/him]
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      1 year ago

      50m+ is highly disputed. The numbers range anywhere from 10-30m excess deaths in a 3 year time period. With some of those metrics counting the inverted birthrate towards death.

      This is nothing out of the ordinary for developing nations, famine caused by mismanagement of agricultural land during industrialization happened in the US too, the dust bowl was a direct result of poor agricultural planning. The USSR experienced this as well, and India experienced it repeatedly.

      Though India is the odd one out with the British famine protocols to basically allow mass death to keep grain prices steady. When they became a Republic they continued to experience famine for decades while China and Russia only had the one. Same as the US. Because all those countries had independence and were able to alter course and change policy to prevent it from happening again. While colonial nations and neo-colonial states were still being ruled under the old British famine laws.

      Industrialization is a terrible thing to go through, and the pre-socialist states that attempted it took a century or more to build up their productive capacity and the whole time we're going through constant famine as laboring power was shifting from agriculture to industry and development was eating up farmland.

      The fact that China and Russia made it through that stage in under 50 years is a testament to the power of central planning.

      • Egon
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        1 month ago

        deleted by creator

        • invalidusernamelol [he/him]
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          1 year ago

          Oops forgot that time the British starved, as this user would call them, "their own people".

          • PosadistInevitablity [he/him]
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            1 year ago

            The British would NEVER consider those their own people. So they get a pass!

            Not a horrific intentional genocide, nope! shrug-outta-hecks

          • Egon
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            1 month ago

            deleted by creator

            • invalidusernamelol [he/him]
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              1 year ago

              I actually kinda agree with them that mismanagement of agricultural policy and intentional starving of colonial subjects for profit are two different things.

              One is (or was) an inevitability of the transition from subsistence/feudal society to industrial society as the agricultural output failed to keep up with the outflow of agricultural labor to industrial labor. Usually bolstered by collapses in grain trade between more established markets in developing nations.

              The other is genocide.

              • Egon
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                1 month ago

                deleted by creator

                • invalidusernamelol [he/him]
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                  1 year ago

                  The genocide was to prevent famine within the imperial core. The grain shortages were more pronounced in England so their solution was to starve their subjects to protect the profitable labor within England itself.

                  Even worse was that there was shortage, but at any given point there was enough grain to prevent famin. But distributing that grain would destabilize the grain price and throw the imperial financial markets into chaos as grain was meant to be a stable investment.

                  So millions die to protect the line. Nothing ever changes.

                  • Egon
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                    1 month ago

                    deleted by creator

                    • invalidusernamelol [he/him]
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                      1 year ago

                      Yeah, because the was a shortage, but they need to keep grain price stable. If they didn't stockpile and allowed India to keep all the grain they needed to avert famine there would have been starvation in England.

                      • Egon
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                        1 month ago

                        deleted by creator

                        • invalidusernamelol [he/him]
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                          1 year ago

                          I'm no big historian in this topic, but I know that British policy was based on Smith's idea that grain prices need to remain stable. Which is why they stockpiled during famine in the periphery.

    • Awoo [she/her]
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      1 year ago

      Stop editing your fucking comments after I've responded already

    • GarbageShoot [he/him]
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      1 year ago

      An Indian historian on the Great Famine in China: She wrote in an essay that "[t]he figure of 30 million has passed into popular folklore ... The fact that 19 million of them never existed because they were never born in the first place is not conveyed by the formulation." She criticized the equating of China's "missing millions" with famine deaths, rather than people who were never born due to declining birth rates. Also she claimed that "Because the internal political developments in China after 1978 were in the direction of attacking Maoist egalitarianism and the commune system, no repudiation from Chinese sources of the US estimates are to be seen". Patnaik concluded that the figures were ideologically derived in attempts to discredit communism, while similar excessive deaths in 1990s Russia, following the collapse of the USSR, were routinely ignored.

    • PosadistInevitablity [he/him]
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      1 year ago

      The CIA literally carry out operations in Communist countries to cause famines. This is all public record, they've admitted it openly.

      Spreading animal and plant diseases into the agricultural system solely to hurt people that dare to break away from Capitalism.

      Why would that be necessary if Communists = no food?

    • robinn2
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      1 year ago

      deleted by creator