submitted 5 months ago by Confidant6198@lemmy.ml to c/memes@lemmy.ml

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[-] yogthos@lemmy.ml 7 points 5 months ago

Millions of people died in China during the Great Leap, with estimates ranging from 15 to 55 million, making the Great Chinese Famine the largest or second-largest famine in human history

Meanwhile in the real world https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25495509/

Inability to consider context must be a quintessentially American mental characteristic.

conservative estimates, Stalin was responsible for the deaths of at least 7 million people, or about 4.2% of USSRs total population.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1478210316676002

Meanwhile, American settlers massacred so many native inhabitants that it cooled down the climate https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47063973

Then of course, capitalism also brought us such wonders as the African slave trade.

And then we have all the atrocities US regime has been committing around the globe, killing countless millions in the name of capitalism

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/the-indonesia-documents-and-the-us-agenda/543534/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jakarta_Method

https://gsp.yale.edu/sites/default/files/walrus_cambodiabombing_oct06.pdf

This is what happens when people get all their education from wikipedia instead of having any actual understanding of the subject.

[-] deranger@sh.itjust.works 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

All those sources you posted don’t refute what you quoted from the other comment. Seems like a “not as bad as” logical fallacy at play. The other poster didn’t say the US was without fault; even though the US has killed many people doesn’t make the actions of those other regimes any less bad.

[-] yogthos@lemmy.ml 6 points 5 months ago

The sources I posted are meant to provide context. And what they show is that when you consider what things were like before, communism actually improved lives in a tangible way. While bad things certainly have happened in communist societies, as they do in every human society, overall trajectory is positive. Meanwhile, the atrocities committed in the name of capitalism, and by US in particular, eclipse anything that has happened under communism. US is a blight upon humanity and has brutally repressed progress in every corner of the world.

[-] deranger@sh.itjust.works 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

[removed by mod]

[-] yogthos@lemmy.ml 6 points 5 months ago

It's literally about the question of what types of outcomes each system produces in the long run. And yes, the lives of Ukrainians were massively improved after the revolution.

USSR provided free education to all citizens resulting in literacy rising from 33% to 99.9%:

USSR doubled life expectancy in just 20 years. A newborn child in 1926-27 had a life expectancy of 44.4 years, up from 32.3 years thirty years before. In 1958-59 the life expectancy for newborns went up to 68.6 years. the Semashko system of the USSR increased lifespan by 50% in 20 years. By the 1960's, lifespans in the USSR were comparable to those in the USA:

Quality of nutrition improved after the Soviet revolution, and the last time USSR had a famine was in 1940s. CIA data suggests they ate just as much as Americans after WW2 peroid while having better nutrition:

Meanwhile, let's look at the whole holodomor narrative of yours from a perspective of an actual historian who studied it. During the 1932 famine, the USSR sent aid to affected regions in an attempt to alleviate the famine. According to Mark Tauger in his article, The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933:

While the leadership did not stop exports, they did try to alleviate the famine. A 25 February 1933 Central Committee decree allotted seed loans of 320,000 tons to Ukraine and 240,000 tons to the northern Caucasus. Seed loans were also made to the Lower Volga and may have been made to other regions as well. Kul'chyts'kyy cites Ukrainian party archives showing that total aid to Ukraine by April 1933 actually exceeded 560,000 tons, including more than 80,000 tons of food

Some bring up massive grain exports during the famine to show that the Soviet Union exported food while Ukraine starved. This is fallacious for a number of reasons, but most importantly of all the amount of aid that was sent to Ukraine alone actually exceeded the amount that was exported at the time.

Aid to Ukraine alone was 60 percent greater than the amount exported during the same period. Total aid to famine regions was more than double exports for the first half of 1933.

According to Tauger, the reason why more aid was not provided was because of the low harvest

It appears to have been another consequence of the low 1932 harvest that more aid was not provided: After the low 1931, 1934, and 1936 harvests procured grain was transferred back to peasants at the expense of exports.

Tauger is not a communist, and ultimately this specific article takes the view that the low harvest was caused by collectivization (he factors in the natural causes of the famine in later articles, based on how he completely neglects to mention weather in this article at all its clear that his position shifted over the years). However, its interesting to see that the Soviets really did try to alleviate the famine as best as they could.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2500600

On top of that, the famine was exacerbated by the fact that kulaks slaughtered livestock rather letting it be collectivized https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulak#Dekulakization

The reality is that famines were common in Tsarist times, and they were a major drive for the revolution in the first place. After the revolution, lives improved dramatically and famines stopped.