[lacampbell]

It's interesting though how very well meaning utopian policies

The largest tragedy of the 21st century is that people still think these policies and these people were 'well-meaning' or 'it just went a bit wrong'. It seems that only when we defeat murderous totalitarians militarily that we understand them for what they are.

[dang]

Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. They're all the same, which makes them tedious and off topic, and they lead to flamewars, which we don't want.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[lacampbell]

What would an HN guidelines compliant post have looked like? Genuine question. This was an event that might have killed as many people as the holocaust, and someone said it was "well meaning". I thought I made a polite and non flamebaity response. Am I unable to disagree with that, or start a discussion about it? If I am, how would I do it?

[pvg]

You're misrepresenting the comment - they didn't call the event itself 'well-meaning', never said the policy itself went 'a little bit wrong'. Then you pile on with the "largest tragedy of the 21st century" bombast. This isn't polite disagreement over phrasing or substance and it's rude as fuck.

[commandlinefan]

> still think these policies and these people were 'well-meaning'

It’s awfully hard to imagine that Mao actually was hoping that people would die, and that they would die en masse of starvation: even if he was strictly self-serving and heartless, he must have known in the back of his mind that huge populations of starving people are unpredictable and difficult to govern. The only way I can picture this taking place is that he (like all dictators) successfully instilled such fear in his direct reports that they never gave him bad news or challenged what he thought sounded like good ideas at the time.

[AlanYx]

Mao had an awareness of what was going on. For example, like the Soviets during the Ukraine famine, Mao's government intentionally outlawed starvation being listed as a cause of death. He was also so utterly convinced of the correctness of his ideologically informed ideas about farming (e.g., he was under the spell of Lysenko's ideas about unproductively close spacing because crops of the same "class" would never compete with each other) that he would choose to blame failures on people's lack of purity for correctly following his ideas and on imagined conspiracies of deposed landlords.

However, what you're saying is also true; there are documented historical examples of local officials, terrified of Mao, setting up faked fields with scarce crops from the neighboring area being transplanted into a single field specifically to "impress" Mao during his visits and avoid his ire.

[Spooky23]

I wouldn't be so sure.

Mao was focused on re-imagining the state and purging old ways of thinking, governance, etc. The insanity of the cultural revolution is a testament to that.

[lacampbell]

How do we know?

Remember the Nazis were brought before an international court. The CCP never had a Nuremberg.

[lacampbell]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB4o5n2EGyA

Two times this video has been posted, and two times it's been flagged. Politician in center left UK party saying historys greatest mass murderer "did more good than harm".

[danharaj]

No famines were ever caused by western capitalist powers in any of their colonies or vassal states.

[rayiner]

It's useful to distinguish between deaths due to malevolence, neglect, and other factors. Capitalist countries have killed plenty of people through malevolence or neglect. The Bengal Famine if 1943, for example, was caused by a combination of overpopulation, British imposed inter-province trade restrictions, Japanese occupation of Burma, and diversion of shipping capacity by the British for WWII. It was not, however, caused by the means by which agricultural production was arranged in Bangladesh. (Which was more feudal than capitalist anyway.)

Socialist countries saw many deaths due to malevolence because it often took violent authoritarians to institute socialist governments in the first place. One can argue about whether those deaths should be held against "socialism" per se. But what's almost unique about socialism is how many deaths resulted even when the government was not acting malevolently or negligently. Tens of millions of people died in the Soviet Union and China not due to gulags and purges, but because socialism is a bad way to organize an economy. Socialist reforms of agricultural production, in particular, destroyed production.

Those deaths are squarely attributable to socialism per se. It's the result of removing market signals, distorting incentives, and replacing the capital-owning class who knows how to operate the economy, etc. What would happen to say Waymo if you replaced its investors and management with the folks who run the U.S. Digital Service along with "stakeholders" from among the employees and "local community?" You'd destroy it, because that's a terrible way to run a company. That's what socialist countries did with agriculture.

[danharaj]

Agricultural output recovered in both Russia and China after massive famine. In fact, there has not since been a famine in China since the last whereas in the century previous famine was commonplace. Is this the part where you say that those countries stopped organizing their agricultural activity in a "socialist" way and that's why they no longer had famines?

[qohen]

Is this the part where you say that those countries stopped organizing their agricultural activity in a "socialist" way and that's why they no longer had famines?

Yes, this is the part[0] and it's worth reading about it at length (I've added paragraph breaks).

The TL;DR, with a Hacker News spin: a small startup of entrepreneurial Chinese hackers working in stealth mode disrupted the existing socialist system of agriculture and changed everything :-)

In more detail:

In December 1978, eighteen of the local farmers, led by Yen Jingchang, met in the largest house in the village. They agreed to break the law at the time by signing a secret agreement to divide the land, a local People's Commune, into family plots. Each plot was to be worked by an individual family who would turn over some of what they grew to the government and the collective whilst at the same time agreeing that they could keep the surplus for themselves.

The villagers also agreed that should one of them be caught and sentenced to death that the other villagers would raise their children until they were eighteen years old. At the time, the villagers were worried that another famine might strike the village after a particularly bad harvest and more people might die of hunger.

After this secret capitalist reform, Xiaogang village produced a harvest that was larger than the previous five years combined. Per capita income in the village increase from 22 yuan to 400 yuan with grain output increasing to 90,000 kg in 1979.

This attracted significant attention from surrounding villages and before long the government in Beijing had found out. The villagers were fortunate in that at the time China had just changed leadership after Mao Zedong had died. The new leadership under Deng Xiaoping was looking for ways to reform China's economy and the discovery of Xiaogang's innovation was held up as a model to other villages across the country.

This led to the abandonment of collectivised farming across China and a large increase in agricultural production. The secret signing of the contract in Xiaogang is widely regarded as the beginning of the period of rapid economic growth and industrialisation that mainland China has experienced in the thirty years since.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiaogang,_Anhui

[danharaj]

Thank you for providing a citation.

[vkou]

The Irish potato famine, or the famines in India were absolutely caused by malevolence. You don't 'accidentally' have a famine in a country that is, in the middle of the famine, is a net exporter of food.

[Spooky23]

The Irish famine is in particular awful as the British wrapped themselves up in heart-wrenching moral concerns. They wouldn't want the poor Irish wretches becoming dependent on charity -- so what if the pig eats better than the farmer.

[rayiner]

I didn't say it wasn't caused by malevolence. But it wasn't caused by "capitalism" as an organizational structure for the economy. My point is simply that while capitalist countries often kill people through malevolence or negligence, socialist countries do both of those things, and are also uniquely adept at killing their own people by destroying previously functional production systems.

[s1artibartfast]

> we understand them for what they are.

Im not sure if I understand what you are trying to say they were. Are you claiming that Mao and Stalin were sadists? I think it is more plausible they were altruistically motivated (greater good, ect).