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by breppp 25 days ago
The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution are two such examples

Generally Communist nations historically favored technological development to human life in the scale of millions, keep that in mind when we enter a new economic revolution

1 comments

The Great Leap Forward wasn't "killing" people, which implies intent. It was just good old economic mismanagement.

On a related note, around 300k people die in the US every year due to causes directly attributable to poverty. [0]

In other words, ~a million every three years.

Now what?

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10111231/

On one side you have people starving because they are forced to grow food which is effectively stolen and sold to enrich the party. People killed fr starvation, or by the party if you didn’t contribute enough, ate some, stole some. So the deaths are the direct result of the CCP.

Vs a study which suggests 183-300k where you take the high end and seem to read about the vast range of causes of which a lot are not very much attributable to poverty.

And on the other side you have people dying because they are denied food, shelter and healthcare as a policy choice.

It's not that they can't be taken care of. It's just that it'd cost money and eat profit margins.

It's an active political and ideological choice to let them die, same in both cases. Just happens to be an ideology you agree with and feel a need to defend.

The 180k are currently poor people, the 300k people poor over the past 10 years (which includes the 180). Didn't take the larger number, took the one that more accurately applied.

Are you still talking about China? Where they are denied food, shelter, healthcare? Or do you accept the CCPs word over the word of the people who show videos of what reality is like in China?
I don't need to accept anyone's word, I've traveled both the US and China extensively.

I'm noticing you're trying really hard to deflect though.

I can tell you haven’t. I lived in China for 8 years.
> The Great Leap Forward wasn't "killing" people, which implies intent. It was just good old economic mismanagement.

If both the USSR and the CCP had millions killed in the process of modernization, without stopping when knowing the death toll, maybe there's intent after all?

How would you describe the cultural revolution then? another case of economic mismanagement?

I noticed you haven't addressed my main point at all. What are the millions dying of poverty every few years in the US (in a country with like a quarter of the population!), a death toll that still hasn't been stopped?

Is there intent there as well?

That study statistics seem questionable at best just so to say the US should have universal health care. A lack of policy is not the same as enacting a policy, especially one that is supposed to emulate past USSR actions which they knew at the time led to millions of dead. This makes it hard to say the CCP didn't know what would happen.

Later when it was found out mass starvation to the point of wide spread cannibalism was happening they would not stop, yet continue sending their troops to steal the peasant's food and execute anyone who resisted.

We also of course have Mao quoted as saying "Death has benefits; fertilizer is created", "Half of China may well have to die", as many other quotes showing they weren't really interested in the millions that will die.

This culminating in 30 million dead in 4 years, which if we take your study at face value will take the US 100 years to achieve through "poverty related deaths", which even communist utopias have.

Regarding the Cultural Revolution I assume you agree this was intentional murder of a million+, although you seemed to challenge that in my original posting. Our current discussion seem to focus on intent even though I said "killing" which usually does imply reduced intent.

Regarding the Great Leap Forward, I do believe the CCP would prefer no deaths, and a lot of the deaths relate to strongman idiotic ideas without challenge, as is endemic in ideological totalitarian societies. However, I believe they fully knew what they were going into, without taking into account the refusal to stop, and therefore these were horrendous crimes.