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It's even infecting the wider lemmy network!
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this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2025
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Wasn't the great leap forward by Mao the biggest mass murder in world history, according to historians not governments?
Doesn't whitewashing that amount to Holocaust denial level cultural blindness?
I know nothing, quick Google search.
Do you understand the difference between causing a famine unintentionally and doing mass murder?
-Mao, probably
PS: 15 million is the low end number. 15-55 million is the commonly accepted number, with some estimates as high as 70 million.
At some point you'd think he'd look around and notice.
Lol what's your source on this, the black book? Also do you think Mao was like the king of China or?
So you think Mao decided starving his own people benefited him? Why?
I'm sorry, but why would that matter? We tend to judge people by their actions, not their intent, when it comes to mass deaths.
Right?
Right?
It matter for the same reason a tribunal need to know the motive of a crime to give it appropriate punishment. It's not about the morality of the action, it's about a logically sound and coherent picture of the event.
Peoples doing something bad for terribly bad reasons is coherent, peoples doing something bad for no reason at all isn't. The fact that you don't have any explanation as to why an entire government composed of thousand of peoples would do such a thing -like it or not- is a very big hole in your narrative, and rise some serious questions about it's consistency and therefore about it's likelihood (because an incoherent statement can never be true no matter what).
Insisting that the event happened the way you say it did without providing any rational or cause-effect relationship and becoming defensive when explicitly asked to provide one puts both your narrative and your argumentation in it's favor in the same category as those of conspiracy theorists who insists that "they" lie to us and immediately gets mad when asked to explain why "they" would.
You're talking about narrative, spin a story about tribunal, and then spin a story that I'm defensive. I'm not.
Literally what the first commenter gave - there was a widespread famine in China, it's caused by Mao agricultural policies.
What are you contesting here? There was no famine? Famine is the narrative? Or that it wasn't caused by policies but by... What? Weather? Weather was good.
I don't understand your point, please clarify it, in a way that isn't just calling your interlocutors stupid or defensive.
Maybe it's my autism but dismissing a relevant question by implying that the person who asked it is immoral/unempathetic for even asking it seems pretty defensive to me, and is a non-argument regardless.
Now that one is on me, I could have worded that better. By cause-effect relationship in this context I meant the cause who's effect was that the government chose to take whatever course of action you believe is responsible for the famine. Peoples take decisions for reasons, bad reasons sometimes, yes, but reasons nonetheless.
It's not about agreeing with the reasons, it's about coherency. That an entire government, a group formed of thousands of peoples, would act all in concert with no motive, especially for a project on such a large scale and which would take so many resources, is nonsense. If you can't present either proof that they really took the conscious decision to manufacture a famine or a motive to explain why they would want to do that, the claim that the famine was intentional is extremely dubious at best.
Also, speaking of a government's actions as if only the one person at the top was to blame is something peoples trying to speak about politics and history seriously should avoid.
There was a famine. But it was not man made with the purpose of killing a large portion of the population, again, as the other commenter pointed out, why would they do such a thing? And why did they stop doing it? It makes no sense.
The famine was the produce of a great number of different factors, inefficient and backward agricultural methods, bad weather, compound effects of WW2 + the Chinese civil war, mismanagement, trade embargoes, etc... But others could explain it better than I can.
An other point we disagree on is the number of deaths from the famine. Numerous western academics intentionally inflate the death tolls of countries ruled by communist parties, most infamously "the black book of communism" and the "victims of communism foundation" who literally count Nazi invaders killed by the red army and peoples who could potentially have been born but weren't as victims of communism.
I called you defensive but I did not call you stupid, nor did I imply it.
Would the governing body of PRC in 1962 attributing the famine to government errors convince you otherwise? Would the Chinese government 20 years later confirming the same convince you?
If not, can you imagine a fact that would convince you, that the responsibility for that famine is on the then Chinese government? What is it?
I'm not sure where you're going with this. That the famine was accidental and (in part) caused by bad policies and mismanagement is what I'm saying happened. You're agreeing with me there.
If you think the famine was accidental but the government's bad policies caused it/made it worse, I already agree.
If you think that the famine was intentional and the government was trying to kill peoples by starvation, I would need proof that they at least discussed it internally in order to be convinced. Leaked internal documents, testimony from peoples who were there (and can prove that they were), recording of meetings between party officials, that kind of things.
I'm splitting this to a separate comment because it's a different topic.
Who said that it was intentionally made famine with the goal of killing people? And where?
Are you hung on the original commenter calling it "mass murder" and your point is that it wasn't premeditated?
That's the "mainstream" narrative so I assumed it was what you were arguing, sorry if it wasn't.
Essentially. Yes.
In short, no, that was cold war propaganda. These intro articles get into some of the details of the Mao era:
I could find books that say the Nazis are great guys too. Doesn't make it right.
Getting people to read even short articles is impossible.
Just be honest with yourself any say that you're not looking to challenge your orientalist biases, that you just want things to confirm them.
The communists were the ones who defeated fascism in ww2, Mao being one of the most important leaders in that fight against japanese fascism. To equate Mao with nazis or the axis powers, who they shed so much blood to defeat, is sickening.
And you are impartial, saying someone you do not know has an "orientalist" bias. Throwing out pejorative words, linking to lengthy fringe arguments like a Trump supporter telling me to watch Hannity.
I see you're defending your heroes by parsing words and cherry-picking books and news and rallying your arguments (and propaganda) to defend them. I expected nothing less from you; it's exactly the same thing a Trump supporter would do.
Carry on, comrade. Enjoy yourself. You have the evangelistic fervor of a Baptist preacher.
The People’s Republic of China oversaw the largest increase of quality of life in human history, and the previously mentioned famine would be the last in a region where they have frequently occurred throughout history.
The PRC’s legacy is not one of causing famine, it is of ending it.
everyone knows that china was perfectly alright before the communists came, no one died of hunger and no one was addicted to opium, also no one died by the hands of the japanese nor it was occupied by other western powers.
That's a bold statement, what's your source?
That covers recent history. What about Egypt, or the Roman Empire?
You didn't mean increase in quality of life for everyone in the world, just for the people under that government?
There's a lot of candidates in "human history".
I'm pretty sure there was no comparative research involved in your assessment, but you might look at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_of_life but there's no mention of China there at all.
Probably because Wikipedia is orientalist and just a Western megaphone. But you quoted them, so maybe not.
I see. You’re just wasting our time playing knee-jerk contrarian.
Great, discussion over.
If you have to go back to the time where agriculture was first being developed to find a jump in quality of life comparable to what Communism brought to China, does that not show that Communism brought about an enormous improvement to the Chinese people? Even if it technically isn't the most significant improvement in all of history (which is still kind of a fuzzy thing to quantify)?
And how is it relevant that they only improved the quality of life of their own people, beyond just being pedantic about the claim "largest increase of quality of life in human history"? Like, was it necessary for Mao to invade all the neighboring countries and modernize them too so they could qualify? Very strange way to move the goalposts.
Meanwhile you do something a million times more honorable and simply refuse to confront new information, dismiss it all as propaganda, and say your opponent is equal to a Trump supporter (for what? for having principled stances that he backed up with multiple sources? How often do Trump supporters back up their claims with sources that aren't PragerU videos or AI generated images?). You're implying that Dessalines is being intellectually dishonest when he has done nothing incorrect in this conversation: he made a claim to counter your unsourced claim, cited his sources, and when you refused to learn anything at all he's just calling you out for falling back on Western propaganda. Is any of that wrong?
This kind of post-truth nihilism is completely fruitless. If you dismiss evidence that contradicts your preconceived notions on the basis that evidence against other unrelated facts might also exist, then the only valid beliefs are the ones you already have. You've arrived at an epistemological position that rejects all new knowledge and positions all knowledge you already have as infallible.
Why not evaluate the claims and their evidence, instead of starting from the position that any defense of Mao is comparable to defending the Nazi Holocaust? Not to mention, if you did come across a group of Holocaust deniers, is this really the weak response you'd give them? Not even going to produce any evidence in support of your own claims?
lol we know, you don't have to tell us.
Yeah lots of people died but the cultural revolution and Great Leap Forward but it has been over for 50 years now, meanwhile how many millions of people have had their lives ruined by US sanctions or wars in the last 70 years? Imperial countries export their misery so that people like you and me can live nice comfortable lives. Meanwhile we point at other countries who were deliberately impoverished for our benefit. When leaders in those countries try to take back their wealth they’re assassinated, when trade unionists try to organise to give the workers better rights they’re tortured and then assassinated. At least the Great Leap Forward only negatively impacted Chinese people, meanwhile you get to sit smugly on your computer or phone and eat your chocolate bar that was built or farmed with the blood of poor labourers in Africa and when those poor people try to rise up to better their conditions our governments and their fascist lackeys will be there in minutes killing them for you so you can keep getting cheap treats.
Also do you really think there is no political repression in the west? I recently read the obituary of a guy who was in my local communist party who was denied work his whole life because he was an „unteachable communist“ being on the wrong side of the ruling classes ideology sucks no matter where you are.