I’ve been called all sorts of names just for asking for real evidence instead of flimsy suggestive bullshit. It took SO much pressing to get anything at all on the Ukrainian Nazi line they love so much, and I got SO much hostility for it.
Eh, I’ve seen enough to agree that some elements within Ukraine and the Ukrainian military are using Nazi-associated symbols. But then again, so are some of the people invading Ukraine. And I don’t really begrudge Ukraine for thinking that repelling an ongoing invasion and occupation is a more urgent problem than a few Nazi nutjobs on their own side. (Honestly, you’d be hard-pressed to find any military anywhere that doesn’t have Nazi nutjobs in it. Military service is very attractive to that type of person.)
Propaganda will do that. I’ve never met a single communist who denied that there was a major famine in China. The problem is that liberals seem to think Mao invented famine, when in fact China was experiencing famines every 2 to 4 years for over a century by the time the communists came to power. They had a theory for how to address the cycle of famines and increase food surplus, and their theory failed. But liberals think that Mao deliberately killed millions of people because he was an evil dictator instead of acknowledging the reality that Mao was leader of a massive government and they all failed as an organization by producing the conditions for famine. The context is also lost that eventually the Chinese revolution did end the cycle of famines permanently, and they were trying to solve it without any help from Western agriculture because the West was too busy protecting the fascist dictator that was holed up in Taiwan who was actively mass murdering and imprisoning political dissidents.
The Holodomor is another one of those things propaganda skews and breaks our ability to agree to a shared reality on. I have never met a single communist that denies that there was a famine and that many people died. What they often cite, which liberals can’t reconcile, is that the famine affected many more populations than just the people who were supposedly targeted and that research into the incident shows that the crop yield was severely negatively impacted by weather and made worse by not just bad decision making but also bad decision making that was in part driven by punitive thinking. The famine happened, but propaganda would have us believe that the famine was unquestionably a deliberate attempt at ethnic cleansing or genocide, when the evidence seems to be far more in support of a natural famine made worse by poor management with an added dose of maliciousness that ultimately rolls up to bad management.
In contrast, you don’t seem to have any problem with most Westerners having never even heard of the famines that were in fact deliberately caused by the West and for which the only explanation is the active choice of making a colonized population suffer.
Seriously. Was Holodomor a deliberate genocide? This is the hill you’re going to die on? Yes, the famine affected a lot of people, but we all know which people were least affected and it wasn’t the Ukrainians who were trying to actually grow the food. Much like the Irish Famine was only a tragic genocide because the British overlords wouldn’t put up with reducing their own take. The blight was real, but the decimation was pure unjustified cruelty.
I’m a leftist, but I’m an honest one. We gain nothing by denying the past and refusing to learn from it. It does a disservice to us all to hide the fact that old ethnic and cultural violence behind a window dressing of systemic failure. Systemic bigotry is still bigotry.
The kazhaks lost more people per capita than Ukraine did. Major non-Ukrainian Russian populations centers suffered equally or very nearly as much as Ukraine did.
So you may think you’re an honest leftist, but you might not be. As an honest leftist myself, I recognize that the Soviet government made tragic decisions, many of them punitive, none of them directed at ethnic cleansing, because the Soviet Union did not have an analysis that included specific ethnicities being material to their political goals as ethnicities. They understood, documented, wrote about, discussed, debated, legislated, and enforced the exact opposite of ethnic cleansing constantly. Yes, Ukranian suffered a lot through the transition to collectivized agriculture, more than most. But that’s because the majority of Ukranian peasants were freeholders of land, whereas the majority of Russian peasants were serfs. As freeholders, they would lose their claim to their farms. Serfs would suffer no such loss. This was structural. Russian peasants weren’t targeted for collectivization because under the Tsar they were already collectivized, whereas Ukranian peasants had private ownership of the land they worked.
Collectivization was not ethnic cleansing, the famine was not ethnically targeted, and the punitive actions of the Soviet Union were not ethnically motivated by an ethnic strategy of ethnic supremacy.
That’s honesty. Honesty is doing the reading, doing the research, and not discarding all the evidence that contradicts the obviously contrived narrative. Yes there was a famine. Yes it killed more Ukranians in absolute numbers. Yes the Soviet leadership made deliberate decisions that were intended to punish people who were Ukranians. No it wasn’t because they were Ukranian, no it wasn’t because the Soviet leadership thought that ethnic cleansing would achieve their intended goals, no it’s not because the Soviet leadership decided to artificially starve all of those people out of malice or ethnic supremacy.
Yes and proportionally the Romani were murdered by the Nazis at a higher rate than the Jews, but we don’t think of it as the Romani Holocaust. The Russians used a cannon to swat flies and murdered millions and you’re going to carry water for them based on official rationalizations? You sound like an American trying to justify racial red-lining.
Why don’t you take a knee and admit you don’t understand the situation and the context. At the end of the day, Soviet institutions were run by people, people with conditioned biases and baggage. I might have some sympathy for their ideological goals, but I will not overlook their atrocities. The Russians were ruled by monsters then, just like they are ruled by monsters now and the window dressing of their official ideology makes little difference.
Do you have a link to tankies denying there was an unwanted famine?
Holodomor was an unwanted famine that was redurected (food taken from farmers). Later wider famines were made worse mostly by Lysenkoism. A con-job which effected Russia and China.
Yet Communism is compared to Nazi? That’s what’s ridiculous liberal/right propaganda.
What happened is much more forgivable (although still regrettable) than what say the millions killed by the East India companies through intentional famines under Capitalism (done for profit), or the hundreds of millions in war dead from Capitalism in the past 30 years.
That’s much more recent, but some redirected famine from the 1930s keeps coming up when talk of Socialism makes wealthy liberals a little too uncomfortable.
What is an “unwanted famine”? Nobody wanted a famine. Lysenko was wrong, and the government backed him because they didn’t know he was wrong. It was a mistake, not a deliberate strategem to harm people.
Both the Holodomor and Chinese famine were caused by politicians that ignore actual agrarian science from actual farmers with actual farming experience. The bad yield was caused precisely by this ignoring of proven science. And the Holodomor had been especially bad for Ukraine because it was the USSR’s bread basket because the Soviet authorities extracted as much food as possible, mirroring the Great Famine in Ireland when the British imperialists exported food from Ireland despite the massive starvation.
The Chinese failure of agriculture was under embargo from the West’s proven science and supply chains. They were forced to come up with their own solutions from scratch from a starting position that was far far behind the rest of the world.
Lysenko was operating in a world where the West had developed the theory of the gene but not yet proven the gene existed and the West immediately developed it into eugenics from its racist tyrannical fascist politics, and Lysenko and the politicians were reacting to that. While Europeans were going around saying “genetics is real therefore we should kill all the poors and the browns before they taint our bloodline”, the Soviets were saying “if we improve social conditions then people will heal for generations to come”.
I know we are literally awash in comic book level propaganda where the evil Soviets were dastardly lying to everyone for power and control, but if you actually read the history, the narratives we have been fed start to look a lot like outright lies.
100% if they had followed the science they would have done better, but science is not apolitical, research on heredity especially so, and without any molecular basis for the theory of genetics, it looks a lot like master race politics.
Farmer knowledge and know how wasn’t embargoed by the West. Lysenko and Mao were just idiots who didn’t listen to experts despite warnings. Also, people already knew about genetic inheritance long before the 20th century, even if DNA wasn’t discovered yet. You are just white washing the truth.
Yes, argicultural technology was absolutely embargoed from China by the West. What world do you live in? The Foreign Assets Control Act was relatively comprehensive and then a year later the “UN” adopted a total collective embargo.
It wasn’t embargoed from the USSR. But that was before the Green Revolution anyway. Everyone in the world was heavily subject to crop failures, like the 50% crop failure in the US Dust Bowl in the 30s. It’s not like there was a known good recipe to solving famine cycles during the first 2 decades of the Russian revolution.
The idea that Mao was an idiot is neither borne by the evidence nor useful as an explanation. He was clearly effective for long periods of time for highly complex problem spaces. But he made a similar class of mistakes to the mistakes that the USSR did in agriculture. Mistakes that they eventually corrected.
Oh embargo, the usual scapegoat for the inherent failure of tankie policies. The collectivisation which removed experienced farmers to work on lands, along with Lysenko’s deliberate ignoring of established agricultural science in exchange to his whatever supposedly science he conjured up with, led to the worst famine since the Irish Famine. Mao was told not to order to kill sparrows because they hunt rats and locusts, pests that have worse effect on agriculture.
I stopped replying to one of them when they denied the holodomor or the chinese famine.
Its quite disheartening that we can’t even agree on a common reality.
Ah so about the ‘hOlOdOmOr’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kaaYvauNho&pp=ygUVaG9sb2RvbW9yIGJhZGVtcGFuYWRh, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4L3d0GJlzgc&pp=ygUVaG9sb2RvbW9yIGJhZGVtcGFuYWRh
I’ve been called all sorts of names just for asking for real evidence instead of flimsy suggestive bullshit. It took SO much pressing to get anything at all on the Ukrainian Nazi line they love so much, and I got SO much hostility for it.
Eh, I’ve seen enough to agree that some elements within Ukraine and the Ukrainian military are using Nazi-associated symbols. But then again, so are some of the people invading Ukraine. And I don’t really begrudge Ukraine for thinking that repelling an ongoing invasion and occupation is a more urgent problem than a few Nazi nutjobs on their own side. (Honestly, you’d be hard-pressed to find any military anywhere that doesn’t have Nazi nutjobs in it. Military service is very attractive to that type of person.)
Propaganda will do that. I’ve never met a single communist who denied that there was a major famine in China. The problem is that liberals seem to think Mao invented famine, when in fact China was experiencing famines every 2 to 4 years for over a century by the time the communists came to power. They had a theory for how to address the cycle of famines and increase food surplus, and their theory failed. But liberals think that Mao deliberately killed millions of people because he was an evil dictator instead of acknowledging the reality that Mao was leader of a massive government and they all failed as an organization by producing the conditions for famine. The context is also lost that eventually the Chinese revolution did end the cycle of famines permanently, and they were trying to solve it without any help from Western agriculture because the West was too busy protecting the fascist dictator that was holed up in Taiwan who was actively mass murdering and imprisoning political dissidents.
The Holodomor is another one of those things propaganda skews and breaks our ability to agree to a shared reality on. I have never met a single communist that denies that there was a famine and that many people died. What they often cite, which liberals can’t reconcile, is that the famine affected many more populations than just the people who were supposedly targeted and that research into the incident shows that the crop yield was severely negatively impacted by weather and made worse by not just bad decision making but also bad decision making that was in part driven by punitive thinking. The famine happened, but propaganda would have us believe that the famine was unquestionably a deliberate attempt at ethnic cleansing or genocide, when the evidence seems to be far more in support of a natural famine made worse by poor management with an added dose of maliciousness that ultimately rolls up to bad management.
In contrast, you don’t seem to have any problem with most Westerners having never even heard of the famines that were in fact deliberately caused by the West and for which the only explanation is the active choice of making a colonized population suffer.
Seriously. Was Holodomor a deliberate genocide? This is the hill you’re going to die on? Yes, the famine affected a lot of people, but we all know which people were least affected and it wasn’t the Ukrainians who were trying to actually grow the food. Much like the Irish Famine was only a tragic genocide because the British overlords wouldn’t put up with reducing their own take. The blight was real, but the decimation was pure unjustified cruelty.
I’m a leftist, but I’m an honest one. We gain nothing by denying the past and refusing to learn from it. It does a disservice to us all to hide the fact that old ethnic and cultural violence behind a window dressing of systemic failure. Systemic bigotry is still bigotry.
The kazhaks lost more people per capita than Ukraine did. Major non-Ukrainian Russian populations centers suffered equally or very nearly as much as Ukraine did.
So you may think you’re an honest leftist, but you might not be. As an honest leftist myself, I recognize that the Soviet government made tragic decisions, many of them punitive, none of them directed at ethnic cleansing, because the Soviet Union did not have an analysis that included specific ethnicities being material to their political goals as ethnicities. They understood, documented, wrote about, discussed, debated, legislated, and enforced the exact opposite of ethnic cleansing constantly. Yes, Ukranian suffered a lot through the transition to collectivized agriculture, more than most. But that’s because the majority of Ukranian peasants were freeholders of land, whereas the majority of Russian peasants were serfs. As freeholders, they would lose their claim to their farms. Serfs would suffer no such loss. This was structural. Russian peasants weren’t targeted for collectivization because under the Tsar they were already collectivized, whereas Ukranian peasants had private ownership of the land they worked.
Collectivization was not ethnic cleansing, the famine was not ethnically targeted, and the punitive actions of the Soviet Union were not ethnically motivated by an ethnic strategy of ethnic supremacy.
That’s honesty. Honesty is doing the reading, doing the research, and not discarding all the evidence that contradicts the obviously contrived narrative. Yes there was a famine. Yes it killed more Ukranians in absolute numbers. Yes the Soviet leadership made deliberate decisions that were intended to punish people who were Ukranians. No it wasn’t because they were Ukranian, no it wasn’t because the Soviet leadership thought that ethnic cleansing would achieve their intended goals, no it’s not because the Soviet leadership decided to artificially starve all of those people out of malice or ethnic supremacy.
Yes and proportionally the Romani were murdered by the Nazis at a higher rate than the Jews, but we don’t think of it as the Romani Holocaust. The Russians used a cannon to swat flies and murdered millions and you’re going to carry water for them based on official rationalizations? You sound like an American trying to justify racial red-lining.
Why don’t you take a knee and admit you don’t understand the situation and the context. At the end of the day, Soviet institutions were run by people, people with conditioned biases and baggage. I might have some sympathy for their ideological goals, but I will not overlook their atrocities. The Russians were ruled by monsters then, just like they are ruled by monsters now and the window dressing of their official ideology makes little difference.
Do you have a link to tankies denying there was an unwanted famine?
Holodomor was an unwanted famine that was redurected (food taken from farmers). Later wider famines were made worse mostly by Lysenkoism. A con-job which effected Russia and China.
Yet Communism is compared to Nazi? That’s what’s ridiculous liberal/right propaganda.
What happened is much more forgivable (although still regrettable) than what say the millions killed by the East India companies through intentional famines under Capitalism (done for profit), or the hundreds of millions in war dead from Capitalism in the past 30 years.
That’s much more recent, but some redirected famine from the 1930s keeps coming up when talk of Socialism makes wealthy liberals a little too uncomfortable.
What is an “unwanted famine”? Nobody wanted a famine. Lysenko was wrong, and the government backed him because they didn’t know he was wrong. It was a mistake, not a deliberate strategem to harm people.
That’s … maybe not quite the flex you think it is.
Exactly.
Both the Holodomor and Chinese famine were caused by politicians that ignore actual agrarian science from actual farmers with actual farming experience. The bad yield was caused precisely by this ignoring of proven science. And the Holodomor had been especially bad for Ukraine because it was the USSR’s bread basket because the Soviet authorities extracted as much food as possible, mirroring the Great Famine in Ireland when the British imperialists exported food from Ireland despite the massive starvation.
The Chinese failure of agriculture was under embargo from the West’s proven science and supply chains. They were forced to come up with their own solutions from scratch from a starting position that was far far behind the rest of the world.
Lysenko was operating in a world where the West had developed the theory of the gene but not yet proven the gene existed and the West immediately developed it into eugenics from its racist tyrannical fascist politics, and Lysenko and the politicians were reacting to that. While Europeans were going around saying “genetics is real therefore we should kill all the poors and the browns before they taint our bloodline”, the Soviets were saying “if we improve social conditions then people will heal for generations to come”.
I know we are literally awash in comic book level propaganda where the evil Soviets were dastardly lying to everyone for power and control, but if you actually read the history, the narratives we have been fed start to look a lot like outright lies.
100% if they had followed the science they would have done better, but science is not apolitical, research on heredity especially so, and without any molecular basis for the theory of genetics, it looks a lot like master race politics.
Farmer knowledge and know how wasn’t embargoed by the West. Lysenko and Mao were just idiots who didn’t listen to experts despite warnings. Also, people already knew about genetic inheritance long before the 20th century, even if DNA wasn’t discovered yet. You are just white washing the truth.
Least obvious and prepared tankie shill answer.
Yes, argicultural technology was absolutely embargoed from China by the West. What world do you live in? The Foreign Assets Control Act was relatively comprehensive and then a year later the “UN” adopted a total collective embargo.
It wasn’t embargoed from the USSR. But that was before the Green Revolution anyway. Everyone in the world was heavily subject to crop failures, like the 50% crop failure in the US Dust Bowl in the 30s. It’s not like there was a known good recipe to solving famine cycles during the first 2 decades of the Russian revolution.
The idea that Mao was an idiot is neither borne by the evidence nor useful as an explanation. He was clearly effective for long periods of time for highly complex problem spaces. But he made a similar class of mistakes to the mistakes that the USSR did in agriculture. Mistakes that they eventually corrected.
Oh embargo, the usual scapegoat for the inherent failure of tankie policies. The collectivisation which removed experienced farmers to work on lands, along with Lysenko’s deliberate ignoring of established agricultural science in exchange to his whatever supposedly science he conjured up with, led to the worst famine since the Irish Famine. Mao was told not to order to kill sparrows because they hunt rats and locusts, pests that have worse effect on agriculture.
Least obvious PR tankie answer.