Communism. Good or bad. What do you really know about Communism?

[Arturo2nd]

Originally Posted by xyzde69

The evidences about communist famines has never been clearly established.
They still are highly disputed by several European historians.

The historians tried to interview the famine victims, but couldn't find them. They were able to review the evidence, including photographs, from the trials of the people convicted of cannibalism. The guilty parties were executed.

It is not really obvious that we need to revert to a more primitive agricultural society. We can keep to our current path and allow nature to take its course. After a few thousand years, virtually all traces of our passing will be recycled.

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by xyzde69

China was out of the chart when it was a Communist country.
Since they became the manufacture of Westerners, they have become the most emissive country on the planet.

China was at the time one of the poorest countries on the planet -- GDP lower than Taiwan for many years. Millions starved, and China's life expectancy at birth was 40 years, equivalent to very worst places on Earth today. Today its 76 years.

There's no question that industrialization and electrification of a nation of more than a billion people has a huge environmental cost, but the Chinese are aware of this and are investing massively in clean energy -- they're installing more solar than any other nation, building more nuclear reactors than any other nation.

Originally Posted by xyzde69

The evidences about communist famines has never been clearly established.
They still are highly disputed by several European historians

This is incorrect. The only disputes among serious historians of the era are as to intention-- were the famines the accidental result of the administratively incompetent communists, or were they intended. There is abundant documentation of the massive famines in the Soviet Union, in China, in Cambodia.

You only have to read.

For China, see Frank Dikotter "Mao's Great Famine"
https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...ikotter-review

For the Soviet Union, see Anne Applebaum's recent and excellent "Red Famine"
https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...plebaum-review

-- but note that this only covers Ukraine, if you look at famine data from across the Soviet Union, the highest death toll was actually in central Asia, Kazakhstan specifically. For the Kazakh famine specifically, see:
http://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violen...edentarization

[Roubignol]

Originally Posted by deepsepia

For China, see Frank Dikotter "Mao's Great Famine"
https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...ikotter-review

The quality of Dikotter's work is highly disputed by several specialists. link

The most interesting is this one:

Cormac Ó Gráda, famine scholar and professor of economics at University College Dublin, criticised the book as "more like a catalogue of anecdotes about atrocities than a sustained analytic argument", and that it failed to note that "many of the horrors it describes were recurrent features of Chinese history during the previous century or so". Ó Gráda says 10 per thousand "normal" mortality rate adopted by Dikötter is "implausibly low" and used to maximise his death count. Ó Gráda says that "The crude death rate in China in the wake of the revolution was probably about 25 per thousand. It is highly unlikely that the Communists could have reduced it within less than a decade to the implausibly low 10 per thousand adopted here (p. 331). Had they done so, they would have 'saved' over 30 million lives in the interim! One can hardly have it both ways."

I'm sure that they were a lot of tragedies during Communism of the last centuries in the State capitalist societies, but I'm sure too that was not much better in those countries before Communism... It probably was even worse.

Following your logic:

Remember that in 1918, between 50 to 100 millions people died of the Spanish flu.

Does it mean that today modern countries would suffer the same amount of victims in case of a new flu pandemic, because they lost millions of people 100 years ago ?
Probably not.


In XXIth century, China still get a unique Party and is economically surpassing "democratic" USA. And trust me, I'd prefer to see Chinese people wasting less energy.

It seems that with good leaders, a unique Party is more efficient than a chaotic democracy. From a empire crowded of poor peasants after just 100 years they have surpassed the most liberal economy.

Maybe we absolutely need a world runned by an Green Vegan Communist Party.

Originally Posted by Brian249x

It is not really obvious that we need to revert to a more primitive agricultural society. We can keep to our current path and allow nature to take its course. After a few thousand years, virtually all traces of our passing will be recycled.

But limiting the birth rate during ... 100 years as the Communist Chinese did, would peacefully reduce the world population to about 500 millions heads.

500 millions humans instead of 10 to 12 billions. Do you imagine ? More place for humanity, more resources and less potential conflicts.
Why wasting so much time ?

Nothing is more efficient than a well-managed proletarian dictatorship.

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by xyzde69

The quality of Dikotter's work is highly disputed by several specialists. .

Nope.

Dikotter won the Samuel Johnson Prize for his work, one of the most prestigious prizes in history. He's working from Chinese archives, which he cites. Dikotter has spent a lifetime working on Chinese history, in Hong Kong or in China.

You cite "Cormac Ó Gráda" -- who doesn't speak Chinese. He is a noted scholar of the Irish famine-- but that doesn't speak to any qualification to examine records in a language he can't read.

The Chinese Communist Party itself has extensive materials on the famine, and it was clearly a crisis for the regime.

Your position is a bit like Holocaust denial . . . no the Nazis didn't want us to know just how many people they murdered, and neither did the Communists.

But the bones keep turning up . . .

[Arturo2nd]

Originally Posted by xyzde69

But limiting the birth rate during ... 100 years as the Communist Chinese did, would peacefully reduce the world population to about 500 millions heads.

You are aware that the PRC is now staring a demographic catastrophe full in the face as a result of that policy, aren't you?

[haroldeye]

Nothing is more efficient than a well-managed proletarian dictatorship.

I think you need to get out and see a bit of real life.

[Wendigo]

Originally Posted by xyzde69

Nothing is more efficient than a well-managed proletarian dictatorship.

There has never been one so how could you know.

That's like saying no cryptid can swim faster than the Loch Ness Monster or it was the tallest Sasquatch I ever saw, none of them actually exist.

Put those stupid dusty old Communism apologist books down, take off your red-tinted glasses, get a bacon sandwich, have a beer and chill

[Roubignol]

Originally Posted by Brian249x

You are aware that the PRC is now staring a demographic catastrophe full in the face as a result of that policy, aren't you?

Which kind of catastrophe?
You was educated (as I was) accepting that elderly people can abuse of the working force of the young generation.

Chinese youth only have to burry a billion of dead elderly people and then they will get a huge countryside available for them.

Originally Posted by deepsepia

Nope.

Dikotter won the Samuel Johnson Prize for his work, one of the most prestigious prizes in history. He's working from Chinese archives, which he cites. Dikotter has spent a lifetime working on Chinese history, in Hong Kong or in China.

You cite "Cormac Ó Gráda" -- who doesn't speak Chinese. He is a noted scholar of the Irish famine-- but that doesn't speak to any qualification to examine records in a language he can't read.

The Chinese Communist Party itself has extensive materials on the famine, and it was clearly a crisis for the regime.

Your position is a bit like Holocaust denial . . . no the Nazis didn't want us to know just how many people they murdered, and neither did the Communists.

But the bones keep turning up . . .

In that case the Samuel Johnson prize surely is used as a Capitalist propaganda tool.

Here is another criticism about his work:

In The China Journal, Felix Wemheuer, lecturer of Chinese history and politics at University of Vienna, said that Dikötter's figure of 45 million dead was higher than other estimates of 15 to 40 million dead, and said, "It seems that his interest is in presenting the highest number possible, to label the Great Leap as the greatest mass killing in human history." Wemheuer says the figure derived from discrepancies between Cao Shuji's 2005 estimate of 32.5 million and data from official county police reports, which Dikötter added 40–50 percent to the official figures. Wemheuer also disputed Dikötter's claims that 2.5 million and 1–3 million people were beaten to death and driven to suicide, respectively. Wemheuer criticised Dikötter's lack of mention of famines under Republican China, and said Dikötter's account "reads like a long list of atrocities committed by Mao's regime against the Chinese people and bears the hallmarks of having been written in furious outrage"

When someone lack to reinsert the facts into the Great History, that's often very very suspicious.

Originally Posted by haroldeye

Nothing is more efficient than a well-managed proletarian dictatorship.

I think you need to get out and see a bit of real life.

Sorry I forgot to write well-managed antispecist proletarian society.

Harold... Do you get grandchildren ? Are you aware of the IPCC studies ?

If you get grandchildren, you have to support a pacific vegan egalitarian society managed by well informed and educated people, not still supporting the worst and destroying economic system EVER runned by corrupted lawyers and plutocracies.

[bowlinggreen]

Originally Posted by xyzde69

Chinese youth only have to burry a billion of dead elderly people and then they will get a huge countryside available for them.

Once again, you ignore the fact that the surplus of old people have to be fed and given medical care until they die, which is a huge burden.

Unless you are going to euthanize them.

You continually gloss over all of these pitfalls in your pursuit of Utopian fantasies.

[Roubignol]

Originally Posted by bowlinggreen

Once again, you ignore the fact that the surplus of old people have to be fed and given medical care until they die, which is a huge burden.

Unless you are going to euthanize them.

You continually gloss over all of these pitfalls in your pursuit of Utopian fantasies.

I've to say that you are my favorite contradictor, because it seems that you are a man of the earth, a son of farmers who was confronted to the inherent violence of life.

I listened that in Western societies about 20% or more (possibly a lot more) of the energy is spend to artificially (pills, hospital, pensions) maintain elderly people in life. That sadly became a business.

If humanity has to survive, I hope that grandparents (who have decided to impose life to their genes) will accept to take by themselves their lethal pills when the game looks over.

Isn't it that the notion of a fair responsability ?
Please answer to this question.