9 ms·

China's Great Famine (2013)

119 points by thrower123 8y ago

nnq 8y ago
In a "more normal" society, in times of famine, people rebel and kill their leaders. That's kind of the "healthy"/correct thing to do: even if you die trying to kill your leaders (no biggie since you likely would've starved anyway), in the end someone succeeds, they get replace by somewhat better leaders, worse case by foreign invaders that can only be better than current leaders anyway, some of your relatives carrying genes and ideas in common with you have better changes of surviving/multiplying. In a more evolved society, applying the rules results in relatively small number of death and explosive cultural and scientific progress afterwards - think about the French revolution (mostly triggered by famine btw). Also, even in the worst case scenario, when a country dissolve in a swarm of anarchic hordes, those hordes still are better off: they can go an pillage the neighboring countries. If a society actually manages to turn its population into fully obedient sheeple, which is probably what the Chinese emperors managed to do, and then the communist party carried on doing... then you get catastrophic outcomes like these. And they are truly catastrophic, worse than worse, because in a war at least you have some "survival of the best warrior" selection that improves the overall human gene pool... The big lesson to be learned here is that training people to be obedient and non-violent makes it impossible for them to fix or destroy a sick social order, and this leads sooner or later to massive numbers of deaths. Our natural propensities for disobedience, individualism, and violence against authority are what keeps societies healthy when kept at a low-enough-but-not-zero level. One can only wonder what catastrophes the "social credit score" thing will surely sooner or later lead too...
- forkLding 8y ago
  Not true, see the Mandate of Heaven and its emphasis on Right of Rebellion: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate_of_Heaven https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate_of_Heaven If famines persisted, it was seen as as the doing of the emperor and that they were unworthy and thus could be replaced by anyone who had military strength, the Han dynasty founder was essentially a middle-class policeman. Moreover emperors have long been got rid of by the Chinese Revolution of 1911, if people are sheeple, why would they violently depose their emperor? You seem to also have forgotten the Tiananmen protests and subsequent massacre, which were against the Cultural Revolution and Great Famine.
  - baybal2 8y ago
    That's all not in small part because the best and brightest people of the generation killed each other in a civil war. With all Jiang Zemin's flaws, his best move was to "politically castrate" the party, and distance intra-party affairs from state governance. This is what made the two decades of progress possible: civil servants without little red books instead of brains. In the current CCPs internal lingo, there is a term "Marxist ghosts" that was around since Jiang first took reign. The party has been long purging Marxist hardliners, but so far, have not came to full realisation why they have to do so other than "because they screwed up"
- mcguire 8y ago
  An obvious counter example would be Ireland, with a history of revolutions before and after the famines. And I may disagree with your worst case scenario: see post-WW1 Europe.
  - WillPostForFood 8y ago
    Is Ireland a good counter example? Wouldn't you say the Young Irelander Rebellion was an unsuccessful rebellion in reaction to the famine, and the Land War was a more organized, successful uprising a couple decades later as famine threatened again?
- castle-bravo 8y ago
  [0] https://youtu.be/8-r-V0uK4u0 https://youtu.be/8-r-V0uK4u0
- jhanschoo 8y ago
  You are letting your prejudice infect your perception of history, and your lack of knowledge about China's modern history shows. At the time of the Great Leap Forward, China then was reeling from far too many changes of power. The CCP threw out the KMT after fighting together in a terrible war against the Japanese; the KMT themselves had been in a bitter struggle for a China torn apart by upstart warlords, and this after the Xinhai revolution that made the Qing dynasty capitulate. China had not seen proper peace for a generation, and it finally seemed to have it. And then to see here an ignorant comment calling a people weary from too many revolutions obedient sheeple, saying that they should have mounted a revolution and this "survival of the best warrior" bullcrap. In case you weren't listening, the instability of revolutions tend to attract tyrannic elements, as their history had shown them. > worse case by foreign invaders that can only be better than current leaders anyway If a revolution were to have happened, who's to say that China would still be better off? China had seen many foreign powers covet it and had freshly suffered at their hands; it is not improbable that a revolution then would mean a China divided and subjugated by unsympathetic foreign powers and abused, as the Japanese had done before.
  - doombolt 8y ago
    Communists also tend to start hating people in countries where they rule, put bad tags on them. That's how they deal with the shortcomings of their policy. This is both for internal communist rulers and overseas communistic wannabees. They blamed a million of different things on Russians, like being lazy drunkards; and shifting the hunger genocide blame from communists to ethnic Russians (for some reason). Now they sure blame Chinese for... Being sheeple? Being hungry? I don't even know. They don't blame Koreans for DPRK's hunger genocide, tho. That's Kims. Still not the communism. Communism is so good, that it always end up in wrong people's hands who are just incapable.
    - dang 8y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18529833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18529833
- kiliantics 8y ago
  Holy social darwinism batman... The amount of orientalism and McCarthyism in HN comments never ceases to amaze me but this comment here really takes the cake.
doombolt 8y ago
USSR had famines, PRC had famines and DPRK also had famines. All three claiming millions of lives. I wonder how there are still people who try and gerrymander "good" and "bad" communism, OR good and bad communists. I think one should withhold discussion about good communists in the same way as one withholds discussion about good nazis. And throw that Trotsky portrait out of the window! The ideology is already dead everywhere so you don't even have any regimes to topple. Let's just bury our dead instead letting them rot.
- NedIsakoff 8y ago
  They claim: it wasn’t true communism.
  - doombolt 8y ago
    Stop praising any non-true communists then, which is basically everyone who tried to practice it.
  - muro 8y ago
    Whenever it fails, "it wasn't true communism". Also, always comes from people who don't/didn't live there.
    - saagarjha 8y ago
      I don’t know of any countries that have adopted “true” communism. Mostly because it’s just easier to seize control of a command economy than figuring out a way to share power.
      - eklavya 8y ago
        Or maybe, people are people and somethings are just fantasies?
    - coldtea 8y ago
      Well, and whenever capitalist countries enslave 2/3rd of the worlds in colonies (even having "human zoos"), it's not "true capitalism". >Also, always comes from people who don't/didn't live there You'd be surprised. E.g.: https://www.economist.com/europe/2017/10/12/many-eastern-europeans-feel-nostalgia-for-the-communist-era https://www.economist.com/europe/2017/10/12/many-eastern-eur... "Since communist nostalgia is a growing phenomenon in Eastern Europe today, it has different ways of manifesting itself amongst post-communist citizens. Nostalgic types are quite particular in their reverence for the past and share different things they are nostalgic about (this is shown in their electoral support for communist and socialist parties). Most of these individuals are nostalgic for job security, free education and reliable and affordable healthcare. This is because most Eastern Europeans remember and long for the vast social programmes and services that are no longer offered under capitalism." https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/kurt-biray/communist-nostalgia-in-eastern-europe-longing-for-past https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/kurt-biray/... "The poll showed 30 percent of Ukrainians approved of the change to democracy in 2009, down from 72 percent in 1991. In Bulgaria and Lithuania the slide was to just over half the population from nearer three-quarters in 1991." https://www.reuters.com/article/us-communism-nostalgia/special-report-in-eastern-europe-people-pine-for-socialism-idUSTRE5A701320091108 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-communism-nostalgia/speci...
HillaryBriss 8y ago
The famine itself was, of course, unimaginably terrible. I feel that another terrible thing this article highlights is the sad reality of political parties, systems and organizations in general: "The root problem is the problem of the system. They don't dare to admit the system's problems … It might influence the legitimacy of the Communist party"
digianarchist 8y ago
"Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine" is a great book on the subject of the Chinese famine.
syntaxing 8y ago
I think this is one of the biggest thing people forget about China. Their wealth is extremely new found. A lot of people alive today still had some sort of relative that has starved to death, particularly in the same age as our baby boomer generation. That's why the Chinese government is extremely strict and the citizens are willing to be "subjugated". Time were extremely tough for them not even two-three decades ago. Side note, I believe most historians will agree that any modern famine within this past century is man-made. They are either created or mitigated poorly because of ignorance.
- amvalo 8y ago
  This explanation sounds nice until you start thinking about other countries which experienced famine in the last century and don’t look anything like china...
  - kabdib 8y ago
    A great many famines in the 1900s were caused by war, unrest and "political stuff" (including forced relocation and creation of work camps / collective farms / prison farms, whatever you want to call them). There were some famines directly related to drought, but they look relatively minor compared to the ones with obvious human agency.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    What famines were there where not either the government caused or ignored the problem, a colonial power ignored or caused the problem or a war was going on?
    - Joakal 8y ago
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine Here's a cut n paste Chinese scholars had kept count of 1,828 instances of famine from 108 BC to 1911 in one province or another—an average of close to one famine per year.[50] From 1333 to 1337 a terrible famine killed 6 million Chinese. The four famines of 1810, 1811, 1846, and 1849 are said to have killed no fewer than 45 million people.[51] Japan experienced more than 130 famines between 1603 and 1868.[52]
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jokoon 8y ago
Do you think it's debatable to compare the deaths of concentration camps in Germany, and the deaths of the great famine? You often see this comparison being made (whatever the reason is), to me those deaths are different because the intention was different. The shoah was aimed at certain people, while the great famine killed indiscriminately.
- anoncoward111 8y ago
  The Holodomor was aimed at Ukrainians by Russians. The Great Famine was aimed at every commoner by the Politburo.
  - trhway 8y ago
    Anybody who care to open wikipedia would see straight through that propaganda about Ukranians and Russians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932%E2%80%9333 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932%E2%80%93... Note: my mother side of the family were generational peasants in the Kiev region, the families of 5 siblings of my grandfather lived there through that time (the granddad took his family to look for better life elsewhere several years before that)
- freeflight 8y ago
  The "shoah" wasn't just aimed at "certain people", it was aimed at all opposition of any kind, political and social, that's how it started out originally. Tbh that's why I really don't like calling it "shoah", as that implies Jews were the only victims of these Nazis crimes. I have no doubt that the Chinese government "prioritized" their food similarly, giving less to those it considered "opposition" while making sure it's actual power-base was taken care off and wouldn't starve to death on them. Just like the Nazis prioritized who they killed first in Dachau not only by "Jewishness" but also the political and social influences these people held, which made them capable of opposing the Nazi rule and thus had to be "taken care off" first.
- tbihl 8y ago
  The interesting comparison is the epidemiological one. Fascism as a deadly infectious idea has terrible and terrifying outcomes, resulting in swift response to it, and a good understanding of what it looks like: we'll all recognize fascism upon hearing race-based rallying cries. Communism as a deadly infectious idea is probably deadlier yet; unfortunately, it is less immediately terrifying, so it doesn't get as rapid a response. And, unlike with fascism, we have a feeble understanding of when radical left-wing thought reaches malignancy, which is a problem we don't have quite so badly with fascism. As to the morality comparison, denying agency to your entire country's farmers on the belief that you can just control everything from afar and keep it running isn't that different from claiming that your country would be running well if you could just get rid of all the Jews. They're both reprehensible actions undertaken based on nonsensical beliefs; one of those beliefs just takes a bit longer to think about.
carapace 8y ago
> "The Chinese people were cheated. They need real history." Can someone fwd this to Sundar Pichai in re: Project Dragonfly?
trhway 8y ago
very similar to the great famine in USSR in 1932-33 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932%E2%80%9333 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932%E2%80%93... One can only wonder why ... Or just look at Venezuela and North Korea today. From that time we have an expression "like a hunger-stricken from the Volga region" ("golodayuschiy s Povolzh'ya", the region among the most affected by the famine) meaning like a completely debilitated by prolonged hunger and by overall extremely bad conditions person.
- v_lisivka 8y ago
  The main idea of communism is to kill «bad» people («Bourgeoisie and Intelligence», i.e. richer and smarter people), to grow «soviet people», which then build communism. Initial estimate in 1918 was to kill 10% of population. To do that, secret police created to spy on people minds, to find bad ones. Secret police reported that majority of Ukrainians are anti-communists. So, idea was simple - communists need to kill majority of «bad» Ukrainians, then communism will happen. You may want to read [0] or similar documents for more information. [0]: The new Soviet archival sources Hypotheses for a critical assessment Andrea Graziosi, 1999
  - claudiawerner 8y ago
    >The main idea of communism is to kill «bad» people («Bourgeoisie and Intelligence», i.e. richer and smarter people), to grow «soviet people» No modern Communist academic nor Marx himself spoke in these terms. You're projecting history onto ideology, which doesn't always work. The Marxist students being persecuted by China this year would very much disagree with your analysis, even having experienced this 'communism'.
    - v_lisivka 8y ago
      First, you are mismatching communism ideology with transition from capitalism to communism. If somebody want to rule a country, he must use violence to beat previous government, no matter what is said in a book. Second, you are mismatching theory with practice.
amaccuish 8y ago
Why is this being dug up from 2013, and not even marked as such?
- dang 8y ago
  Sometimes we miss the year of an article and need users to point it out to us. I've added it now. Historical material is always welcome on Hacker News. Dig away!
teslaberry 8y ago
all countries have famines. the u.s. ---if it lucky enough to survive intact as a nation state---will eventually see its people suffer from famine. it's just a matter of time. unless 'we' all leave the u.s. before it happens
tcper 8y ago
China gov't still deny this history, many people still deny believe this history, if you talk about this in China, they may think you're a spy.
- Leary 8y ago
  This history is well known in China and part of the history curriculum.
amai 8y ago
The same happened in Europe in the 1930s: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

119 points by thrower123 8y ago

nnq 8y ago

In a "more normal" society, in times of famine, people rebel and kill their leaders. That's kind of the "healthy"/correct thing to do: even if you die trying to kill your leaders (no biggie since you likely would've starved anyway), in the end someone succeeds, they get replace by somewhat better leaders, worse case by foreign invaders that can only be better than current leaders anyway, some of your relatives carrying genes and ideas in common with you have better changes of surviving/multiplying. In a more evolved society, applying the rules results in relatively small number of death and explosive cultural and scientific progress afterwards - think about the French revolution (mostly triggered by famine btw). Also, even in the worst case scenario, when a country dissolve in a swarm of anarchic hordes, those hordes still are better off: they can go an pillage the neighboring countries. If a society actually manages to turn its population into fully obedient sheeple, which is probably what the Chinese emperors managed to do, and then the communist party carried on doing... then you get catastrophic outcomes like these. And they are truly catastrophic, worse than worse, because in a war at least you have some "survival of the best warrior" selection that improves the overall human gene pool... The big lesson to be learned here is that training people to be obedient and non-violent makes it impossible for them to fix or destroy a sick social order, and this leads sooner or later to massive numbers of deaths. Our natural propensities for disobedience, individualism, and violence against authority are what keeps societies healthy when kept at a low-enough-but-not-zero level. One can only wonder what catastrophes the "social credit score" thing will surely sooner or later lead too...

forkLding 8y ago
Not true, see the Mandate of Heaven and its emphasis on Right of Rebellion: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate_of_Heaven https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate_of_Heaven If famines persisted, it was seen as as the doing of the emperor and that they were unworthy and thus could be replaced by anyone who had military strength, the Han dynasty founder was essentially a middle-class policeman. Moreover emperors have long been got rid of by the Chinese Revolution of 1911, if people are sheeple, why would they violently depose their emperor? You seem to also have forgotten the Tiananmen protests and subsequent massacre, which were against the Cultural Revolution and Great Famine.
- baybal2 8y ago
  That's all not in small part because the best and brightest people of the generation killed each other in a civil war. With all Jiang Zemin's flaws, his best move was to "politically castrate" the party, and distance intra-party affairs from state governance. This is what made the two decades of progress possible: civil servants without little red books instead of brains. In the current CCPs internal lingo, there is a term "Marxist ghosts" that was around since Jiang first took reign. The party has been long purging Marxist hardliners, but so far, have not came to full realisation why they have to do so other than "because they screwed up"
mcguire 8y ago
An obvious counter example would be Ireland, with a history of revolutions before and after the famines. And I may disagree with your worst case scenario: see post-WW1 Europe.
- WillPostForFood 8y ago
  Is Ireland a good counter example? Wouldn't you say the Young Irelander Rebellion was an unsuccessful rebellion in reaction to the famine, and the Land War was a more organized, successful uprising a couple decades later as famine threatened again?
castle-bravo 8y ago
[0] https://youtu.be/8-r-V0uK4u0 https://youtu.be/8-r-V0uK4u0
jhanschoo 8y ago
You are letting your prejudice infect your perception of history, and your lack of knowledge about China's modern history shows. At the time of the Great Leap Forward, China then was reeling from far too many changes of power. The CCP threw out the KMT after fighting together in a terrible war against the Japanese; the KMT themselves had been in a bitter struggle for a China torn apart by upstart warlords, and this after the Xinhai revolution that made the Qing dynasty capitulate. China had not seen proper peace for a generation, and it finally seemed to have it. And then to see here an ignorant comment calling a people weary from too many revolutions obedient sheeple, saying that they should have mounted a revolution and this "survival of the best warrior" bullcrap. In case you weren't listening, the instability of revolutions tend to attract tyrannic elements, as their history had shown them. > worse case by foreign invaders that can only be better than current leaders anyway If a revolution were to have happened, who's to say that China would still be better off? China had seen many foreign powers covet it and had freshly suffered at their hands; it is not improbable that a revolution then would mean a China divided and subjugated by unsympathetic foreign powers and abused, as the Japanese had done before.
- doombolt 8y ago
  Communists also tend to start hating people in countries where they rule, put bad tags on them. That's how they deal with the shortcomings of their policy. This is both for internal communist rulers and overseas communistic wannabees. They blamed a million of different things on Russians, like being lazy drunkards; and shifting the hunger genocide blame from communists to ethnic Russians (for some reason). Now they sure blame Chinese for... Being sheeple? Being hungry? I don't even know. They don't blame Koreans for DPRK's hunger genocide, tho. That's Kims. Still not the communism. Communism is so good, that it always end up in wrong people's hands who are just incapable.
  - dang 8y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18529833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18529833
kiliantics 8y ago
Holy social darwinism batman... The amount of orientalism and McCarthyism in HN comments never ceases to amaze me but this comment here really takes the cake.

doombolt 8y ago

USSR had famines, PRC had famines and DPRK also had famines. All three claiming millions of lives. I wonder how there are still people who try and gerrymander "good" and "bad" communism, OR good and bad communists. I think one should withhold discussion about good communists in the same way as one withholds discussion about good nazis. And throw that Trotsky portrait out of the window! The ideology is already dead everywhere so you don't even have any regimes to topple. Let's just bury our dead instead letting them rot.

NedIsakoff 8y ago
They claim: it wasn’t true communism.
- doombolt 8y ago
  Stop praising any non-true communists then, which is basically everyone who tried to practice it.
- muro 8y ago
  Whenever it fails, "it wasn't true communism". Also, always comes from people who don't/didn't live there.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    I don’t know of any countries that have adopted “true” communism. Mostly because it’s just easier to seize control of a command economy than figuring out a way to share power.
    - eklavya 8y ago
      Or maybe, people are people and somethings are just fantasies?
  - coldtea 8y ago
    Well, and whenever capitalist countries enslave 2/3rd of the worlds in colonies (even having "human zoos"), it's not "true capitalism". >Also, always comes from people who don't/didn't live there You'd be surprised. E.g.: https://www.economist.com/europe/2017/10/12/many-eastern-europeans-feel-nostalgia-for-the-communist-era https://www.economist.com/europe/2017/10/12/many-eastern-eur... "Since communist nostalgia is a growing phenomenon in Eastern Europe today, it has different ways of manifesting itself amongst post-communist citizens. Nostalgic types are quite particular in their reverence for the past and share different things they are nostalgic about (this is shown in their electoral support for communist and socialist parties). Most of these individuals are nostalgic for job security, free education and reliable and affordable healthcare. This is because most Eastern Europeans remember and long for the vast social programmes and services that are no longer offered under capitalism." https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/kurt-biray/communist-nostalgia-in-eastern-europe-longing-for-past https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/kurt-biray/... "The poll showed 30 percent of Ukrainians approved of the change to democracy in 2009, down from 72 percent in 1991. In Bulgaria and Lithuania the slide was to just over half the population from nearer three-quarters in 1991." https://www.reuters.com/article/us-communism-nostalgia/special-report-in-eastern-europe-people-pine-for-socialism-idUSTRE5A701320091108 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-communism-nostalgia/speci...

HillaryBriss 8y ago

The famine itself was, of course, unimaginably terrible. I feel that another terrible thing this article highlights is the sad reality of political parties, systems and organizations in general: "The root problem is the problem of the system. They don't dare to admit the system's problems … It might influence the legitimacy of the Communist party"

digianarchist 8y ago

"Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine" is a great book on the subject of the Chinese famine.

syntaxing 8y ago

I think this is one of the biggest thing people forget about China. Their wealth is extremely new found. A lot of people alive today still had some sort of relative that has starved to death, particularly in the same age as our baby boomer generation. That's why the Chinese government is extremely strict and the citizens are willing to be "subjugated". Time were extremely tough for them not even two-three decades ago. Side note, I believe most historians will agree that any modern famine within this past century is man-made. They are either created or mitigated poorly because of ignorance.

amvalo 8y ago
This explanation sounds nice until you start thinking about other countries which experienced famine in the last century and don’t look anything like china...
- kabdib 8y ago
  A great many famines in the 1900s were caused by war, unrest and "political stuff" (including forced relocation and creation of work camps / collective farms / prison farms, whatever you want to call them). There were some famines directly related to drought, but they look relatively minor compared to the ones with obvious human agency.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  What famines were there where not either the government caused or ignored the problem, a colonial power ignored or caused the problem or a war was going on?
  - Joakal 8y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine Here's a cut n paste Chinese scholars had kept count of 1,828 instances of famine from 108 BC to 1911 in one province or another—an average of close to one famine per year.[50] From 1333 to 1337 a terrible famine killed 6 million Chinese. The four famines of 1810, 1811, 1846, and 1849 are said to have killed no fewer than 45 million people.[51] Japan experienced more than 130 famines between 1603 and 1868.[52]

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

jokoon 8y ago

Do you think it's debatable to compare the deaths of concentration camps in Germany, and the deaths of the great famine? You often see this comparison being made (whatever the reason is), to me those deaths are different because the intention was different. The shoah was aimed at certain people, while the great famine killed indiscriminately.

anoncoward111 8y ago
The Holodomor was aimed at Ukrainians by Russians. The Great Famine was aimed at every commoner by the Politburo.
- trhway 8y ago
  Anybody who care to open wikipedia would see straight through that propaganda about Ukranians and Russians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932%E2%80%9333 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932%E2%80%93... Note: my mother side of the family were generational peasants in the Kiev region, the families of 5 siblings of my grandfather lived there through that time (the granddad took his family to look for better life elsewhere several years before that)
freeflight 8y ago
The "shoah" wasn't just aimed at "certain people", it was aimed at all opposition of any kind, political and social, that's how it started out originally. Tbh that's why I really don't like calling it "shoah", as that implies Jews were the only victims of these Nazis crimes. I have no doubt that the Chinese government "prioritized" their food similarly, giving less to those it considered "opposition" while making sure it's actual power-base was taken care off and wouldn't starve to death on them. Just like the Nazis prioritized who they killed first in Dachau not only by "Jewishness" but also the political and social influences these people held, which made them capable of opposing the Nazi rule and thus had to be "taken care off" first.
tbihl 8y ago
The interesting comparison is the epidemiological one. Fascism as a deadly infectious idea has terrible and terrifying outcomes, resulting in swift response to it, and a good understanding of what it looks like: we'll all recognize fascism upon hearing race-based rallying cries. Communism as a deadly infectious idea is probably deadlier yet; unfortunately, it is less immediately terrifying, so it doesn't get as rapid a response. And, unlike with fascism, we have a feeble understanding of when radical left-wing thought reaches malignancy, which is a problem we don't have quite so badly with fascism. As to the morality comparison, denying agency to your entire country's farmers on the belief that you can just control everything from afar and keep it running isn't that different from claiming that your country would be running well if you could just get rid of all the Jews. They're both reprehensible actions undertaken based on nonsensical beliefs; one of those beliefs just takes a bit longer to think about.

carapace 8y ago

> "The Chinese people were cheated. They need real history." Can someone fwd this to Sundar Pichai in re: Project Dragonfly?

trhway 8y ago

very similar to the great famine in USSR in 1932-33 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932%E2%80%9333 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932%E2%80%93... One can only wonder why ... Or just look at Venezuela and North Korea today. From that time we have an expression "like a hunger-stricken from the Volga region" ("golodayuschiy s Povolzh'ya", the region among the most affected by the famine) meaning like a completely debilitated by prolonged hunger and by overall extremely bad conditions person.

v_lisivka 8y ago
The main idea of communism is to kill «bad» people («Bourgeoisie and Intelligence», i.e. richer and smarter people), to grow «soviet people», which then build communism. Initial estimate in 1918 was to kill 10% of population. To do that, secret police created to spy on people minds, to find bad ones. Secret police reported that majority of Ukrainians are anti-communists. So, idea was simple - communists need to kill majority of «bad» Ukrainians, then communism will happen. You may want to read [0] or similar documents for more information. [0]: The new Soviet archival sources Hypotheses for a critical assessment Andrea Graziosi, 1999
- claudiawerner 8y ago
  >The main idea of communism is to kill «bad» people («Bourgeoisie and Intelligence», i.e. richer and smarter people), to grow «soviet people» No modern Communist academic nor Marx himself spoke in these terms. You're projecting history onto ideology, which doesn't always work. The Marxist students being persecuted by China this year would very much disagree with your analysis, even having experienced this 'communism'.
  - v_lisivka 8y ago
    First, you are mismatching communism ideology with transition from capitalism to communism. If somebody want to rule a country, he must use violence to beat previous government, no matter what is said in a book. Second, you are mismatching theory with practice.

amaccuish 8y ago

Why is this being dug up from 2013, and not even marked as such?

dang 8y ago
Sometimes we miss the year of an article and need users to point it out to us. I've added it now. Historical material is always welcome on Hacker News. Dig away!

teslaberry 8y ago

all countries have famines. the u.s. ---if it lucky enough to survive intact as a nation state---will eventually see its people suffer from famine. it's just a matter of time. unless 'we' all leave the u.s. before it happens

tcper 8y ago

China gov't still deny this history, many people still deny believe this history, if you talk about this in China, they may think you're a spy.

Leary 8y ago
This history is well known in China and part of the history curriculum.

amai 8y ago

The same happened in Europe in the 1930s: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor