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> In the USSR and China, the large scale deaths were linked to failures during economic development. no, they were caused by ideological stupidity (stalin: loo
by zabzonk 4y ago
> In the USSR and China, the large scale deaths were linked to failures during economic development.
no, they were caused by ideological stupidity (stalin: look up "kulaks", mao: see cultural revolution and great leap forward), and both states being governed, by terror, by paranoid megalomaniacs. read a history book.
> this was an issue with the USSR and early China.
did the west not provide the ussr and china with enourmous amounts of military, economic and technical aid during and after ww2 (selling the ussr jet engines, for example)? oh, yes, it did!
- CrackerNews 4y agoThe ideological stupidities were motivated by the goal of economic development. Stalin thought kulaks' economic interests were holding back the centralizing industrialization of agriculture through collectivization. Mao wanted to move from a peasant-based economy to industrial-based through the great leap. (The cultural revolution was a populist cudgel to make the Western educated intellectuals adapt and submit to the local Chinese conditions.) --- I wouldn't lean on wartime subsidies too much because they are extraordinary circumstances. The USSR focused on self-sufficiency to the point of foreign trade only being 4% of GDP in 1985. China started opening up after Nixon normalized relations.