[lacampbell]

It's interesting though how very well meaning utopian policies

The largest tragedy of the 21st century is that people still think these policies and these people were 'well-meaning' or 'it just went a bit wrong'. It seems that only when we defeat murderous totalitarians militarily that we understand them for what they are.

[dang]

Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. They're all the same, which makes them tedious and off topic, and they lead to flamewars, which we don't want.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[lacampbell]

What would an HN guidelines compliant post have looked like? Genuine question. This was an event that might have killed as many people as the holocaust, and someone said it was "well meaning". I thought I made a polite and non flamebaity response. Am I unable to disagree with that, or start a discussion about it? If I am, how would I do it?

[commandlinefan]

> still think these policies and these people were 'well-meaning'

It’s awfully hard to imagine that Mao actually was hoping that people would die, and that they would die en masse of starvation: even if he was strictly self-serving and heartless, he must have known in the back of his mind that huge populations of starving people are unpredictable and difficult to govern. The only way I can picture this taking place is that he (like all dictators) successfully instilled such fear in his direct reports that they never gave him bad news or challenged what he thought sounded like good ideas at the time.

[AlanYx]

Mao had an awareness of what was going on. For example, like the Soviets during the Ukraine famine, Mao's government intentionally outlawed starvation being listed as a cause of death. He was also so utterly convinced of the correctness of his ideologically informed ideas about farming (e.g., he was under the spell of Lysenko's ideas about unproductively close spacing because crops of the same "class" would never compete with each other) that he would choose to blame failures on people's lack of purity for correctly following his ideas and on imagined conspiracies of deposed landlords.

However, what you're saying is also true; there are documented historical examples of local officials, terrified of Mao, setting up faked fields with scarce crops from the neighboring area being transplanted into a single field specifically to "impress" Mao during his visits and avoid his ire.

[Spooky23]

I wouldn't be so sure.

Mao was focused on re-imagining the state and purging old ways of thinking, governance, etc. The insanity of the cultural revolution is a testament to that.

[lacampbell]

How do we know?

Remember the Nazis were brought before an international court. The CCP never had a Nuremberg.

[lacampbell]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB4o5n2EGyA

Two times this video has been posted, and two times it's been flagged. Politician in center left UK party saying historys greatest mass murderer "did more good than harm".

[danharaj]

No famines were ever caused by western capitalist powers in any of their colonies or vassal states.

[rayiner]

It's useful to distinguish between deaths due to malevolence, neglect, and other factors. Capitalist countries have killed plenty of people through malevolence or neglect. The Bengal Famine if 1943, for example, was caused by a combination of overpopulation, British imposed inter-province trade restrictions, Japanese occupation of Burma, and diversion of shipping capacity by the British for WWII. It was not, however, caused by the means by which agricultural production was arranged in Bangladesh. (Which was more feudal than capitalist anyway.)

Socialist countries saw many deaths due to malevolence because it often took violent authoritarians to institute socialist governments in the first place. One can argue about whether those deaths should be held against "socialism" per se. But what's almost unique about socialism is how many deaths resulted even when the government was not acting malevolently or negligently. Tens of millions of people died in the Soviet Union and China not due to gulags and purges, but because socialism is a bad way to organize an economy. Socialist reforms of agricultural production, in particular, destroyed production.

Those deaths are squarely attributable to socialism per se. It's the result of removing market signals, distorting incentives, and replacing the capital-owning class who knows how to operate the economy, etc. What would happen to say Waymo if you replaced its investors and management with the folks who run the U.S. Digital Service along with "stakeholders" from among the employees and "local community?" You'd destroy it, because that's a terrible way to run a company. That's what socialist countries did with agriculture.

[dang]

Please don't take HN threads even further into political and ideological flamewar. We don't want it here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[disintegore]

It doesn't make any sense to me why some people try to rehabilitate Stalin, Mao and company. There is absolutely nothing to be gained in doing so. In truth, modern Socialism is far removed from Soviet Communism and modern Socialists need to recognize that "but Stalin" is a trite bad-faith argument and the people who employ it should be ridiculed.

[s1artibartfast]

> we understand them for what they are.

Im not sure if I understand what you are trying to say they were. Are you claiming that Mao and Stalin were sadists? I think it is more plausible they were altruistically motivated (greater good, ect).