There has certainly been a lot, but my gut still says China or maybe Soviet Union.
It really depends on how far back you are going and what criteria you’re using to ascribe responsibility for any given type of death.
For example, if a CCP guard kills a Uyghur prisoner in one of the camps that’s obviously a death under the CCP, but if China creates an economic crisis in some country via its Belt and Road debt colonialism campaign and someone there subsequently dies due to hardship stemming from those economic issues is the CCP responsible?
However, this claim is completely absurd when you stop and think about it even for a minute. That figure 1 million is repeated again and again. Let’s just look at how much space would you actually need to intern one million people.
This is a photo of Rikers Island, New York City’s biggest prison. The actual size of a facility interning ten thousand people.
According to Wikipedia, “The average daily inmate population on the island is about 10,000, although it can hold a maximum of 15,000.” Let’s assume this is a Xinjiang detention camp, holding ten to fifteen thousand people. How many of these would it take to hold one million people?
Let’s do some math:
Rikers Size
Rikers Prisoners
One Million Uyghurs Size
413.2 acres (0.645 square miles)
10,000 to 15,000
43 to 64 square miles
In reality, one million people would probably take more space; all the supposed detention camps we see are much less dense than Rikers.
For comparison, San Francisco is 47 square miles. Amsterdam is 64 square miles. You’d literally need detention camps that total the size of San Francisco or Amsterdam to intern one million Uyghurs. It’d be like looking at a map of California. There’s Los Angeles. There’s San Diego. And look, there’s San Francisco Concentration City with its one million Uyghurs.
Practically all the stories we see about China trace back to Adrian Zenz is a far right fundamentalist nutcase and not a reliable source for any sort of information. The fact that he’s the primary source for practically every article in western media demonstrates precisely what I’m talking about when I say that coverage is divorced from reality.
Along with his “mission” against China, heavenly guidance has apparently prompted Zenz to denounce homosexuality, gender equality, and the banning of physical punishment against children as threats to Christianity.
The fact that this nutcase is being paraded as a credible researcher on the subject is absolutely surreal, and it’s clear that the methodology of his “research” doesn’t pass any kind of muster when examined closely.
It’s also worth noting that there is a political angle around the narrative around Xinjiang. For example, here’s George Bush’s chief of staff openly saying that US wants to destabilize the region, and NED recently admitting to funding Uyghur separatism for the past 16 years on their own official Twitter page. An ex-CIA operative details US operations radicalizing and training terrorists in the region in this book. Here’s an excerpt:
US has been stoking terrorism in the region while they’ve been running a propaganda campaign against China in the west. In fact, US even classified Uyghur separatists as a terrorist group at one point www.mintpressnews.com/…/276916/
Here’s an account from a Pakistani journalist who has been all over Xinjiang (which borders Pakistan) claims that western media reports on “atrocities” are lies. …com.pk/…/exposing-the-occidents-baseless-lies-ab…
It’s also worth noting that the accusations originate entirely from the west while Muslim majority countries support China, and their leaders have visited Xinjiang many times.
Also notable that whenever western media actually deigns to visit Xinjiang, which is not often, they’re unable to produce support for any of their claims of mass imprisonment and oppression, so they opt for insinuations instead apnews.com/…/coronavirus-pandemic-lifestyle-china…
More than the US? The country that maintained slaves for many generations, on land taken from slaughteted and genocided indigenous peoples? The country that is to this day actively supporting genocide purely to protect its economic interests via Imperialism?
I’d think so, yeah, the CCP alone has pretty insane numbers, which is saying a lot.
You have to keep in mind that there’s something like a million Uighurs in China that got scooped up and put in concentration camps 2010s. There’s Tianamen, Tibet, the purges during Xi’s rise to power, the brutalization of HK and the literal millions dead under Mao through both intentional acts to purge the party and punish dissidents and simply the incompetance of the the failed economic theories.
Millions of people died in China during the Great Leap, with estimates ranging from 15 to 55 million, making the Great Chinese Famine the largest or second-largest[1] famine in human history. [Wiki]
Pretty high number, and that’s not even counting anything more contemporary.
Beginning in 2014, the Chinese government, under the administration of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Xi Jinping, incarcerated more than an estimated one million Turkic Muslims without any legal process in internment camps. Operations from 2016 to 2021 were led by Xinjiang CCP Secretary Chen Quanguo.[2] It is the largest-scale detention of ethnic and religious minorities since World War II. [Wiki]
So, yes, the genocide in Gaza is criminal, no less egregious or evil and those committing or supporting it should be brought before a tribunal, but they’re still rookie numbers compared to the CCP. Even if you go all the way back to the Nakba. There’s simply no way around it.
If you’re going to act morally outraged about the US, you can’t then just skip over China because it’s politically uncomfortable. Xi had execution vans ffs.
Countless more. Do I really need to go on to illustrate just how evil the American Empire is, and why pulling a whataboutism to distract from this might be seen as insensitive?
I generally agree with you, but honestly, pro-China and pro-Soviet users talking about American deaths is whataboutism itself. I’m not saying they shouldn’t, but it’s rather glaring how much they avoid their own missteps.
Where was China or the USSR mentioned on this post? Purely in the comments section, and purely to assert that the US’s crimes are not as bad.
This post isn’t saying that the PRC and the USSR have never performed crimes. It isn’t avoiding their missteps, the purpose of this post is to talk about by far the worst Empire. Saying that the PRC and USSR also have committed atrocities only serves to minimize US atrocities here.
You’re right, this post is about America, and I don’t want to diminish what they’ve done. But if one wants to criticise, one opens thselves up to criticism. Glass houses and all that. In that vein, the OP seems to have a very limited set of topics, and if you remove criticisms of capitalism and America, he doesn’t seem to have much to say at all. It makes you wonder if they have an agenda, or if they’re even an actual person at all.
Maybe for you it seems that way. I think it’s perfectly acceptable to believe the US and Capitalism are horrible, without considering these views to be “an agenda.”
Do you have an “anti-China and anti-USSR agenda” by criticizing them when not involved? That’s a silly way of framing political views.
Millions of people died in China during the Great Leap, with estimates ranging from 15 to 55 million, making the Great Chinese Famine the largest or second-largest famine in human history
Millions of people died in China during the Great Leap, with estimates ranging from 15 to 55 million, making the Great Chinese Famine the largest or second-largest famine in human history
All those sources you posted don’t refute what you quoted from the other comment. Seems like a “not as bad as” logical fallacy at play. The other poster didn’t say the US was without fault; even though the US has killed many people doesn’t make the actions of those other regimes any less bad.
The sources I posted are meant to provide context. And what they show is that when you consider what things were like before, communism actually improved lives in a tangible way. While bad things certainly have happened in communist societies, as they do in every human society, overall trajectory is positive. Meanwhile, the atrocities committed in the name of capitalism, and by US in particular, eclipse anything that has happened under communism. US is a blight upon humanity and has brutally repressed progress in every corner of the world.
It’s not about communism or capitalism, it’s about historical mass death events. It’s just a coincidence some of the largest mass deaths happened under communism. For example, I’m sure the lives of Ukrainians were greatly improved sometime after the mass starvations during the holodomor.
I don’t even disagree with what you’re saying about the US but using this to imply that communist regimes of China and Russia were good actually is insane to me. Not as bad as fallacy in full effect.
It’s literally about the question of what types of outcomes each system produces in the long run. And yes, the lives of Ukrainians were massively improved after the revolution.
USSR provided free education to all citizens resulting in literacy rising from 33% to 99.9%:
USSR doubled life expectancy in just 20 years. A newborn child in 1926-27 had a life expectancy of 44.4 years, up from 32.3 years thirty years before. In 1958-59 the life expectancy for newborns went up to 68.6 years. the Semashko system of the USSR increased lifespan by 50% in 20 years. By the 1960’s, lifespans in the USSR were comparable to those in the USA:
Quality of nutrition improved after the Soviet revolution, and the last time USSR had a famine was in 1940s. CIA data suggests they ate just as much as Americans after WW2 peroid while having better nutrition:
Meanwhile, let’s look at the whole holodomor narrative of yours from a perspective of an actual historian who studied it. During the 1932 famine, the USSR sent aid to affected regions in an attempt to alleviate the famine. According to Mark Tauger in his article, The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933:
While the leadership did not stop exports, they did try to alleviate the famine. A 25 February 1933 Central Committee decree allotted seed loans of 320,000 tons to Ukraine and 240,000 tons to the northern Caucasus. Seed loans were also made to the Lower Volga and may have been made to other regions as well. Kul’chyts’kyy cites Ukrainian party archives showing that total aid to Ukraine by April 1933 actually exceeded 560,000 tons, including more than 80,000 tons of food
Some bring up massive grain exports during the famine to show that the Soviet Union exported food while Ukraine starved. This is fallacious for a number of reasons, but most importantly of all the amount of aid that was sent to Ukraine alone actually exceeded the amount that was exported at the time.
Aid to Ukraine alone was 60 percent greater than the amount exported during the same period. Total aid to famine regions was more than double exports for the first half of 1933.
According to Tauger, the reason why more aid was not provided was because of the low harvest
It appears to have been another consequence of the low 1932 harvest that more aid was not provided: After the low 1931, 1934, and 1936 harvests procured grain was transferred back to peasants at the expense of exports.
Tauger is not a communist, and ultimately this specific article takes the view that the low harvest was caused by collectivization (he factors in the natural causes of the famine in later articles, based on how he completely neglects to mention weather in this article at all its clear that his position shifted over the years). However, its interesting to see that the Soviets really did try to alleviate the famine as best as they could.
The reality is that famines were common in Tsarist times, and they were a major drive for the revolution in the first place. After the revolution, lives improved dramatically and famines stopped.
Look, I get it, I wouldn’t give a shit if TikTok imploded tomorrow and went out of business. I don’t use it. Actually, I would cheer on TikTok’s implosion. It’s a cesspool. However:
“First they came for the xxx and I didn’t care because I didn’t use or like xxx”…“and then they came for me or the thing I liked or used there was nobody left to defend me”
I knew I shouldn’t have said anything, because I would have become everyone’s enemy. Please don’t generalize my words, because I have this opinion only about tiktok only.
True. Impossible to fully censor. Easy to “censor enough”, force out of app stores, and deem illegal while being cheered on by the left and right because they both somehow think it’s in their interests, having abandoned the idea of free speech somewhere along in their ideological trajectory. Just like with TikTok ban or the Digital Services Act.
They’ll start by saying lemmy is spreading “disinformation” or “foreign influence” or “harming children” or whatever their excuse of the day is. Then legislate lemmy apps out of the app stores and go after lemmy server operators or users.
Not saying lemmy couldn’t survive as a network, the point of the meme is the dangerous precedent set when people support things like a TikTok ban and say the government should be able to regulate speech or access to speech in that manner. The government shouldn’t be able to tell you what you can say or think, who you share those thoughts with, or what media you consume. It’s a human right to think and speak and be able to listen to others speak. And unfortunately, for different reasons, both the left and right are cheering on its erosion.
Centralized platforms are proprietary, brittle, easily targeted. When they are taken down, they stay down.
Lemmy is, effectively, a protocol, not a platform. Anyone can host an instance, and they all talk to each other by default. Any of the big instances get knocked down, and they get replaced by a dozen others. An instance may die, but so long as someone wants to put up another, Lemmy remains.
Bitcoin is not a centralized platform. Tor is not a centralized platform. Government has had little success targeting these protocols.
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