Stalin’s 20 million and Mao’s 70 million both come from a book called ‘The Black Book of Communism’ where th authors tried to inflate all the numbers as much as possible to arrive at 100 million deaths under communism in the end. The really high numbers come from taking the difference between the population decades later and what the population would have been if the borth rate hadn’t dropped (even though lower birth rates are an indication of better living standards).
Also, if you leave out the USSR’s purges (Soviet archives revealed around 800k), almost all of the deaths come from ‘man made famines’. Completely disregarding that in both China and Russia there have been famines all the time before their revolutions. Both countries were among the poorest and most backward in the world. No government on earth could have prevented all famines immediately. After some years after Mao’s and Stalin’s reorganizations of agriculture, famines were eliminated (except for during WW2). Life expectancy doubled within 30 years under communist China. Very quickly in the Soviet Union as well.
Of course you can argue about the governments having been able to do it better in hindsight, but even then the deaths certainly weren’t cold blooded murder.
Considering this, you certainly won’t arrive at the tens of millions of people killed just by the US military. Many, many more if you factor in indirect deaths (by embargoes, sanctions, refusing to allow other countries to produce their vaccines, etc.).
Not my favorite community but I wish !writingprompts had more engagement. It was really cool on Reddit and I wish it got more love here as well. I’d participate too but I can’t write for shit.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !beebutts, !trippinthroughtime, !nominativedeterminism
lol this place is nothing but libs, i mean u see blue maga people everywhere, im sure they are very confident that this community reinforces the ameriKKKan genocide machine not opposes it.
this is a meme about amerikkka banning website because they expose amarican backed or committed warcrimes and genocides, what the fuck are u talking about.
I’m as critical of the US as anyone but if I have to pick one to spy on me, I’ll pick the US.
Yes both are bad. Don’t start going “but America” on me please lol. This is not me saying the US isn’t violating our civil liberties regularly. But we do have more here than Chinese citizens do. Also, China has an adversarial stance to the US so there’s another layer to it. Same reason I object to Russia interfering with elections and also don’t like what our own domestic media operations do. Both are bad, but Russia is objectively worse.
But for real folks don’t download TikTok regardless of who holds the reins.
But what are the Chinese going to be able to do you? If you are an American living under the American government theres much more they could do to you, such as locking you up.
That is a strange question. If you use any service to consume media, the service has a huge influence on what information you receive. It is a common complaint over media. Using a service which is under control of someone who doesn’t have your best interest in mind, is giving power over your media consumption to that actor. Which is bad. That is why you should care about who e.h. owns and controls the Washington Post.
I didn’t pick aside. I don’t use TikTok and I don’t care who owns it. But I live in the US, theoretically I would rather one entity spying on me than two lol
If I don’t want to be spied on by the US I would have to leave the country, which is not exactly an option. Then I would have to determine a country that does not spy on its citizens or is otherwise not spied on heavily by another country. I’d be very curious with that list looks like. I imagine it’s very small, and very undesirable.
I use a lot of digital tools to protect my privacy and have fought for digital privacy rights directly. Don’t lecture me please.
Where is this magical land you live?
Honestly I’m just getting tired of discussions where people lecture me about “just taking it laying down“ as if somehow I have the ability to end the US surveillance state or otherwise opt out of it. I have limited options, as do all of us. I am acknowledging reality, not saying I endorse it or don’t even push back where I can. These kinds of comments are flippant and annoying.
TL;DR: zero isn’t a real option today so don’t act like it is.
People generally don’t not “choose” freedom. We didn’t wake up one morning and say, y’know, I feel like giving away all of my personal data to the government. Telling people whom you’ve got no idea of their struggles to “be a leader” from your keyboard isn’t constructive. It’s noise at best, and condescending at worst. But you do you.
I cant make your life more free for you. You have to do it.
I cant think of every way to make your life more free. You have to invoke your own creativity.
These are choices to make, and when pressed I responded. But I only offer advice, and it is open ended at worst.
Im not telling people how to live, im merely stating that them not shooting themselves in the foot would be beneficial if they say they dont like being shot in the foot.
Because that’s the way it is. My dislike of it is immaterial. It’s the current state of affairs today, June 4th, 2024.
It’s also why I said “if I have to pick.” Whenever these discussions come up people act like that’s an endorsement. No amount of qualifiers prevents this interpretation.
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.
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