Marxist-Leninist ☭

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Would the governing body of PRC in 1962 attributing the famine to government errors convince you otherwise? Would the Chinese government 20 years later confirming the same convince you?

    I’m not sure where you’re going with this. That the famine was accidental and (in part) caused by bad policies and mismanagement is what I’m saying happened. You’re agreeing with me there.

    If not, can you imagine a fact that would convince you? What is it?

    If you think the famine was accidental but the government’s bad policies caused it/made it worse, I already agree.

    If you think that the famine was intentional and the government was trying to kill peoples by starvation, I would need proof that they at least discussed it internally in order to be convinced. Leaked internal documents, testimony from peoples who were there (and can prove that they were), recording of meetings between party officials, that kind of things.


  • I’m sorry, but why would that matter? We tend to judge people by their actions, not their intent, when it comes to mass deaths.

    Right?

    Right?

    Maybe it’s my autism but dismissing a relevant question by implying that the person who asked it is immoral/unempathetic for even asking it seems pretty defensive to me, and is a non-argument regardless.

    Literally what the first commenter gave - there was a widespread famine in China, it’s caused by Mao agricultural policies.

    Now that one is on me, I could have worded that better. By cause-effect relationship in this context I meant the cause who’s effect was that the government chose to take whatever course of action you believe is responsible for the famine. Peoples take decisions for reasons, bad reasons sometimes, yes, but reasons nonetheless.

    It’s not about agreeing with the reasons, it’s about coherency. That an entire government, a group formed of thousands of peoples, would act all in concert with no motive, especially for a project on such a large scale and which would take so many resources, is nonsense. If you can’t present either proof that they really took the conscious decision to manufacture a famine or a motive to explain why they would want to do that, the claim that the famine was intentional is extremely dubious at best.

    Also, speaking of a government’s actions as if only the one person at the top was to blame is something peoples trying to speak about politics and history seriously should avoid.

    What are you contesting here? There was no famine? Famine is the narrative? Or that it wasn’t caused by policies but by… What? Weather? Weather was good.

    There was a famine. But it was not man made with the purpose of killing a large portion of the population, again, as the other commenter pointed out, why would they do such a thing? And why did they stop doing it? It makes no sense.

    The famine was the produce of a great number of different factors, inefficient and backward agricultural methods, bad weather, compound effects of WW2 + the Chinese civil war, mismanagement, trade embargoes, etc… But others could explain it better than I can.

    An other point we disagree on is the number of deaths from the famine. Numerous western academics intentionally inflate the death tolls of countries ruled by communist parties, most infamously “the black book of communism” and the “victims of communism foundation” who literally count Nazi invaders killed by the red army and peoples who could potentially have been born but weren’t as victims of communism.

    I don’t understand your point, please clarify it, in a way that isn’t just calling your interlocutors stupid or defensive.

    I called you defensive but I did not call you stupid, nor did I imply it.


  • It matter for the same reason a tribunal need to know the motive of a crime to give it appropriate punishment. It’s not about the morality of the action, it’s about a logically sound and coherent picture of the event.

    Peoples doing something bad for terribly bad reasons is coherent, peoples doing something bad for no reason at all isn’t. The fact that you don’t have any explanation as to why an entire government composed of thousand of peoples would do such a thing -like it or not- is a very big hole in your narrative, and rise some serious questions about it’s consistency and therefore about it’s likelihood (because an incoherent statement can never be true no matter what).

    Insisting that the event happened the way you say it did without providing any rational or cause-effect relationship and becoming defensive when explicitly asked to provide one puts both your narrative and your argumentation in it’s favor in the same category as those of conspiracy theorists who insists that “they” lie to us and immediately gets mad when asked to explain why “they” would.


  • If the US stopped sending weapons Israel would have to stop the genocide regardless of whether they want to or not. Already even with being pumped full of pentagon weapons and fundings all they can do is bombing unarmed civilians from far away because every time they try to actually fight Hamas or Hezbollah they get fucking shredded and have to retreat within a few months and their supposedly impenetrable iron dome gets regularly bullied by Hezbollah and Ansar Allah drones, so without US help they would be doomed to fall unless they sue for peace.


  • ExotiqueMatter@lemmygrad.mltoMemes@lemmy.mlDonmala Trarris
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    21 days ago

    Ha yes, wanting a politician that doesn’t have sewer fermented dogshit stances on literally every single important current political issue is “expecting perfection”.

    Keep scolding everyone who dares have even the mildest criticism of the blue clown show as they continue to slide more and more to the right, that worked out so well for you all this past election.



  • Multiple ways:

    • Unchallenged monopoly over the highest valued African industries. The majority of African export industry, from mineral exports like rare earth and gold to high value agricultural exports like cocoa and coffee, are overwhelmingly dominated by western corporations.

    • Direct theft of resources. European companies take advantage of their monopoly on extraction and transport of African minerals to unilaterally export mineral wealth out of Africa and put them into banks and reserves in Europe. For example, France import so much gold from their “former” colonies that it has one of the largest gold reserves in the entire world despite the fact that France doesn’t have a single active gold mine anywhere in it’s sovereign territory.

    • Capture of added value from noncompetitive raw exports. Through the IMF and World Bank, the west has put in place a multi-decade scheme of making sure Africa can’t industrialize while pretending to help them. Due to this, African nations don’t have any industry capable of processing their raw crops and minerals, forcing them to sell as-is and let western businesses cash in on the added value of processing them. For example, Ivory coast produce over 40% of the world’s cocoa beans supply, but since until China helped them build one Ivory coast didn’t have any processing plant, Ivory coast for a long time had to sell raw cocoa beans for low prices and let western chocolate, pharmaceutical and makeup corporation earn the added value of roasting and fermenting the beans, separating the oil and making consumer products out of them.

    • Exploitation of desperate workers. It is hardly a secret nowadays that Africans working in the mining or high value crops industries are horrifically exploited and work in high mortality rate, near slavery conditions for almost no pay whatsoever. Plenty of documentaries have been made on the subject, especially on Nestle’s treatment of their cocoa producers.

    • Unequal exchange. Due to the IMF scheme mentioned in point #3, Africa is stuck producing and exporting noncompetitive, low or no added value products, which translate to low revenues for the countries. The complementary of this fact is that, on the other hand, African nations have to buy every finished high added value products (cars, consumer electronics, machinery, etc…) from the west, generally for very high prices. This unequal exchange, Europe buy only cheap low value goods from Africa, Africa buys only expensive high value goods from Europe, results in a net flow of wealth away from Africa and directly into the pockets of European capitalists. As long as Africa continues to produce only low value goods and buy high value goods from Europe, which the scheme ensure it does, Africa will continue to have their wealth sucked away via this mechanism.