Dukasaur wrote:If the Hitlers on the site are forced to change their name, the various Stalins and Maos should be forced to change theirs.
Not a valid comparison.
inb4 20m people starved hurr durr
Moderator: Community Team
Dukasaur wrote:If the Hitlers on the site are forced to change their name, the various Stalins and Maos should be forced to change theirs.
mrswdk wrote:Dukasaur wrote:If the Hitlers on the site are forced to change their name, the various Stalins and Maos should be forced to change theirs.
Not a valid comparison.
inb4 20m people starved hurr durr
mrswdk wrote:Dukasaur wrote:If the Hitlers on the site are forced to change their name, the various Stalins and Maos should be forced to change theirs.
Not a valid comparison.
Hunter S. Thompson wrote:The Edge... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over..
Endgame422 wrote:mrswdk wrote:Dukasaur wrote:If the Hitlers on the site are forced to change their name, the various Stalins and Maos should be forced to change theirs.
Not a valid comparison.
inb4 20m people starved hurr durr
In the context this was written in it certainly is a valid comparison. That was about people's names that could be offensive. Not about who is better/worse as a person, or about the related politics you want it to be. The point was people could be offended by Mao references on this site and here you are,offended.
tzor wrote:mrswdk wrote:Dukasaur wrote:If the Hitlers on the site are forced to change their name, the various Stalins and Maos should be forced to change theirs.
Not a valid comparison.
A totally valid comparison ... at least for Stalin.
Oh and it's 45 not 20.
But are we just talking numbers or are we talking about exterminations in concentration camps? Hitler killed on race and Stalin killed on social status. Are we talking about failed economic policies or a deliberate attempt to keep food from going to people (by stealing all of the food) resulting in them starving to death? (this the case with Stalin.) I think I can make a very good case for Hitler and Stalin being relatively equal (and the only reason why we don't treat them equal was that Stalin got a "GET OUT OF JAIL FREE" Card from Churchill for being on the right side (in the end) of WWII).
mrswdk wrote:tzor wrote:mrswdk wrote:Dukasaur wrote:If the Hitlers on the site are forced to change their name, the various Stalins and Maos should be forced to change theirs.
Not a valid comparison.
A totally valid comparison ... at least for Stalin.
Oh and it's 45 not 20.
But are we just talking numbers or are we talking about exterminations in concentration camps? Hitler killed on race and Stalin killed on social status. Are we talking about failed economic policies or a deliberate attempt to keep food from going to people (by stealing all of the food) resulting in them starving to death? (this the case with Stalin.) I think I can make a very good case for Hitler and Stalin being relatively equal (and the only reason why we don't treat them equal was that Stalin got a "GET OUT OF JAIL FREE" Card from Churchill for being on the right side (in the end) of WWII).
Oh, yah. I just meant the inclusion of Mao in that post. Stalin and Hitler did fairly comparable things.
BigBallinStalin wrote:Why separate them from national socialism?
Mao Zedong, founder of the People's Republic of China, qualifies as the greatest mass murderer in world history, an expert who had unprecedented access to official Communist Party archives said yesterday.
Speaking at The Independent Woodstock Literary Festival, Frank Dikƶtter, a Hong Kong-based historian, said he found that during the time that Mao was enforcing the Great Leap Forward in 1958, in an effort to catch up with the economy of the Western world, he was responsible for overseeing "one of the worst catastrophes the world has ever known".
Mr Dikƶtter, who has been studying Chinese rural history from 1958 to 1962, when the nation was facing a famine, compared the systematic torture, brutality, starvation and killing of Chinese peasants to the Second World War in its magnitude. At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in China over these four years; the worldwide death toll of the Second World War was 55 million.
Mr Dikƶtter is the only author to have delved into the Chinese archives since they were reopened four years ago. He argued that this devastating period of history ā which has until now remained hidden ā has international resonance. "It ranks alongside the gulags and the Holocaust as one of the three greatest events of the 20th century.... It was like [the Cambodian communist dictator] Pol Pot's genocide multiplied 20 times over," he said.
Between 1958 and 1962, a war raged between the peasants and the state; it was a period when a third of all homes in China were destroyed to produce fertiliser and when the nation descended into famine and starvation, Mr Dikƶtter said.
His book, Mao's Great Famine; The Story of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, reveals that while this is a part of history that has been "quite forgotten" in the official memory of the People's Republic of China, there was a "staggering degree of violence" that was, remarkably, carefully catalogued in Public Security Bureau reports, which featured among the provincial archives he studied. In them, he found that the members of the rural farming communities were seen by the Party merely as "digits", or a faceless workforce. For those who committed any acts of disobedience, however minor, the punishments were huge.
State retribution for tiny thefts, such as stealing a potato, even by a child, would include being tied up and thrown into a pond; parents were forced to bury their children alive or were doused in excrement and urine, others were set alight, or had a nose or ear cut off. One record shows how a man was branded with hot metal. People were forced to work naked in the middle of winter; 80 per cent of all the villagers in one region of a quarter of a million Chinese were banned from the official canteen because they were too old or ill to be effective workers, so were deliberately starved to death.
Mr Dikƶtter said that he was once again examining the Party's archives for his next book, The Tragedy of Liberation, which will deal with the bloody advent of Communism in China from 1944 to 1957.
He said the archives were already illuminating the extent of the atrocities of the period; one piece of evidence revealed that 13,000 opponents of the new regime were killed in one region alone, in just three weeks. "We know the outline of what went on but I will be looking into precisely what happened in this period, how it happened, and the human experiences behind the history," he said.
Mr Dikƶtter, who teaches at the University of Hong Kong, said while it was difficult for any historian in China to write books that are critical of Mao, he felt he could not collude with the "conspiracy of silence" in what the Chinese rural community had suffered in recent history.
mrswdk wrote:The vast majority of the starvations were accidental,
So, we'll just "Whoops! My bad!" And everything is okay? That's like someone running over a person in the middle of the street while they were on the phone and saying "Whoopsie, my bad guys!" and driving off without anything happening (but on a much larger scale). Was it intentional? No, but does that absolve them of killing the person? Somehow, I don't think so.mrswdk wrote:The vast majority of the starvations were accidental, caused by Mao's misguided policies (which led to a huge food shortage) rather than deliberate persecution. That's why the GLF only lasted 3 years: Mao realized he was messing up and abandoned it.
Except Mao was a dictator, an absolute ruler. Obama, as much as people criticize him, has no where near that power and can only do so much because a lot has to go through Congress and the Supreme Court. Apples to oranges.Also, you can't just lump all local government activity into a column labelled 'Mao'. Every time a black kid gets shot by a psycho cop in America, is that 'Obama'?
Line up 45 million people in a single file line. I think you would be convinced that it is quite a large number of people.Also, 45m sounds big but at the time was approximately 4% of the entire country (I'm assuming a population of 1b). That isn't an astonishingly large number of people to do in a nationwide famine.
Little late for that one though.Long live Grandpa Mao
muy_thaiguy wrote:So, we'll just "Whoops! My bad!" And everything is okay? That's like someone running over a person in the middle of the street while they were on the phone and saying "Whoopsie, my bad guys!" and driving off without anything happening (but on a much larger scale). Was it intentional? No, but does that absolve them of killing the person? Somehow, I don't think so.mrswdk wrote:The vast majority of the starvations were accidental, caused by Mao's misguided policies (which led to a huge food shortage) rather than deliberate persecution. That's why the GLF only lasted 3 years: Mao realized he was messing up and abandoned it.
my_thaiguy wrote:Except Mao was a dictator, an absolute ruler. Obama, as much as people criticize him, has no where near that power and can only do so much because a lot has to go through Congress and the Supreme Court. Apples to oranges.MrSWDK wrote:Also, you can't just lump all local government activity into a column labelled 'Mao'. Every time a black kid gets shot by a psycho cop in America, is that 'Obama'?
wai_mai_guy wrote:Line up 45 million people in a single file line. I think you would be convinced that it is quite a large number of people.MrsWdk wrote:Also, 45m sounds big but at the time was approximately 4% of the entire country (I'm assuming a population of 1b). That isn't an astonishingly large number of people to do in a nationwide famine.
tzor wrote:mrswdk wrote:Dukasaur wrote:If the Hitlers on the site are forced to change their name, the various Stalins and Maos should be forced to change theirs.
Not a valid comparison.
A totally valid comparison ... at least for Stalin.
Oh and it's 45 not 20.
But are we just talking numbers or are we talking about exterminations in concentration camps? Hitler killed on race and Stalin killed on social status. Are we talking about failed economic policies or a deliberate attempt to keep food from going to people (by stealing all of the food) resulting in them starving to death? (this the case with Stalin.) I think I can make a very good case for Hitler and Stalin being relatively equal (and the only reason why we don't treat them equal was that Stalin got a "GET OUT OF JAIL FREE" Card from Churchill for being on the right side (in the end) of WWII).
chang50 wrote:tzor wrote:mrswdk wrote:Dukasaur wrote:If the Hitlers on the site are forced to change their name, the various Stalins and Maos should be forced to change theirs.
Not a valid comparison.
A totally valid comparison ... at least for Stalin.
Oh and it's 45 not 20.
But are we just talking numbers or are we talking about exterminations in concentration camps? Hitler killed on race and Stalin killed on social status. Are we talking about failed economic policies or a deliberate attempt to keep food from going to people (by stealing all of the food) resulting in them starving to death? (this the case with Stalin.) I think I can make a very good case for Hitler and Stalin being relatively equal (and the only reason why we don't treat them equal was that Stalin got a "GET OUT OF JAIL FREE" Card from Churchill for being on the right side (in the end) of WWII).
The Soviets were slightly more than just being on the right side of wwii..the Red Army primarily defeated the Wehrmacht so unless Churchill and Truman intended to stab them in the back after their heroics and sacrifice I fail to see where Stalin was given a get out of jail free card by anyone.
mrswdk wrote:muy_thaiguy wrote:So, we'll just "Whoops! My bad!" And everything is okay? That's like someone running over a person in the middle of the street while they were on the phone and saying "Whoopsie, my bad guys!" and driving off without anything happening (but on a much larger scale). Was it intentional? No, but does that absolve them of killing the person? Somehow, I don't think so.mrswdk wrote:The vast majority of the starvations were accidental, caused by Mao's misguided policies (which led to a huge food shortage) rather than deliberate persecution. That's why the GLF only lasted 3 years: Mao realized he was messing up and abandoned it.
There is a big difference between causing deaths by accident and causing deaths by deliberate extermination (e.g. Hitler, Stalin, Bomber Harris, the Manhattan Project).my_thaiguy wrote:Except Mao was a dictator, an absolute ruler. Obama, as much as people criticize him, has no where near that power and can only do so much because a lot has to go through Congress and the Supreme Court. Apples to oranges.MrSWDK wrote:Also, you can't just lump all local government activity into a column labelled 'Mao'. Every time a black kid gets shot by a psycho cop in America, is that 'Obama'?
In many (probably most, possibly 'all') cases, local cadres pretended food production was just fine, even when they were falling behind and failing to grow sufficient crops. Central government (i.e. Mao & Friends) levied more food than the rural areas could afford to give, but only because they had no idea they were taking too much. Once the information trickled through, the GLF was abandoned and Mao apologized.
Let me get this straight, you don't think Mao exterminated dissenters and only "accidentally" killed tens of millions of people? I don't know whether I should laugh at that naivete or cry because of your disillusionment of this.mrswdk wrote:muy_thaiguy wrote:So, we'll just "Whoops! My bad!" And everything is okay? That's like someone running over a person in the middle of the street while they were on the phone and saying "Whoopsie, my bad guys!" and driving off without anything happening (but on a much larger scale). Was it intentional? No, but does that absolve them of killing the person? Somehow, I don't think so.mrswdk wrote:The vast majority of the starvations were accidental, caused by Mao's misguided policies (which led to a huge food shortage) rather than deliberate persecution. That's why the GLF only lasted 3 years: Mao realized he was messing up and abandoned it.
There is a big difference between causing deaths by accident and causing deaths by deliberate extermination (e.g. Hitler, Stalin, Bomber Harris, the Manhattan Project).
Uh huh. He apologized after millions died, and then continued to let millions more die. Somehow, I see his "apology" going something like this.my_thaiguy wrote:Except Mao was a dictator, an absolute ruler. Obama, as much as people criticize him, has no where near that power and can only do so much because a lot has to go through Congress and the Supreme Court. Apples to oranges.MrSWDK wrote:Also, you can't just lump all local government activity into a column labelled 'Mao'. Every time a black kid gets shot by a psycho cop in America, is that 'Obama'?
In many (probably most, possibly 'all') cases, local cadres pretended food production was just fine, even when they were falling behind and failing to grow sufficient crops. Central government (i.e. Mao & Friends) levied more food than the rural areas could afford to give, but only because they had no idea they were taking too much. Once the information trickled through, the GLF was abandoned and Mao apologized.
I think our ideas of "greatest leaders who ever lived" have completely different meanings. Like, you think a man responsible for the deaths of at least 45 million people (about on par with Stalin and Hitler) and for completely tanking the economy of a massive country like China within a few years equates to being a "great leader".Mao may have been one of the greatest leaders who has ever lived but even he had to delegate some of the workload when it came to running a country of 1billion people.
wai_mai_guy wrote:Line up 45 million people in a single file line. I think you would be convinced that it is quite a large number of people.MrsWdk wrote:Also, 45m sounds big but at the time was approximately 4% of the entire country (I'm assuming a population of 1b). That isn't an astonishingly large number of people to do in a nationwide famine.
2dimes wrote:mrswdk wrote:The vast majority of the starvations were accidental,
Oops-a-daisy.
Hunter S. Thompson wrote:The Edge... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over..
TA1LGUNN3R wrote:"Branded with hot metal...?" How else do you brand things?
The Racist Diplodocus wrote:There was no starvation in the big coastal cities or in the far north, where most people were loyal to Mao.
Return to Practical Explanation about Next Life,
Users browsing this forum: No registered users