• Melatonin@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    11 hours ago

    “Oops! I killed 15 million people, but it was an accident. My bad. Who knew forcibly moving all the farmers to the city and making them work in factories would cause a famine?”

    -Mao, probably

    PS: 15 million is the low end number. 15-55 million is the commonly accepted number, with some estimates as high as 70 million.

    At some point you’d think he’d look around and notice.

    • bort [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      11 hours ago

      They did notice, and very quickly changed policy.

      The Great Chinese Famine was an enormous tragedy but it very obviously wasn’t deliberate.

      Also important to note, after a constant cycle of famine throughout its history, this was China’s last. The CPC worked hard to make sure something like it would never happen again.

      • ThirdConsul@lemmy.ml
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        11 hours ago

        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?

        • ExotiqueMatter@lemmygrad.ml
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          2 hours ago

          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.

          • ThirdConsul@lemmy.ml
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            40 minutes ago

            You’re talking about narrative, spin a story about tribunal, and then spin a story that I’m defensive. I’m not.

            Insisting that the event happened the way you say it did without providing any rational or cause-effect relationship

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

            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.

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