this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2024
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Sure beats Marxism and Fascism
Rich... considering it's coming from somebody who understands neither.
There's a 100% chance that I know more about than you... You know since I've actually studied both in college. But I'm sure an armchair professor such yourself with a PhD from Lemmy's echo chambers knows better than my professors.
Which college was that? Prager U, maybe?
If you did, you'd actually sound as if you knew anything about the subject matter at hand.
But you don't - which means you didn't.
Nope, a respected public University in New England.
Your entire argument here boils down to "nuh-uh", which is absolutely meaningless. If you have actual criticisms then stop beating around the bush and get on with it. Otherwise, I have no interest in whatever this is.
Oh really? A "respected public University in New England" taught you to think like a cheap Tucker Carlson knock-off?
Do tell... does this "respected public University in New England" do refunds?
I hope for your part they do.
Yeah okay professor Armchair Marxist, I'm sure everybody is wrong and fake, and you're the only one that's right and credible.
No, no, no, "expert" - I want to know more about this (supposed) “respected public University in New England” you attended that (somehow) failed to teach you the difference between Marxism and Marxist-Leninism and/or Maoism.
We're talking basics here, Clyde - basics that you don't seem to get despite your pretentions to "expertise" on the subject matter at hand.
I'm all ears.
Hey now don’t make fun of Sleezy! An intro to political science class taught by some adjunct has all the information you could possibly need on Marxism! All the stuff about linen is just for the fashion nerds.
I'd stop, but... at this point the jokes are writing themselves.
How?
Well it's quite simple really, you have three choices:
Fascism: A failed murderous ideology in both theory and practice that has killed tens of million and has done nothing but bring tyranny, poverty, famine, hate, and genocide everywhere it went.
Marxism: A failed murderous ideology in both theory and practice that has killed tens of million and has done nothing but bring tyranny, poverty, famine, hate, and genocide everywhere it went.
Neoliberalism: A very flawed ideology that takes economic freedom to an extreme and puts too much faith in unregulated free markets.
Sounds like a no brainer choice to me.
Broad generalizations, I can’t argue against that. Defeated by vaguery again.
You can't argue, period. Marxism can't be argued for on its own merits. It needs fallacies, enemies, violence, and censorship to keep itself from collapsing.
What merits does Marxism have? What fallacies, enemies, violence and censorship does it use to keep from collapsing?
Your biases are showing, honey.
Good, I'm very biased against failed tyrannical ideologies.
So no good reason to listen to anything you have to say, got it.
You don't listen to anything that's not from your echo chambers in the first place. If you weren't a closed minded moron, you wouldn't be a Marxist.
Is that so?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_economic_reform
If you want to see Marxism in China then look no further than Maoist China. That was true socialism implemented down to the letter... And it was one of the biggest disasters in human history.
Yeah no shit it was because of the reforms the socialists implemented that they were able to eradicate poverty, not sure how that's supposed to help your point.
Life expectancy nearly doubled while Mao was in power. that's not "one of the biggest disasters in human history," it was the single greatest improvement in quality of life on such a large scale in such a short time period ever.
Do you even understand what the reforms were?
Mao killed somewhere between 40 million and 80 million people during his 27 year reign. He is widely considered to be the person responsible for the highest death toll in human history. The Great Leap Forward by itself is estimated to have somewhere between 15 million to 55 million deaths. The Great Chinese famine is the biggest famine ever recorded and is one of the worst anthropogenic disasters in human history. This is not the hill you should die on.
China went through the Opium wars, the Sino-French war, the first Sino-Japanese war, the Russian invasions of northern China, the second Sino-Japanese war that led to the Japanese genocide against the Chinese, the Taiping Rebellion, the North Chinese famine, the Boxer Rebellion, the Dungan Revolt, the Chinese civil war, the Miao rebellion, Red Turban Rebellion, Panthay Rebellion, the Punti–Hakka Clan Wars, the 1911 revolution, the Laogai camps, the land reform movement, the cultural revolution, the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries, the Great Leap Forward, and the list goes on and on. All of these events happened within the span of around 150 years, and the estimated death toll for them in aggregate is somewhere between 150 million to 200 million. Do you begin to comprehend how batshit crazy that is? Literally any sort of stability would've seen the life expectancy shoot up because there aren't people dying left and right.
The same thing happened in Russia. They went through a lot of shit that ended up killing so many people, but once Stalin finally fucked off, the life expectancy went up. The same happened in Germany after WWII or India after the British or so many other countries that went through lots of horrible events in rapid succession. Once a stable government is in place, things will improve no matter how horrible the ruling regime is.
Bzzzt Sorry, that is incorrect.
You can see various dips in life expectancy prior to the communists coming to power - those dips represent the various wars you mentioned. The baseline, even in times of peace, was still less than 35. It wasn't just the wars and instability, it was the abject poverty and exploitation that people had been living under. They had frequent famines, zero access to medical care, and most of what the peasants made went straight to the aristocratic landlords. The life expectancy sprung up extremely rapidly following the revolution, when it did not after any of the previous wars, because the main reason for it increasing was not the end of the war but the communists' policies.
The communists put a stop to all of that, and though there was a lot of turmoil and missteps, they were enormously successful at improving the quality of life of the people. When they took power, China was a third world country, today, the average life expectancy is higher than that of the US. No other faction, certainly not the Nationalists, or the Japanese, or the warlords, or the Qing, would have been willing or able to do that.
China's self proclaimed "century of humiliation" never really say any peace time or stability. It was on disaster after another from the late 1700s/early 1800s until 1965-1970. The communists took control over mainland China in 1949. You can clearly see from the graph that you posted that life expectancy was stagnant and even declined between 1950 and 1965, which is well into the communist era. This was when Mao went on his rampages killing the previously mentioned 40 to 80 million people. China did not see stability until Mao's reign of terror started to weaken due to his old age in the late 60s (He died in 1976). That's when the life expectancy started rising to normal levels.
This is objectively false. Mao's Marxist policies are precisely what led him to become the single biggest killer in human history. Mao's death toll rivals the aggregate number of deaths during WWII... by far the bloodiest war in human history that saw some of the worst genocides ever recorded. Most academic estimates show that the higher end of the death toll ranges caused by Mao's policies is a figure higher than all the people that were murdered under Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Hirohito, and Lleopold II combined... some of the worst killers in history.
No, in the first half of the 20th century alone, China went through the 1911 revolution, the second Sino-Japanese war, the Chinese civil war, the land reform movement, the cultural revolution, the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries, the Great Leap Forward, and the Laogai camps one after another. Millions of people were killed just about every year until the late 1960s. Literally any form of stability would've shown the same results.
No, they didn't. They literally did all of those things. From purges to famines to invading other countries (Tibet and Vietnam) to democide to ruthlessly squashing rebellions. Things only started to improve when Deng Xiaoping implemented the economic reforms in the late 70s and 80s to liberalize the economy and adopt capitalism. That's when China's historic rise happened.
Wtf are you talking about? The Qing was an empire that rules for 200 years before foreign powers started dividing and conquering the empire which eventually led to it's demise as it wasn't able to fight all the foreign powers and squash all the rebellions. The Japanese wanted to genocide the Chinese. The warlords wanted to conquer the country for themselves but all failed to do so. The nationalists never had a chance to properly govern until they went to Taiwan.
It's killing us slower?