It is really a sign of the times we're living in though that saying something as self-evident as "Stalin's and Mao's regimes were responsible for megadeaths due to starvation" causes people to get upset though.
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Replying to @danlistensto @KennethFolk
All the deaths related to the Great Depression rest on capitalism, but somehow that doesn't get pointed out much. (And arguably those include many of the WWII deaths). We are good at seeing the sins of our enemies, but that's intellectually worthless if we can't see our own.
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Replying to @iwelsh @KennethFolk
it doesn't? are you sure? in my very conventional mainstream public high school history courses we studied the Great Depression in a lot of detail and it was represented as both a tragedy and an enormous policy failure that could have been prevented/mitigated.
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Replying to @danlistensto @KennethFolk
I certainly do not see it mentioned nearly as often in public debate as the Communist famine deaths. (Or the fools screaming Venezuela, as if it isn't just a mismanaged petro state.) Nor do I see people actually tote up the number of deaths.
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Replying to @iwelsh @KennethFolk
alright, well I can't argue with your subjective experience of relative frequency of topics in the media you personally consume. have you seen anyone deny or write apologia about the Great Depression though?
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Replying to @danlistensto @KennethFolk
No. But nor have I seen capitalists accept the death count of the Depression and WWII Western front as accruing to them and then comparing it to the deaths of communism. Let alone accept the death counts of various famines and genocides as in India and N. America.
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to be clear, I'm fine with accepting the famines as "Marxist". I don't care. But in the same time period as the Russian famine England caused a massive famine in India, and I don't accept that India wasn't part of the capitalist world system.
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Replying to @iwelsh @KennethFolk
mismanagement of India by the colonial authorities is very tragic and bad. the motivations for it were most likely a mixture of callousness (and racism) and desire to exploit colonies. that's substantively different than Marxist policies not working as intended.
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to be clear, I am not in any way justifying the brutality of colonial regimes or capitalist exploitation. those are bad things and should be criticized. I don't understand what you're point is though besides just trying to do some reflexive whataboutism.
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Replying to @danlistensto @KennethFolk
this is actually an important question. If you want to compare systems you have to compare systems. If both cause deaths, then look at that. Hard to do on twitter. I wrote the argument at length.http://www.ianwelsh.net/did-the-industrial-revolution-require-land-clearances-slavery-genocide-and-empire/ …
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I don't want to compare systems. My original remark was about the meta context of public discussions, not about comparing systems. Have a nice day.
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Replying to @danlistensto @KennethFolk
Understood. I won't talk with you again.
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