Can definitely blame them… Several of the famines in their ‘empire’ were either engineered, caused through incompetence or arrogance, or ignored when preventable.
Ref: Any of bengal’s several famines under British rule, frankly even after once you take Churchill into account.
It is like miles away from the intentional economical engineering we are talking about. Still not sure why you are so bent on trying to wiggle them into a comparsion between regimes and personnel more direct, intentional and immediate like Mao or Stalin.
If you dont distinguish from those, then why even have a debate on them?
The joke implied that the question intended to ask one or very few directly involved personnel and you disregarded that. Thats it.
A famine is a widespread scarcity of food,[1][2] caused by several factors including war, natural disasters, crop failure, widespread poverty, an economic catastrophe or government policies.
Hey, i hate the british too, but the article doesn’t directly blame the british for the famines and it also includes famines that took place in non-british held or administrated territories.
Nevertheless, it does point out that in many cases, british administration worsened the situation.
It also just one territory, I’m sure the Irish also have a few bones to pick.
Though speaking of time advantage, the best answer might be “mosquitos”, and while “blood sucking insects” could be a name for british colonists, they didn’t spread malaria since the dawn of humanity
Lame jokes can be presented in a funny way. Delivery is important. My favorite method is “matter of fact” like I am telling a normal story about usual things. Catches the recipient off-guard and the joke lands much more betterer.
I get the joke but I still expected some tankies to show up. But then again, OP is on lemmy.world which is defederated with the tankie instances so that’s why
Capitalism instead made food absurdly abundant and gave everyone air conditioned boxes.
Edit: to address all of the nonsense responses below all at once: China’s embrace of capitalism has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.
Capitalism didn’t give us shit. We had to trade 1/3 of our lives for that “abundance”. Don’t make money because you’re disabled? Doesn’t seem so abundant anymore. Also, growing food isn’t a byproduct of capitalism. The agricultural revolution began before capitalism existed. Imagine how much better your life would be if you didn’t parrot ruling class talking points. You aren’t ruling class so stop LARPing as a member of it.
Noobish kdr. Max 10 millions deaths, somewhere between a French general during WWI (not counting German casualties) and minor paranoid dictators. Too much time larping as a psychopathic torturer, not enough time getting the job done. Mao killed several million people on a good mood, that’s professionalism.
While it has proven difficult to accurately estimate the pre-colonial population and the amount by which it changed under the Congo Free State, estimates for the Congolese population decline during Leopold’s rule range from 1 million to 15 million.
How about Bill Gates? His control of intellectual property law allowed him to almost personally stop the global south from manufacturing their own COVID vaccines and instead have to purchase them from the west. Bill Gates is answerable to millions of deaths. He’s one of the most evil people alive but you get weird looks saying so. He’s one of the top 5 richest people in the world and has spent the last two decades doing PR.
The question does not require a single name, it said who, which can be answered with a list of people or groups of people. Eg. Who did I make love to last night? A: Your parents!
That’s pretty fucked in the head, fam, even if these lists love blaming single communists but it when it comes time to talk about the death tolls of WW1 and 2 it’s always a shared responsibility and contextual.
What else would it be? I don’t see how one could blame WW1 on a single person. Though I would say most of WW2 could be blamed on a single person, if you really feel like it.
The common narrative of WW1 is that it indeed was started by a single person. Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand which most people agree was the inciting incident that caused WW1.
I think it would be quite reductive to just blame the assassin. Sure, he was the one that created the spark that ignited the conflict, but it had been brewing for years, and we can’t ignore the roles the heads of states were playing in starting the war.
And Mao personally executed 40 million people, huh? There wasn’t an entire ecosystem of officials fabricating reports at every level? His head of state security gets no credit for making everyone afraid to tell the truth?
Hell, the obnoxious thing about it is all it really does it blame the wrong single communist, people go on about the sparrows but Lysenkoism had destroyed crop yields before they got exterminated.
So, yes, it is as absurd to blame Mao entirely for The Great Leap Forward as it is to blame a Serbian assassin for WW1. There were cultural considerations, treaties, idiot officials, an agricultural policy built almost entirely on fraud, etc etc.
The most devastating thing about the Great Leap Forward is that the famine was entirely preventable if people weren’t afraid to tell the truth, and that simply isn’t a situation that can be built by one person.
Hell, there were good crops left to rot because the workers had left for the industrialization projects in the cities. Do you think Mao personally said “fuck that rice, go build some tractors?”
Everything is contextual. Hell the plan the assassins had was exactly to provoke a war. They might not have thought it would get as big as it did, they just wanted a civil war for independence, but if intentions don’t matter, and they must not for this discussion because the intention of The Great Leap Forward wasn’t to starve people.
The funny thing with The Black Hand’s plan is, it worked. Serbia didn’t just get independence, it became the primary power of Yugoslavia when the Austro-Hungarian Empire was dissolved.
Well, the workers didn’t own the means of production, they didn’t abolish currency, they didn’t do anything about class division, they didn’t abolish the state, they didn’t empower the working class, and they aren’t going to do any of these things later, but on the other hand, you clearly think mao was very trustworthy so surely you must just be taking his word for it.
“land tilled by the peasantry was increasingly subject to government control, undoing many key principles of ownership as we shall see in the subsequent section ‘The Collectivisation of Agriculture.’”
So… the government took it. Making it a meaningless gesture. Communism is not when the government owns things.
Y’know it’s not hard to figure this stuff out. The government took everything in china. That doesn’t even take research, that’s basic knowledge.
Bold of you to call me “fucking stupid” when you didn’t even read your own source, not to mention that that’s ONE of the requirements, not all of them, and they didn’t even do that.
Especially trying to accuse me of not reading the source when you skipped past to the very last paragraph to dishonestly quote out of context a line that even within itself betrays the fact that you’re being a dishonest piece of shit.
Congratulations, you’ve at best given 1 of the things that I listed… and tried to turn that into me being the idiot and not you. Except you didn’t because you know full well the chinese government owns that now. They didn’t give the land to the people, they pretended to briefly and then took it for themselves. Unlike you I have actually bothered to research these things: resourcehub.bakermckenzie.com/…/real-estate-law
Who owns land in china? the chinese government. So, no, they did not even make an attempt.
You said they didn’t do anything about class division and being the debatelord idiot you are, you decided to ignore the fact as you read it that they abolished an entire landlord class so you could stay on course with your reply.
When the government takes everything is that solving class division in your mind, or is that just creating a new class that owns everything?
Now, what I want you to try to do, with your very useful and very large brain is compare the list of things that make communism, and compare the list of things that the chinese did, right, and notice that the chinese didn’t do any of them.
Abolish class division < they created a new class, their own bourgeois, and took everything. This could ARGUABLY be an attempt… and it’s the best you’ve got.
Abolish currency < not even attempted
Abolish the state < not even attempted
Give the workers the means of production < not even attempted
So, at best, they attempted one of the things… and didn’t do it.
And when I say you don’t need research for this, I’m saying that it’s common knowledge that the chinese government took anything… Even gradeschoolers know that.
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