I would really rather that these were actual examples, and not conspiracy theories. We all have our own unsubstantiated ideas about what shadowy no-gooders are doing, but I’d rather hear about things that are actually happening.

  • zenitsu@sh.itjust.works
    98·
    11 months ago

    China’s great leap and the soviet famine alone take you more than half way there using the higher estimates (now add gulags, red terror, etc…) might not get exactly to 100, but it’s not so far off to qualify meaningfully as a lie (unless you’re speaking to a braindead tankie).

    • rando895@lemmy.ml
      173·
      11 months ago

      The problem with these counts is there is no way of making them look good, like lives saved due to “x”. How many people lived because the Soviets managed to eliminate all famines in their territory after that? A huge feat given their relative frequency beforehand.

      And then you can blame countless deaths on capitalism, feudalism, slavery, but then do you normalize those numbers based on total world population?

      What about blaming AK-47s? The police?

      My point is that it’s a pointless metric that is only used to drum up support against some group of people, not a useful one for objectively understanding anything. It does away with all context, and replaces it with some inane number.

    • knfrmity@lemmygrad.ml
      71·
      11 months ago

      No they don’t.

      But you’re just proving the trope asked about in the original post.

    • dnick@lemmy.world
      63·
      11 months ago

      I think the point is that it’s difficult to attribute that to communism in any meaningful way where you’re comparing it to non-communism. Like if those 100 million people would have died anyway, how to do you say ‘it was communism that did it’ since maybe more would have died under the next most likely form of government that would have been in it’s place. How many people have died for Democracy, assuming that both world wars and countless other ones were fought to defend it.