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Comment by lxm | Hacker News Reader

18 pointslxm15 comments

I find the "who killed more people?" question as proof of how evil some dictator was, to be rather pointless. Was Pol Pot not so bad because he killed less people? Part of the equation is also how many people they had access to. China, being the most populous country in the world, gave Mao more opportunity to kill people.

I think everybody agrees these people were terrible, but I do think the way they killed people matters. Hitler created a system to exterminate people on an industrial scale. Mao wanted to feed people and didn't let his ignorance about agriculture stop him, and considered dissenting (more reasonable) voices treasonous.

Considering dissent treason (hey, Trump!) is absolutely a sign of totalitarianism and something that can lead to disaster and death, but intentionally setting out to murder millions of people still feels like a different level of evil to me.

Mao also purged his opponents (or completely innocent people) in huge numbers, e.g. the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries and Cultural Revolution were not about feeding people.

Of course. I'm not presenting his famine as an innocent accident. All of these dictators (and many others besides) tend to kill political opponents and don't mind a bit of collateral damage. But I think the industrial scale of the holocaust and indeed the large scale slaughter Khmer Rouge, are of a different order of evil.

The author is unnecessarily pejorative and dismissive of https://monthlyreview.org/commentary/did-mao-really-kill-mil... which is scholarly and well researched. If they understood population models I suspect they'd be less inclined to say it's just apologist because it weighs up the evidence pretty nicely. It felt like the article was saying ' look ma, the numbers keep going up' about Mao as if that meant they had to be more credible. That's not how it works, the rumour mill feeds more than it winnows.

Impossible for Americans to get distance from the internecine warfare between editors i suspect.

Well, it's hard not to call an article apologist when it classifies the death of tens of millions of people as "initial disruption".

Their underlying point remains: basic demographics strongly suggest the post 1980 inflationary death figures are highly speculative, and lack theoretically sound underpinning.

If you will forgive some whataboutism the British attitude to famine in India might give some context. Does anyone in the UK polity intend accepting their policy killed sixty million people over the life of British India? Oh, only two million in 1943. That's ok then..

Why are they compared to each other? Completely different people operating completely different systems with completely different goals.

They were all dictators operating totalitarian regimes with the goal of absolute power. So they wore slightly different symbols on their arms, the difference between them was only a scrap of cloth.

American society seems to see plenty of difference between purposefully inflicting direct harm and harm as a side-effect of policies not specifically intended to inflict it (enough that politicians will invoke the latter as defense even in instances of the former).

Hell, even in solely the former case it makes a large difference depending on the specifics of the intended target of direct purposeful harm.

More generally, intent is a huge factors in evaluating responsibility & level of harm, and to a lower level so is specificity.

American society

Western society in general has plenty who want to try these policies again because they say this time it will be different.

The only difference you care about. Other people see other differences. You need to talk to more Russians and Chinese if you think a one dimensional comparison has merit. The unofficial party line on Mao (as the article says) is 70% right and 30% wrong. That's a more nuanced position than you think.

They were all twentieth century dictators responsible for millions of deaths.

They were all products of their time, at the start of their mass killing careers firmly believing in making the world better through massive and rapid social change (Mao and Stalin believed in progressive change, Hitler was more 'regressive' although it's more complicated than that). They were inspired by Marx (yes, even Hitler) and his followers.

Hitler and Stalin resided in the same town for a while http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21859771

Genghis Khan?

Why is this flagged?

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