Hacker News Reader

Comment by nytgop77 | Hacker News Reader

Surprisingly few people know about it.

It's not that surprising USSR had top notch propaganda machine as does Russia now. Suppressing this information was/is pretty high on the agenda.

Honestly, I don't think it's that. It's just that Western History is West-centric. In general that makes sense because an arbitrary human life has value approximately zero. For instance, 2 million people died in a famine in India under British rule but no one knows about that.

If it weren't for Hotel Rwanda, the Rwandan genocide might go unnoticed. The Khmer Rouge are barely known. And everyone might joke that "Haha the North Koreans have no food" on the edgier parts of the Internet but ultimately, 3.5 million could have died there and we would barely have noticed.

That's not even because of some evil ignorance - it's just that people always see things from their reference point (and not even big vs small). American Independence was a big deal to America but not a big deal to the UK. Brexit is a big deal to the UK but no one outside really gives that much of a damn. And think about the Vietnam War - it's this massive moment in American history but to the Vietnamese it is one massive moment sandwiched between their wars with two other superpowers.

There is a tremendous amount of denial and revisionism that goes on with all 20th century socialism, because the modern socialists really don’t want you to know about any of it.

its kind of weird to suggest that anti-socialist / anti-communist propaganda is somehow getting suppressed by some sort of socialist leftists. What an inane delusion to think socialists have that power, when in reality the west has a long tradition of making history fit their capitalist imperialist agenda by any means necessary.

No conspiracy is required. It works the same way holocaust denial does. Any individual person who support socialism is (via selection bias) incredibly likely to be a denier of the failures and humanitarian atrocities of 20th century socialism. If enough people espouse these revisionist opinions, you get to point where you can cast doubt over the facts of history amongst the general population. The only difference between holocaust deniers and socialist revisionists is that there's not enough people who hold holocaust denial views for them to be taken seriously by ordinary people. Depending on what polls you look at, about 40% of Americans think socialism is a good thing, and about half of the population would vote for a socialist president. So clearly your estimation of socialist influence is very understated.

Actually, modern socialists tend to be better at it then modern conservatives. Modern conservatives are too focused on trying to use it politically in contemporary politics.

The Rwandan genocide got a great deal of television coverage in North America at the time, nearly as much as the Yugoslavian wars. It was because the Rwandan conflict was so familiar to Westerners in the late 1990s and early millennium that a Hollywood studio was willing to fund a film about it.

Of course, now the tail might wag the dog, and the film might introduce the conflict to a younger generation that missed the reportage at the time.

The New York Times helped a lot with that too

I was suprised seeing how mainstream the denial of it is on reddit. Back before I stopped looking at the front page a few years ago, it was pretty common to see college-aged communists claiming that it was either western propoganda meant to turn people away from communism, or that it was a necessary evil and you "have to break a few eggs to make an omellete".

I do. I try to bring it up when the conversation has space for it.

The media is controlled by those who want to make nazism a bigger issue despite the fact it killed many, many less.

Who, specifically?

Mao's even bigger genocides are probably even less known.

I always got the sense that Mao's genocides are more visceral in the West because of the large Chinese immigrant population that lives in the US.

If all famines caused by economic systems are genocides, then there's a very large reckoning to be done by applying the same accounting methodology to other countries.

If you add them up in the last century, you'll see that Communist and similar regimes dominate the famine stats.

Much of it was dysfunctional economics, but much was also deliberate genocides of disposable populations.

I think the West avoided using this as propaganda against the Soviets because that would only call attention to the equally massive and more recent Bengali famine, which was engineered by the British.

> which was engineered by the British.

Nonsense. The Bengal famine was caused by factors beyond British control, including the Japanese invasion of Burma and multiple natural disasters in Bengal which had a devastating effect on rice imports and grain production. The British failed to completely alleviate the famine, yes, but they did alleviate it partially by sending over 100,000 tons of grain to aid the region, and they would have sent more if shipping had been available (there was the small matter of a gigantic global war going on).

And of course if it wasn't for the British then Bengal would have eventually been conquered by the Japanese, who had far worse plans for the area than anything the British managed.

Comparing Britain's failures in Bengal to Stalin's genocide is offensive, revisionist garbage.

No offense, but curiously, those are the exact same reasons Russians tend to use to whitewash Holodomor. (Not saying you're wrong or anything)

Oh really? What gigantic global war was Russia fighting in 1932?

Thank you for the reality check on the bad faith relativists

Reply on news.ycombinator.com