Comment by ladyattis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ladyattis | Hacker News Reader

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The problem with Thiel's worldview is that it's not all that accurate. Yes, the Soviet Union was a horrible authoritarian state but the alternative to it isn't any better especially if you're not in the United States or of its preferred/default social classes. The damage done by the USSR and the Russian civil war pale in comparison to the yearly death toll of millions from medical deprivation and starvation even after the Green Revolution (we still have a distribution problem wrt food and medicine). His solutions are basically go back to some form of feudalism but without there being a singular sovereign to keep the nobles of our age in check (i.e. him and other billionaires). The reality is that capitalism has been limping along post Cold War and it's not getting any better, so without there being an outside threat to unify ourselves around, its flaws are seen more keenly and felt more closely than in the past. If Thiel wants to stop the second Bolshevik revolt then he should focus on making wealth distribution through market means viable and support ending monopolies and enclosures of various commons (weaken IP law, reform land rights, and so forth).

Interestingly social setups had 'billionaires' and 'everybody else' too, it was just way worse for everybody else. It's not like there was no unchecked ruling class there.

How many people die every year from medical deprivation? While that is a legitimate problem that we need to fix, I'm skeptical whether that could exceed the 100M who have been killed by Communism.

https://victimsofcommunism.org/

> How many people die every year from medical deprivation?

A quick search suggests figures ranging from 1 million to 40 million per year. So if you want to compare that to 100 million deaths by communism over the past 100 years, then preventable disease seems to kill at least roughly the same number of people, and possibly 40 times as many.

World population circa 1950 was like 2 billion. I don't know what the root study is that reaches that 100M figure, but the idea that communism killed one in twenty people on the whole planet seems a bit unlikely.

The really high end figures for the worst[0] man-made disaster of all time (the famine during the great leap forward) are 42 million, no idea where you'd get the rest of the numbers from.

[0]: edit: I thought it was the worst: apparently there were several previous famines in China in the 19th century that were more deadly.

Victims of Communism and the authors of the Black Book of Communism's own figures are debated by experts of the history of Russia and the USSR, especially during Stalin's reign. Many of the deaths that the Black Book of Communism sites were mostly due to the invasion by Nazi Germany (somewhere around 10 or 20 million iirc). The rest are also mostly not direct deaths by the Bolsheviks or the USSR state apparatus (this is including the famines). And the biggest problem with the book is that it often makes up the figures whole cloth.

This isn't saying the USSR or the Bolsheviks weren't horrible, but one must put their crimes against humanity in the proper context and not turn them into super inhuman villains as much as we did with the Nazis (they too were horrible, but sadly they were very much a product of the mainstream values of their time).

Plus, the claim that allowing for social democratic policies like UBI, IP law reform, and the like to come to fruition isn't going to create another Red Terror. If anything, it's the most conservative thing you can do (see German Empire and the institution of Social Insurance by Otto von Bismarck) since it retains capitalism but tames its worse aspects for a time. This is why I roll my eyes at folks like Thiel since they rarely have anything that would be a viable alternative than status quo and lying about how bad things are for many people today. And I say this as someone who's far left of many folks being a Mutualist and an anarchist.

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