Hacker News Reader

Comment by cooper_ganglia | Hacker News Reader

Criticizing Mao is "Holocaust apologia" because killing 45,000,000 of his citizenry was just an accident?

More people died then than during the Holocaust. More people dying is objectively worse, no matter how you slice it.

The 5 - 10 million Congolese who died under Belgian rule is probably much higher as a percentage of the population than the great leap forward.

Great leap forward killed 4% of Chinese population. Vietnam war killed 10% - 12% of people in Vietnam. I do not see condemnation of US here..Rather, I see the celebration that US has a democracy.

I will always condemn the Vietnam War, as well as Leopold 2's murderous regime in Congo Free State. Those do not excuse Mao's murderous policies, no matter how necessary it was to repair China after the destructive Opium Wars. It was under Deng Xiao Ping that China's recovery began.

The Vietnam War caused a lot of changes politically and militarily in the US because the US is a democracy. We make a lot more effort not to go around slaughtering civilians these days. Nobody wants to be a babykiller.

War has never been nice, but peace is supposed to be. It wasn't some foreign invader that killed that 4% of China's population, it was their own government - the organization whose primary purpose is to look out for their welfare.

Are you sure? The US still killed a lot of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention the unconditional support for Israel's intentional murder of civilians and children.

Yep. It's an order of magnitude difference. Civilian casualties happen with any non-trivial war, but the US set policies and added training for military members to try to minimize it. You can thank the hippies for that.

Israel is a different matter, and it's all a political mess.

But bear in mind that these are foreign deaths. A government is responsible for its own people, not those of other countries. I realize hating on US is the popular thing these days, but at least we don't let large percentages of our own people starve.

Sounds to me like the US still doesn't care enough about civilians yet. More than in Vietnam, but still less than many other countries, who also don't let their own people starve, but also don't let them die from preventable disease or school shootings.

"Better than China" is too low a bar for a democracy.

Not exactly. It’s just that much more effort is put into making crimes acceptable to the general public. Embedded 'independent' journalists, collateral damage, precission weapons, 'mistakes’ everywhere, and the usual ‘but we are a democracy' - along with a bunch of similar justifications. It still results in over a million deaths, but now it’s perfectly acceptable to the majority of people.

Well, I suppose we should start killing our own civilians then, since that seems to be what people approve of these days. "Only 4%" should be about right, yes?

> We make a lot more effort not to go around slaughtering civilians these days. Nobody wants to be a babykiller.

Citation needed. The only effort US is making, is for hiding its crimes. Killing all people at a wedding because there is a "terrorist" (which was earlier trained by US) present there, is no excuse.

Everything is a matter of perspective, ... and propaganda.

If I plan out how to kill someone, get the right weapon and execute on my plan, yeah that is murder.

If I see a donation stand for children in Africa and decide to rather buy a video game from that money, well some children are going to starve because of my decision but I haven't exactly killed them.

Blaming Mao for a famine is completely insane if you are not super brainwashed. He was a human not a god.

But considering you took the highest death toll estimation you could find already shows you are not interested in facts but in pushing a narrative.

If only Mao had been aware that he was human and not a god. He didn't allow any criticism of his ideas, and that makes him entirely culpable for the results.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com