• @InverseParallax
    link
    English
    12 months ago

    Mao killed more.

    Fortunately, he only killed Chinese people, and they don’t mind, so we’re all good.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      12 months ago

      Like personally? I often feel like attributing famines solely to one person is a bit messed up, although there are cases like Bengal where specific government individuals were enthusiastic .

      The party later distanced themselves from him somewhat, so presumably they thought his ideas could be improved on but I had thought a lot of china and USSR famines rested on really dumb ideas about industrial agriculture that were popular in many places + officials hiding bad numbers + desperate need to show immediate superiority of alledgedly better numbers + upheavals of massive civil was and ww2.

      • @InverseParallax
        link
        English
        12 months ago

        He was a massive idiot, he personally decided agriculture was being eaten by birds, so he demanded every peasant kill a quota of birds.

        They did, and were immediately hit by the largest locust infestation in modern history.

        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign

        He killed 50 million Chinese purely because he was an epic moron with an incredible ego.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          12 months ago

          Realistically I’ll have to look into this before trusting a random comment and I probably wont because it’s half the world away from me and he’s dead anyway.

          I am sure there is some subtly in personal culpability though because between Mao and peasants killing birds was a whole bureaucracy that evidentally thought it was worth doing (and idk how much is slavish obedience/fear).

          Temujin personally killed a lot of people. Like personally ordered the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and his overall campaign was ~10% of human population at the time an estimated 40 million, which seems to be comparable to famine figures even if we personally blame both of them. Dude was a certified maniac and I think that especially given the overall lower population at the time and deliberate murderous intentions stands as histories greatest monster and most murderous person.