this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2024
76 points (63.1% liked)

Memes

45725 readers
947 users here now

Rules:

  1. Be civil and nice.
  2. Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 
all 45 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] Count042@lemmy.ml 27 points 5 months ago (1 children)

That needs to be the British empire.

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 13 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Arguably the US is an offshoot of that cancer

[–] ThunderclapSasquatch@startrek.website -4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Fuck that we broke away centuries ago.

We metastasized centuries ago.

[–] allywilson@lemmy.ml -5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I mean looking at your post history this ridiculous comment makes sense.

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] allywilson@lemmy.ml -1 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 4 points 5 months ago

Ah yes, anybody who disagrees with you is a puppet without independent thought. 🤡

[–] Anamana@feddit.de 19 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Well how many people did the US kill? Any data on it?

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 13 points 5 months ago

It's hard to quantify, but the US instigated or had a hand in causing most of the largest mass-killing events of the twentieth century.

To give just a single example, the CIA was the main driver behind the anti-communist massacres in Indonesia in 1965. 500k-1M people killed.

Or operation Condor, another anti-communist CIA-led program in several latin american countries: about 60-80k people killed, and 400k imprisoned.

A larger list of US atrocities is here.

[–] JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works 14 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Some numbers I found for reference to compare.

More info on WWII

WWII deaths breakdown Sorry that's unreadable in dark mode, I can't find that one without a transparent background. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

WWII deaths white background

Millions of people died in China during the Great Leap, with estimates ranging from 15 to 55 million, making the Great Chinese Famine the largest or second-largest famine in human history

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

conservative estimates, Stalin was responsible for the deaths of at least 7 million people, or about 4.2% of USSRs total population.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet_Union_under_Joseph_Stalin#Modern_estimates

Wars death toll https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Millions of people died in China during the Great Leap, with estimates ranging from 15 to 55 million, making the Great Chinese Famine the largest or second-largest famine in human history

Meanwhile in the real world https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25495509/

Inability to consider context must be a quintessentially American mental characteristic.

conservative estimates, Stalin was responsible for the deaths of at least 7 million people, or about 4.2% of USSRs total population.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1478210316676002

Meanwhile, American settlers massacred so many native inhabitants that it cooled down the climate https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47063973

Then of course, capitalism also brought us such wonders as the African slave trade.

And then we have all the atrocities US regime has been committing around the globe, killing countless millions in the name of capitalism

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/the-indonesia-documents-and-the-us-agenda/543534/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jakarta_Method

https://gsp.yale.edu/sites/default/files/walrus_cambodiabombing_oct06.pdf

This is what happens when people get all their education from wikipedia instead of having any actual understanding of the subject.

[–] deranger@sh.itjust.works 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

All those sources you posted don’t refute what you quoted from the other comment. Seems like a “not as bad as” logical fallacy at play. The other poster didn’t say the US was without fault; even though the US has killed many people doesn’t make the actions of those other regimes any less bad.

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The sources I posted are meant to provide context. And what they show is that when you consider what things were like before, communism actually improved lives in a tangible way. While bad things certainly have happened in communist societies, as they do in every human society, overall trajectory is positive. Meanwhile, the atrocities committed in the name of capitalism, and by US in particular, eclipse anything that has happened under communism. US is a blight upon humanity and has brutally repressed progress in every corner of the world.

[–] Doom@ttrpg.network 2 points 5 months ago

His sources are always bad

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 11 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)
[–] crazyCat@sh.itjust.works 3 points 5 months ago (2 children)
[–] BachenBenno@feddit.de 12 points 5 months ago

Stalin's 20 million and Mao's 70 million both come from a book called 'The Black Book of Communism' where th authors tried to inflate all the numbers as much as possible to arrive at 100 million deaths under communism in the end. The really high numbers come from taking the difference between the population decades later and what the population would have been if the borth rate hadn't dropped (even though lower birth rates are an indication of better living standards).

Also, if you leave out the USSR's purges (Soviet archives revealed around 800k), almost all of the deaths come from 'man made famines'. Completely disregarding that in both China and Russia there have been famines all the time before their revolutions. Both countries were among the poorest and most backward in the world. No government on earth could have prevented all famines immediately. After some years after Mao's and Stalin's reorganizations of agriculture, famines were eliminated (except for during WW2). Life expectancy doubled within 30 years under communist China. Very quickly in the Soviet Union as well.

Of course you can argue about the governments having been able to do it better in hindsight, but even then the deaths certainly weren't cold blooded murder.

Considering this, you certainly won't arrive at the tens of millions of people killed just by the US military. Many, many more if you factor in indirect deaths (by embargoes, sanctions, refusing to allow other countries to produce their vaccines, etc.).

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 4 points 5 months ago

in your deranged fantasies

[–] Facebones@reddthat.com 2 points 5 months ago

I'm a cereal killer Its a bad habit I killed Tony, Lucky Charms, and that silly rabbit