Learn today when listening to MapleTakes on Twitch (Canada Comrade). Canada has a “Victims of Communism” monument that they put up. Here is a picture of it blacked out like it’s the Epstein files.
They had to black it out because people kept realizing they were all fucking Nazis.
> victims of communism monument
> emptygod tier bit
Sure, the USSR did kill a lot of Nazis. But to claim all of the victims of communism were Nazis is bullshit
It is the academic consensus even among western scholars that the Ukrainian famine was indeed a famine, not an intentional genocide. This is not my opinion, but, again, the overwhelming consensus even among the most anti-communist historians like Robert Conquest who described himself as a “cold warrior.” The leading western scholar on this issue, Stephen Wheatcroft, discussed the history of this in western academia in a paper I will link below.
He discusses how there was strong debate over it being a genocide in western academia up until the Soviet Union collapsed and the Soviet archives were open. When the archives were open, many historians expected to find a “smoking gun” showing that the Soviets deliberately had a policy of starving the Ukrainians, but such a thing was never found and so even the most hardened anti-communist historians were forced to change their tune (and indeed you can find many documents showing the Soviets ordering food to Ukraine such as this one and this one).
Wheatcroft considers Conquest changing his opinion as marking an end to that “era” in academia, but he also mentions that very recently there has been a revival of the claims of “genocide,” but these are clearly motivated and pushed by the Ukrainian state for political reasons and not academic reasons. It is literally a propaganda move. There are hostilities between the current Ukrainian state and the current Russian state, and so the current Ukrainian state has a vested interest in painting the Russian state poorly, and so reviving this old myth is good for its propaganda. But it is just that, state propaganda.
Discussions in the popular narrative of famine have changed over the years. During Soviet times there was a contrast between ‘man-made’ famine and ‘denial of famine’.‘Man-made’ at this time largely meant as a result of policy. Then there was a contrast between ‘man-made on purpose’, and ‘man-made by accident’ with charges of criminal neglect and cover up. This stage seemed to have ended in 2004 when Robert Conquest agreed that the famine was not man-made on purpose. But in the following ten years there has been a revival of the ‘man-made on purpose’ side. This reflects both a reduced interest in understanding the economic history, and increased attempts by the Ukrainian government to classify the ‘famine as a genocide’. It is time to return to paying more attention to economic explanations.
I wonder if anyone has a number on how many people capitalism has killed.
At least 10 million every year from starvation and preventable diseases.
FTR, China (as the big communist-style economy) seems to be one of the smaller donors among the big economies to international aid programmes for both food and healthcare.
The US (until the schmuck) was the biggest by far for food contributions via the WFP, with the EU and individual donors making up the majority. Healthcare seems more balanced contribution-wise (not so much from the US)
Obviously it is hard to get exact numbers. In particular, China also has its own aid programme too. Estimates are of USD 5 billion to USD 8 billion per year (1,000 million) … a total for all aid.
Sure, aid is also used for leverage (soft power), but there certainly seems to be a historical pattern of the capitalist superpowers helping to feed the world, despite it often still not being enough…
It will be interesting to see if China has stepped up, with the US cutting back under trump.
edit: In a world where leaders and governments put the needs of people first, one wouldn’t need as much aid, of course.
It’s important to consider where this aid is going. In the US most of it’s forreign aid over history has been gone to fund verious wars, such as most recently the war in ukraine and the war in gaza, where particularly the war in gaza is going towards funding genocide, definitely not something I would consider a worthy cause.
Compare that to china which is specifically spending it’s money on helping the global south develop and lift developing countries out of poverty. It has been building infrastructure projects and giving grants mainly in africa but also in asia.
Removed by mod
This is utter bullshit.
As I explained here, the food aid is a tool of imperialism. It’s a tool to keep the global south linked to the US Empire and remain underdeveloped, resulting in unequal exchange.
As for Ukraine, you’re entirely wrong. In 2014, the west backed the far-right Euromaidan coup because the democratically elected president, Yanukovych, picked a Russian loan over one from the IMF that required austerity measures. The Stepan Bandera-upholding neo-Nazis orchestrated the Maidan Massacre, and began ethnically cleansing the Donbass region. 13,000 civilians were murdered by the Kiev regime over the course of a decade in the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, and it was only when Kiev had ammassed a gigantic invasion force that Russia intervened to protect the DPR and LPR per their requests for aid.
Here are even some western government sanctioned sources.
- BBC, 2014: Ukraine underplays role of far right in conflict
- Human Rights Watch, 2014: Ukraine: Unguided Rockets Killing Civilians
- The Hill, 2017: The reality of neo-Nazis in Ukraine is far from Kremlin propaganda
- The Guardian, 2017: ‘I want to bring up a warrior’: Ukraine’s far-right children’s camp – video
- WaPo, 2018: The war in Ukraine is more devastating than you know
- Reuters, 2018: Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem
- The Nation, 2019: Neo-Nazis and the Far Right Are On the March in Ukraine
- openDemocracy, 2019: Why Ukraine’s new language law will have long-term consequences
- Jacobin, 2022: A US-Backed, Far Right–Led Revolution in Ukraine Helped Bring Us to the Brink of War
- Consortium News, 2022: Evidence of US-Backed Coup in Kiev
- Al Jazeera, 2022: Why did Ukraine suspend 11 ‘pro-Russia’ parties?
- History of Fascism in Ukraine: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV
Groups like Azov have been folded in officially. The Kiev regime upholds Stepan Bandera and uses likeness for propaganda. Nazis infest Ukrainian leadership:
The east supported Yanukovych, and that’s why the far-right Banderites couping him kicked off the war.
smdh my hed
Reporter: [REDACTED]
Reason: Trivialization of GenocideI accidentally commented on a lib instance and was told by lemmy users that Russia is doing a genocide in Ukraine just like Israel is in Palestine and I finally realized they literally live in a post-fact alternate world.
Gaza is 144 square miles and 100k+ civilians were killed but Eastern Ukraine is 16000 square miles and 10k civilians were (unfortunately for sure) killed.
The Palestinians are a group of people that only exist in Palestine with a distinct culture from Egypt and Jordan and are being wiped off the face of earth. The people who died in the Russia/Ukraine war are mostly Russian speaking Russians. This is not the same. The Gaza genocide is a literal order of magnitude greater. The facts don’t matter to them at all just the insistence of American innocence and their “rules based order”.
The libs are the ones trivializing genocide.
Always But Russia, But China, But Hamas. Everything is genocide except for actual genocide, which is fine
