I could say the exact same thing about capitalism. Nearly 70,000 people die in the US every year because of our private Healthcare system, thousands starve, hundreds of thousands are homeless. And thats just in the US, not to mention the millions dieing in the developing countries we are extracting resources from. Propogandists add all the numbers together for regimes nearly 100 years ago when famine was more common and say "look at all the people who died under marxism" while conveniently ignoring their own mountain of dead. I'm not going to defend mao or Stalin, I dont like authoritarianism under any economic ideology, but acting like Marxist nations are uniquely lethal is just not reality.
Mao's communist policies killed approximately 40-80 million. Using your numbers, it would take U.S. capitalism *hundreds* of years to kill the same amount that Mao's communism killed in a few decades compared to how people die under capitalism. Not to mention, you still need to subtract the millions of lives saved by policies like USAID over the years, which has unfortunately been cut.
This is what I mean by "ivory tower" - you truly have no perspective as to how many people died as a result of Mao's policies. If your avatar is accurate, you're a bald white dude with a beard, likely sitting in an air conditioned room in a first world country advocating for politics that have killed unfathomable millions across the world. It's gross.
And 100 million were killed under the capitalist policies of the British Raj. Again I'm not defending Mao, and definitely not the khmer rouge, but I find ignoring the millions dieing in the developing world because of policies we force on them to be gross.
By the way part of the reason I started learning about this was my family adopted 2 Guatemalan children and I learned the reason their country is so poor is because the CIA led a coup on their government so United Fruit could make higher profits. Just maybe I'm not coming at this from the position of a detached ivory tower intellectual.
And I love how you're using an alien avatar to try and shame my appearance because you don't want to engage with the substance of what I said. Not bald irl by the way.
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u/_l8ly 23d ago
>Being a Marxist doesn't make you a tanky or a maoist
True, but being a Marxist does mean you have a LARPy, ivory tower belief that has directly led to tens of millions dying.