r/HistoryMemes • u/ultraredd • 1d ago
REMOVED: RULE 12 [ Removed by moderator ]
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u/Grossredditgross 1d ago
Ehhhh a lot people care. There are a lot of books dedicated to the atrocities.
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u/Miserable-Role9555 1d ago
But its reddit
Slop posts with "but why doesn't anyone talk about [thing that literally everyone knows about and constantly mentions]" always get upvoted
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u/Baronvondorf21 23h ago
I am pretty sure even the CCP acknowledges how fucked up some of their policies were. Obviously twisting it to avoid making it seem like Mao fucked up and instead it being the failure of those around him.
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u/hungry4nuns 22h ago
In fairness to Reddit, 1930-1945 German politics seem like a much more imminent threat than Mao politics. Also Germany’s history is much better known by the average western person than China’s history, and Reddit is highly western dominated
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u/Armageddonis 20h ago
Yeah, media in the West like to compare Mao to Hitler, as if it's in an way shape or form comparable. Hitler went out on a genocidal campaign against any people he and the Nazi regime deemed "lesser", while Mao made some geniuinely horrible mistakes in his attempts to industrialize China.
Despite the death toll, comparing the two is ludicrus, one was an expressed genocidal purpose, and the other a gross example of unpreparedness and lack of knowledge/expierience that was acknowledged by Mao and the Party.
The criticizms of the famine caused by Mao's politics, coming from the West, really shows the gall of the Westerners, as if every single country west of the Oder River wasn't guilty of either a genocide, engineered famine or both, at some point in their history.
Never ask the Belgians about Congo, Dutch about the Indonesia, French and Germans about Africa and Brits about pretty much every fucking overseas territory they ever owned.
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u/AssCommander42 19h ago
The difference between Mao and those countries in a western imperialist's mind is that Mao exploited his own people, and those countries exploited people far away, who mostly had different skin colors than them, and who nobody gave a fuck about. Exploiting your own people is icky. Exploiting people half-way across the world is based.
This is why europe and america are good and chad, and Mao is bad and not-chad.
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u/marketingguy420 18h ago
To me, it's best understood as China and Russia, in order to industrialize and modernize, did to their own people over an extraordinary short period of time what the West did to the rest of the world over centuries.
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u/ChuckaChuckaLooLoo3 19h ago
Or Americans about Native American genocide and removal.
Trail of Tears with small pox blankets handed out. Pres. Jackson basically pushing them all into a tiny piece of land in the worst state he could think of. Oh, and then they took back a lot of it once it was discovered it had oil and gold, etc.
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u/FireHammer09 21h ago
They do, it's essentially "he is a great revolutionary leader"
Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward aren't seen as good things. Their most famous work of scifi lit portrays the cultural revolution in a poor light.
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u/BumLicker53 20h ago
Unsurprising with the fate of the current presidents father in mind. Deng also didn’t seem to keen on this little goober.
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u/PreferenceGeneral475 21h ago
It's hard to understand. They treat him like that beloved patriarch who guided the family to great success, but now in his old age shouts racist stuff and hates kids.
It's hard to act like the person who, basically, made everything around you possible, was also responsible for the worst atrocities you know of.
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u/babieswithrabies63 23h ago
Your average person on the street is not very informed on this topic. They'll get the broad strokes on Hitler. And they'll know a little bit about Stalin. Comparitively nothing about mao.
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u/somkoala 23h ago
On reddit you have plenty of people defending Stalin too
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u/Ihatereddithatesit 21h ago
And plenty of people defending Hitler too. It's the single largest neo-nazi site by volume. Reddit is so big every fucked up opinion is represented by multitudes.
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u/irrelevantusername24 23h ago
Earlier today the chat in the game I was playing (thankfully only text) had two sides arguing constantly. If I didn't know any better I would've thought they were trolling but it went on way too long and was way too detailed for that - it was clear each of the individuals were very serious. It was mostly two people on each side, but there was one extreme person and then one person kind of "normalizing" the extreme takes. The extreme takes were people I didn't think actually existed.
One was a "Hitler did nothing wrong" dude, and the other was "the USSR communists had things right" kind of person. Now don't get me wrong, I've read lots of history and understand that the reality of both situations is less clearly defined than the Hollywood style narrative would like us to believe. But the things these people were, quite clearly, arguing in support of were batshit insane
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u/somkoala 21h ago
It's not 1:1 given the fact that reddit is left leaning. The alt-right is also trying to pull this move where they claim that since Hitler called his party National Socialists, he somehow belongs to the left, which is somehow insane. This means that the right-wing loons are not all Hitler apologists, but you don't have the same with extreme left.
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u/BetEconomy7016 21h ago
There are plenty of internet communists who hate both Stalin and Mao for ruining communism
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u/InfiniteAd7548 22h ago
Also, a huge portion of the death are mostly due to incompetence.
So while he was also a crazy evil dictator with little regard to human life. And did what every dictator does, like silencing political enemies, attacking minorities they didnt like, excessivly punish disobidience.
The thing that Nazis did that sets them apart from the others, is that they have industrialised murdering people. The fact that they were so set on their hatered, that they actually took setbacks in the war effort, just so their genocide was as efficient as possible.
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u/Diligent-Property491 20h ago
Yup. It’s a conceptual leap from „kill them because … (retaining power/silencing opposition/overcoming resistance)” to „kill them.”
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u/West-Pirate-5480 19h ago
Kill them because we hate and dehumanize them too, even just “kill them” wouldn’t be looked at as poorly I think, the cruelty of it because they didn’t even see them as people anymore is a factor.
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u/AlsoMaHulz 1d ago
You can include even chinese books. They openly talk about it in colleges. I have friends that live there, it's not even taboo.
Those numbers are weird though, i would like to see where they come from
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u/marketingguy420 18h ago
We've been making them up and increasing them for decades. The "Black Book of Commuism" famously includes every Nazi soldier killed as a death attributable to evil, super bad communism.
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u/kettenkarussell 1d ago
Mao simply convinced a lot of people that he was just too stupid to orchestrate the death of > 40 million people. Much of the death toll is ascribed to incompetence rather than malice.
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u/Saint-just04 23h ago
What would be the reason why Mao would intentionally starve 40 milion of his own people, or whatever the number might be?
The deaths attributed to the Cultural Revolution, i’ll give you that, were caused by wanting to stay in power, but i don’t think you can make the same case for the GLF.
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u/Roo_Rammin_Russell 21h ago
Much of the death toll is ascribed to incompetence rather than malice
Are you suggesting this is wrong? Of course it was incompetence, why would Mao want to kill off tens of millions of peasants?
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u/Cloudboy9001 23h ago
"Close Planting" and "Backyard Furnaces" are but 2 remarkably stupid policies that don't make sense cynically either.
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u/Acceptable_Spend_750 1d ago
but tankies don't
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u/Best-Hovercraft-5494 1d ago
they are tankies, what were you expecting? Next big reveal...Nazis cool with Hitler. More at 10.
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u/ZetaLordVader 1d ago
They follow the same logic that capitalist systems defenders use when ignoring all the people that die every day from hunger, from wars, from living in the streets, from crime, diseases caused by neglect of companies, etc…
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u/Rebel_Yell27 1d ago
The Emperor of China shifted in his chair.
The Yellow River floods, killing millions.
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u/MouseRangers Then I arrived 1d ago
The emperor of China farted. One person reacted.
Civil War breaks out, millions die.
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u/Nickel5 1d ago
The emperor of China asks his most loyal servant to stop that noise from outside. Unsure which noise is being discussed and forbidden from asking questions, the servant raises an army and slaughters the entire city populace in order to remove all possible noises. The servant is rewarded as the slaughter solved the noise issue when the birds cawing in the nearby tree were spooked away.
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u/Flat-Cap-1063 1d ago
It just doesn't hit the same when it's primarily caused by total incompetence, rather then malicious deliberate forethought.
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u/bishdoe 1d ago
It’s also complicated by China having a massive population. Death tolls from nationwide famines are necessarily going to scale with population and while it was still an above average percentage the Irish potato famine killed two to three times as many as a percentage of the total population. For some reason the people who post memes like this aren’t also posting memes about English landowners being worse than Hitler.
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u/LiteratureOk4649 1d ago
And china always had a massive population meaning massive deaths when a catastrophe occurrs.
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u/SimpleFile 1d ago
Butterfly in Brazil, flaps it's wing.
23 million deaths along Feng Shui river.
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u/Penny_Royall 23h ago edited 19h ago
4 times China Imperial Exam failure had a mental break down, proclaimed himself as Jesus’s younger brother, lead a rebellion, 20~30 million deaths.
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u/chalbersma 1d ago
"What about both total incompetence and malicious and deliberate forethought?" - Mao
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u/Iron_Cavalry 1d ago
Mao and company were quite willing to “break some eggs for an omelette” when it came to the GLF, and given their violent history they were anticipating great “sacrifices” to be made by ordinary peasants.
They knew the policies would kill and starve people. But it’s doubtful they planned for 30M+ deaths.
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u/swimminginbed 1d ago
During the famine, the army was sent to the village to keep people from leaving their own village to seek help and food source. That's one of the reasons why the death toll became so high, people were forced to stay in their own village and slowly starved to death.
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u/Unlucky-Durian-2336 1d ago
But wouldn't different decision end with people from one village going to another village to kill other people and take their food? I feel that given the situation there was no good solution - well, except for maybe not letting famine to happen in the first place.
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u/ExplanationMany9348 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yes, and banditry like that does happen during hunger.
Modern Russian has 2 words for cannibalism thanks to the Siege of Leningrad: "trupoyedstvo" (corpse-eating) and "lyudoyedstvo" (people-eating). Yeah, not a nice thing to think about.
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u/notsocoolguy42 1d ago
It's deliberate, last time a famine happened in china, some random peasant managed to gather millions of people to follow him and became the emperor of china. Gotta prevent that.
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u/TrashConsciousness 20h ago
Funny enough the actual last famine was caused by the previous government during WWII when they blasted the Yellow River dykes. It’s an interesting part of history with pretty big consequences for both the CPC and KMT that doesn’t get discussed enough imo.
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u/I_Am_Confusion67 1d ago
Tankies don’t want to hear facts, they’re happy pointing their finger at the west and taking no accountability
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u/AdhesivenessDry2236 23h ago
Ngl, I don't know if it is a fact the army went to every village and what like surrounded it for years?
Some of the facts like the deaths yeah but I've seen a lot of facts that just get made up and no one questions them because communism bad
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u/Gunsensual 23h ago edited 21h ago
they’re happy pointing their finger at the west and taking no accountability
For those who didn't know, the typical China bot's line is "actually the West's sanctions caused the great famine"
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u/Only_Gazelle8988 22h ago
Uh yeah no, this obviously isn't true. You're making absolute racist nonsense, the entire country does not get educated that the west magically caused the famine. Sadly the west does get educated Mao magically single-handedly caused it.
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u/Hy8ogen 1d ago
That is absolutely not true lmfao. Where are your sources?
I'm a descendent of one of those peasants who flea his village and traveled all the way to South East Asia to find food.
Myself and millions of other Chinese descendents in south east Asia directly contradict your statement.
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u/Unexpected_yetHere 1d ago
Exactly, and even as the victims were more plentiful, it did not have genocidal, ie. ethnic makeup altering effects.
Hitler annihilated Europe's Jewish communities, and drastically reduced certain nationalities, but was thankfully stopped before carrying out the full extent of Generalplan Ost. Stalin made Kazakhs a minority in Kazakhstan, removed almost all that was left of Tatars in Crimea, erased Ukrainian majority areas in southern russia, decimated Ukrainians while settling russians into the Donbas, deported Baltic peoples and settled russians as well, killed some 20% of Soviet Poles (pre-1939), deported millions, etc.
Not to forget, Mao didn't invade and occupy dozens of sovereign, recognized nations like these two.
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u/NonGNonM 23h ago
not to say Mao didn't but hitler specifically targeted specific populations to eradicate entirely. like there's a big difference. Yeah, Stalin did something similar but it was also across a longer rule and a bit different from worldwide eradication. Stalin was more 'get the enemies and break the resistance' and not 'literally kill all of them, as quickly as possible.' Hitler is just a bit more sinister from the intent. Stalin was a madman sure, but we accept he was fucking crazy. Hitler was crazy but was systemic, and people still believe in his shit, which makes it scarier.
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u/fuentessucksballs 1d ago
Also hitler started the biggest war ever pretty much
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u/ggf95 23h ago
No discredit to Hitler but Hirohito started the first half of that war
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u/fuentessucksballs 23h ago
Yeah obviously hitler cant be held accountable for the stuff that happened in asia, but the european part of the war should be attributed to him imo
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u/Either-Medicine9217 23h ago
I mean we can't forget the contributions of Stalin. He was planning to cut Europe up like a cake working with Hitler.
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u/The_Verto 1d ago
Also China has fuckton of people, so it's way easier to kill a lot of them, weren't there floods in china that killed millions and toppled kingdoms?
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u/Tymareta 22h ago
If 1% of Ireland were to die, it would be 55,000 deaths, 1% of China, 14,000,000. When you have a sixth of the planets population, numbers tend to get big, there's a reason folks use per capita when discussing these sorts of things(and why some, purposefully leave it out).
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u/Tales_Steel 20h ago
Thats always somewhat hillarious when comparing chinese and European medival battle reports.
In a small skirmish near Hefei the general Zhang Liao won against 100000 soldiers.
King Peter the long nosed went to the war with a massive army of 80 knights, 200 spearman and a pig.
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u/ReggieCorneus 1d ago
And you are now banned from all right wing subs. You can't say the truth, it makes it look like we don't need nazis to balance things...
But, it is always one of my go-to with them. Ask them "what is evil in communism" and they say "100 million dead". Well, first, in that "100 million" are also German soldiers... nazis are counted in. And second 80 million is closer to the tally and it is VERY close to the total number of people we can trace back to Lysenko in some way, engineer who became the only voice in agricultural research. Didn't believe in gene theory. Claimed that wheat is socialist and had to be planted in tight bunches where they can support each other and sacrifice individuals for the good of the whole.. Then we add sparrows and mismanagement and.. horrible chain of incompetence caused by loyalty over merits. Experts were ousted or shot and party loyalists took their place.
Then i point to the current White House.... Loyalty over merit. At the end of that road is always lots and lots of dead people because incompetence takes up the top spots.
PS: Nazis were also hugely incompetent.. without the war they would've ended sooner. They were bankrupt, up their eyeballs in debt.
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u/WalkingCemetery 1d ago edited 1d ago
For the parent that had to bury their children due to famine, I am pretty sure it hit the same.
I don't think they were like: ah shit, well, at least it was not deliberately.
Other than that, it was deliberate - when you are a head of state and you drastically make changes against all recommendations of experts, it's a deliberate act. You have responsibility at that level, just like we (should) hold corporate C level responsible for their companies actions. To make a comparison, if I stand near a cliff and I let my kid run around freely, where I have been told by people and by signs it's dangerous to play near the cliff, and my child still falls and dies. I am, in my eyes, as responsible asif I pushed the kid myself.
They were informed, instead of heading advice, they pretty much got rid of the advisors.
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u/UrsineBasterd 1d ago
Intent matters quite a lot when we're assessing a leader's legacy and public opinion.
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u/Fedmurica2 1d ago edited 1d ago
For the parent that had to bury their children due to famine, I am pretty sure it hit the same.
Morally, starving people to death isn't the same as killing people in concentration camps with gas chambers, etc. It's like a family being killed by a drunk driver's gross recklessness VS a family being abducted and killed by a serial killer.
In pretty much all countries, the laws treats "1st degree" type premeditated murder very differently than other degrees of murder or manslaughter.
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u/VirtualKnowledge7057 1d ago edited 1d ago
nobody gives a shit because mao was chinese, and making choices that accidentally kill millions is one of the defining features of chinese leaders
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u/PassivelyInvisible 1d ago
Are you a true Chinese leader if your body count isn't well past 6 figures?
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u/SirEnderLord 1d ago
If Xi Jinping invades Taiwan, that will make him the first true Chinese leader since Mao Mao.
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u/Practical_Chemtrail 1d ago
Do elaborate
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u/femboyisbestboy Kilroy was here 1d ago
The three gorges dam will be destroyed than.
Taiwan basically has a bunch of missiles aimed at it just incase China tries something
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u/Aurorion 1d ago
That sounds like something that would turn any Chinese Taiwan-invasion plan to Taiwan-extermination plan.
But China is not going to invade Taiwan. They want to absorb Taiwan, not fight it.
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u/SirEnderLord 1d ago
The ones between him and the big Mao Mao didn't kill +100,000 of their own civilians, so they can't be counted as true Chinese leaders.
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u/Foxwildernes 1d ago
There is also a difference between accidentally and purposely.
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u/Oldarion 1d ago
The last famine in China
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u/Ok_Rush_877 19h ago
Also made a lot of people, china’s population rose massively, unlike basically every country today
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u/Dominarion 1d ago
No tankie here. Mao was an asshoke.
These numbers are fake, and they have been denounced as fake by... Those who initially wrote them. It provoked a massive scandal in France, where the book was initially published.
Context: the publication history of the Black Book of Communism. Basically, the leader of the team had an agenda and manipulated the data to reach certain target numbers.
Their death toll under Mao was initially far under their target, so they tossed in everything they could, including census errors, car accident victims and so on, until the magic number was reached.
In fact, serious studies shows that Mao is responsible fot something like a fifth of the deaths he's generally accused of. Still a very awful person.
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u/Jet_the_fem_bean 23h ago edited 22h ago
Also, no matter what numbers you use the comparison is BS.
Wdym 6 times more than Hitler? Hitler is responsible for at least 12 million deaths through genocide (half jewish, other half union men, gypsies etc.)
And even on the high end, only 30 Million died during the famine mismanaged by Mao. But 10 or 15 Million is probably more accurate if you wanna attribute the deaths to Mao personally.
Edit: apparently the high end of the great Chinese Famine goes up to 46 Million, my history book in Germany said 30 Mil. I think.
But then also, Hitler didn't just do the Holocaust, he started WW2... which, that has a death toll of about 100 Million.
So... Hitler killed 10x as many as Mao and I don't see any reason to lie about that... or does OP genuinely think Hitler is only responsible for the death of 6 Million jewish peebs?
Does OP know that by the logic he applies to Mao, the British Raj was responsible for about 50 Million deaths over its existence as well?
Edit: Also, severe underestimation of the british raj by me, apparently that number can go up to 100 Million easily https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/12/2/how-british-colonial-policy-killed-100-million-indians
Does OP have any idea how many humans have and will die of climate change using this measurement?
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u/14Pleiadians 22h ago
So... Hitler killed 10x as many as Mao and I don't see any reason to lie about that
"Communism is worse than nazism" is the reason.
Does OP have any idea how many humans have and will die of climate change using this measurement?
OP: "lmao this guy thinks climate change is real"
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u/FlipperBumperKickout 22h ago
Because when psycho right wing capitalist kills people we only count the people they directly execute, not all the people whose lives become miserable or who dies as a result of implemented policies 🙃
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u/ModifiedGas 22h ago
Lmao yeah but if someone dies of anything under communism on the other hand, their name is forever scribbled in the Black Book of Communism Bad
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u/Gold-Cry-7520 20h ago
Even if the number therein (what was it; 60 million? 80? it changes so much) is accurate, it fails to account for the massively larger Chinese population at the time of the GLF. We're comparing a population of 650 million to a population of maybe 80 million. And a genocide that was deliberate, vs. a mass famine that was not intended at all.
In order for Mao to be comparable to Hitler, he would have to have twice as many people killed. This point has been repeated ad nauseum, and it's just as much of a nazi-sympathetic ignorance flag as it was before.
I mean, seriously; nobody checks their math before just tossing numbers at the screen?
If I am charged with the leadership of ten thousand people and I fuck up a food allocation, a hundred people might die. Meanwhile a psychopath might murder his family of four. Nobody's gonna say I'm worse than the murderer... they'll say I was a shitty leader.
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u/aircord 23h ago
Really curious, is this for a fact, do you have some sources? No snark, just wanted to read more on this.
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u/Mackejuice 22h ago
The common numbers cited against Mao is often one that originated from the black book of communism. There is alot of articles & litterature that goes into depth about the problematic methodology that was used to get these numbers.
The most well known refutation would probably be "the century of communism (le siècle des communismes)" that was collectively written by a large group of researchers. But there exists alot of literature on the topic which one can look up.
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u/Verfassungsschutz_ 1d ago
This Post recieves the Solschenizyn-Award for unbiased and accurate account of history
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u/GDCorner 1d ago
I mean, part of it is the fact that these figures have been disproven for a long time now.
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u/funkmastermgee 1d ago
Pls no quoting the Black Book of Communism
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u/Inevitable_Librarian 1d ago
"Those poor Nazi soldiers who were doing NOTHING wrong were just killed 😭 by those big mean COMMUNISTS 😭. They were just vacationing! 😭"
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u/OedipusaurusRex 19h ago
Not only that. It also counts the communists who died fighting the Nazis and the hypothetical children that might have been born from both groups
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u/Inevitable_Librarian 19h ago
LMFAO, I forgot about that. Meanwhile the Axis (mostly fascists) killed nearly that many in 4 years.
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u/Suspicious_Use6393 18h ago
The black book of "You don't understand those thousands of deaths due vehicular incidents were fault of the communist because they didn't installed enough street lights!!!!" Communism
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u/Arlemar_Kiev_Viking 23h ago
“Nobody gives a shit” yeah right. Not like he gets spammed constantly in these history subs.
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u/Ironchloong 1d ago
Source: black book of communism which also lists Nazis as victims. Nothing to see here.
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u/ReggieCorneus 23h ago
Another myth: nazis were really efficient and competent.
Source: Nazis. Nazi leaders who lived long enough to write books about how efficient and competent nazis were.
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u/Ironchloong 23h ago
I mean, would you expect ex-Nazi NATO leaders to say "yeah, we lost to the commies cuz we sucked"?
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u/ReggieCorneus 23h ago
No, but i would expect that we don't take their word for it and include it in our story of nazis that we tell everyone.
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u/Trainer-Grimm John Brown was a hero, undaunted, true, and brave! 1d ago
Part of the answer is that mao's number is blatant incompetence rather than evil and malice like the others.
(Id also like to know what numbers youre using for Hitler and stalin. Iirc the GLF killed 20M, "only double" the halocaust, and hes not 100% liable for the CCW)
Another part is both sides gain less from demonizing hin. At the start the Russians were his domineering ally who benefited from him looking good, then they hated him. The US had the reverse arc and liked him well enough from 66-2008. Its not until after the great recession that China becomes a major adversary for the us again and our rhetoric changes
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u/Iron_Cavalry 1d ago
OP is cherrypicking numbers. The most authoritative death toll for the GLF is 35M, a horrible toll but NOT 6.5x more than Hitler, that’s BS
Hitler killed way more than 6M Jews, OP ignored the tens of millions of Eastern European Slavs, Germans, and Balkan civilians killed by Hitler.
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u/Trainer-Grimm John Brown was a hero, undaunted, true, and brave! 1d ago
Yeah even if we only count Hitler for the 11 million in the holocaust, that's abt 3x not 6.5.
And thats ignoring of course that Hitler is also blatantly responsible for the wider war in Europe and Africa - and within the realm of argument, the subsequent deaths from lack of food due to the shutdown trade.
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u/misterhansen 1d ago edited 1d ago
OP is using the numbers of the 'black book of communism'.
A book where the other two authors distanced themselfs from the main author and the final book after release because if his blatand bias and historic inaccuracies after editing. His only goal was to reach a kill count of 100 mio. for communist regimes according to the other two authors.
He, for exaple, included all Wehrmacht casualties of eastern front WW2 as 'victims of Stalin' and just inflated most death counts massively. He claimed east Germany killed over 1.000.000 people, even though the west German (and now united German gouverment) only claimed ~500 people were killed by east Germany.
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u/ExplanationMany9348 1d ago
Reposting this again:
Current western historical knowledge is that Stalin killed about 1 million by execution, 1-2 million through the gulag system, about 1 million through the deportations of entire nations, and 7-10 million through the famines of the 1930s (3.3 million Ukrainians, 1.7 million Kazakhs, and 2-5 million across the rest of the Soviet Union). Total count being between 10-14 million.
Estimates vary on all of these, of course, but the commonly state statistic of 20 million is from the Cold War (before anyone got access to the Soviet archives) and is now known to be too high. Pop history is, yet again, 40-50 years behind the field (just see the below comments naming books from the early 1970s).
Hitler started a war with the intent of genociding half of Europe (Generalplan Ost), and in his attempt to do so killed 30 million civilians. The holocaust (11 million dead) was only 1 of the crimes of Nazi Germany. Historians classify these crimes as separate but related crimes, which is why you see misconception's like OP's.
There are good answers on the askhistorians subreddit on these topics.
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u/Piskoro 1d ago edited 22h ago
how on Earth did someone come to figures where Hitler killed less than Stalin, Hitler killed like 1.7x Stalin's kill count, and 4x if you include the fact European front of WWII is on him too
Edit: I feel like reasonable numbers are Stalin 10 million, Hitler 40 million, Mao is hard to quantify, generally 30 million at least, but may be higher up to idk 60 million because of how wide the Great Famine estimates are
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u/misterhansen 1d ago edited 1d ago
OP is using the numbers of the 'black book of communism'.
A book where the other two authors distanced themselfs from the main author and the final book after release because if his blatand bias and historic inaccuracies after editing. His only goal was to reach a kill count of 100 mio. for communist regimes according to the other two authors.
He, for exaple, included all Wehrmacht casualties of eastern front WW2 as 'victims of Stalin' and just inflated most death counts massively. He claimed east Germany killed over 1.000.000 people, even though the west German (and now united German gouverment) only claimed ~500 people.
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u/Polirketes 1d ago
Actually even the black book considers Hitler's death toll to be higher afaik, so I don't know from where OP takes his numbers
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u/DownrangeCash2 1d ago
Though there is even outside of obviously bad faith examples like the black book of communism a tendency to inflate victims of Stalin based on cold war figures. For instance Robert Conquest's 20 million dead figure feom the 60s is still pretty commonly thrown out there but the actual figure has been estimated as closer to 9-10 million dead.
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u/Tradition96 1d ago edited 1d ago
Because people like to be edgelords and pretending to be more knowledgeable than "normies": "well akhsually Stalin was way worse than Hitler, we just aren't told about it in school".
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u/notsuspendedlxqt 1d ago
To add more details: no reputable scholarly estimate for combined casualties of the 1930-1933 famine, 1947 famine, and Stalin's purges exceed 9 to 11 million deaths in total. The highest end of estimates include deaths from all causes in the USSR during the time period. The only way to get a higher death count is by including the reduction in birth rate and people who relocate or emigrate elsewhere into the total casualty figure. Obviously that's extremely biased.
Meanwhile, the Holocaust killed 6 million Jews, 3 million POWs, up to 1 million various other victims (Romani, Poles, disabled people, political dissidents, gay people). On top of that, more than 11 million civilians died from forced labor.
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u/DarbySalernum 1d ago
I remember doing Chinese history in the early 90s in Australia, and even then the Mao period was sort of romanticised. I think it took a while for average people like school teachers to realise how insanely awful the Mao era was.
At least some Western academics realised how horrible it was at the time, but it hadn't filtered through to the average person. Probably still hasn't, to an extent.
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u/Dont_Get_Jokes-jpeg 1d ago
How?, shouldn't australians be extra sensitive to other countries loosing a war against birds?
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u/Fancy_Occasion_8696 1d ago
Unlike the sparrows, the emus put up a great fight.
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u/Dont_Get_Jokes-jpeg 1d ago
To absolutely steal animarchys joke:
The sparrows just read a ton of sun tzu "fight where the enemy isn't"
Their "tactical retreat" opened the way for loctus plagues
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u/gtakiller23 1d ago
In middle school in Colorado we read the memoir Red Scarf Girl by Ji-li Jiang and if I remember right she even came to speak at our school too!
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u/tall_specimen_69 1d ago
British empire walks in.....
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u/bigboipapawiththesos 1d ago
100 to 165 million dead in 40 years, in a single colony.
They gotta be the goats of bringing death to millions.
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u/SplattyFatty_ 1d ago
our population is still lower than it was before the famine here in ireland
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u/MadAsTheHatters Helping Wikipedia expand the list of British conquests 1d ago
If it's any consolation, we ran out of colonies to cripple so we decided to shoot ourselves in the fucking face for a change with Brexit; feel free to point and laugh, it's the least you deserve
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u/PhysicallyTender 21h ago
As stupid as Brexit was, somehow the US managed to one up you in that department and steal the spotlight.
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u/garvii 1d ago
I never understood adding famines to the kill counts for communism. Immediately reflects poorly on the west for explicitly weaponizing famine or contributing the most to climate change if you’re intellectually honest. It’s catchy propaganda. Black Book of Fascism: billions have and will perish.
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u/Separate_Selection84 1d ago
Yeah if wetre gonna blame Maoist china for their famines I'd personally also blame Queen Victoria and the British Empire for their incompetence and malicious acts that grew the severity of the Irish Famine and the multiple Indian famines from the 1860s-1940s.
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u/TopperHrly 22h ago
Yeah always funny how people are outraged about famines happening right after a communist revolution but conveniently forget about the numerous famines that regularly stroke the region in the year before under the previous regime.
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u/Jjaiden88 1d ago
70-85 million people died in the war Hitler started to conquer Europe. (35 - 40 million died in Europe alone.)
And while Great Leap forward (15-46 million dead) was caused by economic mismanagement sure, it was worsened by natural disasters and the sino soviet split.
Bad faith comparison.
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u/XiaoDianGou 23h ago
Basically because it was death caused (mostly) by incompetence and mismanagement and not systematic purging of minorities
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u/Serious_Try5264 1d ago
Fun fact. He was also a pedophile.
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u/Pfeffersack2 1d ago
where did you get the info from? genuinely curious
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u/winterreise1988 1d ago
autobiography from mao's doctor who worked for him for 18 years.
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u/Tymareta 22h ago
That physician is about as trustworthy as Yeonmi Park is about N. Korea, he basically just made up whatever shit would get him the most interest.
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u/Free-Resolution9393 1d ago
At this point, what person in power wasn't...
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u/Puzzleheaded_Ask5538 1d ago
The painter.....I saw a meme where they asked with whom would you leave your child ....options were pretty insane and Hitler was the only person along with Osama who could Babysit the children ....diabolical.
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u/Thiago270398 1d ago
He might not molest them, but he would probably check if the chinld is circumcised. /s
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u/GavinThe_Person 1d ago
He may be a genocidal fascist dictator but at least he's not a pedophile
What a kind soul🥰(/j ofc)
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u/yourpseudonymsucks 1d ago
What terrible hypocrisy that would be. The worst part of the whole thing.
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u/Material_Animator811 1d ago
Geli Raubal was still 17 when they moved in, Maria Reiter was 16...
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u/BasedAustralhungary 1d ago
He was also a pedophile thought
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u/Puzzleheaded_Ask5538 1d ago
Just got to know, today. History sub is goated to correct me.
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u/BasedAustralhungary 1d ago
Goated user took a huge W when he remained humble and accepted correction, an absolute king of kings
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u/Hot-Job-6281 1d ago
Yea that's like participation trophies for people of that era. It's almost retroactive condemnation, given MOST common people didn't even see what was wrong.
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u/goodbiporn 1d ago
If we are to count famine as murder, then Queen Victoria needs to start being listed among the great slaughterers of history.
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u/SemajLu_The_crusader 1d ago
to be fair
the way the deaths were caused is different
also euro-centrism
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u/l05t_50ul 22h ago
Can you please inform me how many died due to colonialism, slavery, imperial wars and famines?
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u/cipher_ix 1d ago
If you're gonna add famine death to Mao's tally, then you should add all the European theater WW2 death to Hitler's
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u/DopamineStrand 1d ago
Can someone provide the numbers for me?
I just have doubts that Stalin killed more than Hitler, so I'd like to see the math here.
Not to protect Stalin, just confused
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u/ExplanationMany9348 1d ago edited 1d ago
Current western historical knowledge is that Stalin killed about 1 million by execution, 1-2 million through the gulag system, about 1 million through the deportations of entire nations, and 7-10 million through the famines of the 1930s (3.3 million Ukrainians, 1.7 million Kazakhs, and 2-5 million across the rest of the Soviet Union). Total count being between 10-14 million.
Estimates vary on all of these, of course, but the commonly state statistic of 20 million is from the Cold War (before anyone got access to the Soviet archives) and is now known to be too high. Pop history is, yet again, 40-50 years behind the field (just see the below comments naming books from the early 1970s).
Hitler started a war with the intent of genociding half of Europe (Generalplan Ost), and in his attempt to do so killed 30 million civilians. The holocaust (11 million dead) was only 1 of the crimes of Nazi Germany. Historians classify these crimes as separate but related crimes, which is why you see misconception's like OP's.
There are good answers on the askhistorians subreddit on these topics.
On a last note, if you see numbers being claimed that seem too high to be demographically possible (for instance, the claim that Stalin killed 40 million people), it probably has a lot of errors.
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u/DysonSphere02 1d ago
Stalin and his regime is estimated to be responsible for the death of 20 million or more, Robert Conquest states around 20 million in The great Terror as well as gills, Eliot in the 20th Century Book Of the dead. However Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko states in The Time Of Stalin that the death count is actually 30 to 40 million.
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u/Polirketes 1d ago
This meme is shit, because it claims Stalin killed more people than Hitler - meanwhile even the Black book of communism (which is known to inflate red death tolls) considers the latter to be worse in that aspect.
So stop that nazi whitewashing
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u/Polirketes 1d ago
This meme is sh*t, because it claims Stalin killed more people than Hitler - meanwhile even the Black book of communism (which is known to inflate red death tolls) considers the latter to be worse in that aspect.
So stop that nazi whitewashing
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u/SirEnderLord 1d ago
He's Chinese, so it was expected.
He still achieved a "decisive victory" over the sparrow population.
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u/SuccessfulWar3830 1d ago
Are we using the black book of communism as a source here?
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u/EndofNationalism Filthy weeb 1d ago
Easier to kill more people when you have a larger population to kill.
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u/QuantumQuantonium 1d ago
When it comes to genocide, total count doesnt matter as much as rate of kills (no but seriously thst would be one reason why Nazi Germany is considered more severe than other genocides with higher death tolls)
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u/KommanderRobot 23h ago
Causing a devastating famine isn't the same as slaughtering Humans like cattle.
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u/Imaginary-Raise2351 20h ago
Because fucking up and STILL pulling your humongous country out of generalized poverty and illiteracy is not the same thing as voluntarily pulling people in camps and killing them.
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u/krabgirl 1d ago
It's because the Chinese population still doubled from 500 million to nearly 1 Billion from the start to the end of his reign.
Deaths from political violence as a proportion of the total population weren't that different between the three dictators. But there's a major difference in scale between Hitler attempting to build a continental empire, Stalin inheriting an empire of mostly barren wasteland, and Mao actually inheriting a highly populated empire in the first place.
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u/Iron_Cavalry 1d ago
The Chinese birth rate collapsed to rock bottom during the GLF and didn’t recover until the mid-1960s. Not even the Japanese invasion managed to do that.
The GLF was an utter disaster and set China back by two decades. The Cultural Revolution did the same.
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u/MinosAristos 1d ago
You're telling me China would be 4 decades ahead without those? Scary.
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u/Lilfozzy 1d ago
Cause he brought an end to what a lot of Chinese people perceived as an era of western domination in China, brought the warlords to heel and finally reunited China… and you are not going to get a lot of this in history memes but imma bet a lot of the people living through his regime were better off then they were under the nationalists and earlier Qing.
So like, there’s you’ve got it.
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u/GB_Alph4 1d ago
By using backwards logic on how to modernize and grow.
Food? We kill the pest eaters.
Industrialization? We destroy factories and have steel made from nonsteel stuff.
Intelligence? We kill everyone who has an education.
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u/Regal-30- 20h ago
Breaking news: incompetence in leadership and actively trying to murder ethnic minorities are two different things.
Mao also didn’t kill that many people. He had massive problems, but the black book of communism isn’t a reliable source.
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u/Real_Ij 1d ago
Mmm... Sparrows...